Negative publicity or affiliates may end up eating a large amount of the search results for your brand name.

If it is negative publicity of course you should take the message on board, but what do you do if you solved the problem and the bad search results will not go away? Directly contacting them and showing the problem has been fixed might help. Maybe even offering to donate to a charity may help, but if the person will not work with you it is going to be up to you to create other content that can be deemed more authoritative than theirs.

If the affiliates add a lot of value of course them listing below you for your brand name is no big deal, but what happens if they are thin affiliate pages that add no value, or worse yet try to use your brand to push people to a competing product with a higher payout? Is there another way to add search results to the index that will not cost you a percent of your sales?

Press Coverage:
The first thing you want to do is ensure you are leveraging your authority and brand correctly. Are you well known? Has your company been covered in the press? If so do not be afraid to point a few links at the good press pages.

Extend Press Coverage:
Look for press coverage in search results for your brand name. Also look through your backlink data. You may be able to talk to people who were mildly interested and get them to do more in depth coverage of your goods and services.

Wikipedia:
If you have a strong enough brand you may be able to list your company in the Wikipedia. If your stuff is legitimate I typically recommend creating a whole page instead of just adding a link because I believe most pages have to go through a deletion cycle vote before they are deleted. Make sure to reference media coverage in your Wikipedia article.

Creating your own topic page in Wikipedia also makes it easier for it to rank for your brand since the whole page is focused on your brand, instead of your site just being mentioned in a link.

Keep in mind that if you are trying to block out negative comments and have not changed the business model or issues that caused them you may be giving people another avenue to criticize your business in the Wikipedia page about your company.

The earlier you get into Wikipedia the lower the bar will be. As they create more content, get more citations, and have logarithmically growing costs it will be harder to get into the Wikipedia.

Social Networks:
Set up pages on sites like MySpace.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Sites like Knowem make it easy to register your brand on many sites.

Press Releases:
Press releases typically do not pack a huge punch in the search results, but they do well in news search, and if you point a few links at them it could also help them outrank other pages that are not on high trust websites.

PRleap and PRWeb are a few free resources on that front.

Good press releases can also lead to other media coverage.

Interviews and Writing Articles:
Just like press releases it is another easy way to create content that is highly relevant to your brand or name. Make sure you link at it to help build it up. If you write for a somewhat well known site, and especially if you can make something a bit controversial or appealing to a link authority rich group that page should pack a punch in the SERPs.

If you interview someone else that is popular then others may heavily link at it. Add a few more links and it may be able to rank.

Blog for Others:
You have to build up some amount of trust before you can do self promotional stuff on other sites, but if you are creative with how you write you can keep a page from sounding too self promo while virtually guaranteeing it will rank by including the right words in it and placing it on an authority site.

Sites like Lockergnome have guest authors write some of their channels.

Vertical Databases:
Sell software? Do you have a profile page on Download.com, HotScripts, or sites like ZDnet.com? If not why not?

Give away software? Are you listed on all the software AND freeware directories?

Highly Relevant Second Page on Your Site:
Create an about page that you link to sitewide. When you write content and submit it to other sites point some of the signature links and whatnot back at your about page instead of at the home page. Do this to try to get a double listing.

Subdomains:
You probably do not need to create many of them for this purpose, but maybe you can create a subdomain for part of your business and then link it up.

Local Sites:
Create sites for different regions. Maybe create sites for different user groups. One domain for consumers, one for distributors, etc.

Profile Pages:
MSN's Small Business Directory allows you to create a company profile page. Make sure you point a few links at it and it should rank for semi competitive phrases.

There are also other types of profile pages that may require deeper thinking to find and then deep thinking to debate the consequences of. Creative Commons has a directory with profile pages.

Rent a Pre sell Page:
Rent a whole page advertisement on someone else's site.

Blogging, Forums, and Social Sites:
Create a blog on Blogspot or one on Wordpress.com. Or maybe one on each.

Create forum user names and make a few posts. Link back to that profile to build up its authority.

Many sites such as Newsvine, Squidoo, or some free host sites also allow you to create pages on their sites which may help you leverage the authority of their domains.

Creativity:
There are many ways to leverage big ideas that are not your own. For example, what is to stop you from creating a Wordpress theme that is named after your company.

SEO Question: I have a little personal side project going -- selling an info product (completely unrelated to SEO; it has to do with _____ and local markets) and I loved the simpleness of your delivery of your ebook. It was straight forward and easy to follow. I want to mimic your process -- I will be using Paypal too.

Any advice or pitfalls you encountered along the way? Techinical or otherwise? Just thought I'd ask someone who has been there before. Maybe save me some time / mistakes.

SEO Answers: There are many ways to go with selling info products. We'll start off with the pieces I think are important and then maybe others will add info at the end.

First you really have to survey the market.

How to survey:

• Do keyword research, looking at things like Overture price and search volume. Perhaps even set up a test Google AdWords account.

• If you know the market well what were the major questions you had when you were buying information and products about your market? You can use Google AdWords to collect feedback for what issues are important to others. Tell them you have a nearly completed book that will be for sale soon and that you will give them it free for feedback on what they would like to be in the book. Alex Mendosian calls this concept the Ask Database, although it may be just as easy to set up a form box that sent mail to a Gmail account and use tagging and their email search to sort through the feedback.
• You can also search industry forums, blogs, and Google Groups to see what common problems and questions people have.
• Do information products, software, and service products in your market have commonly complained about issues? If so you may want to make that part of your sales angle.

Competitive Analysis:

• Does the business model and delivery model make sense? Sometimes by changing the format something can become hyper successful or a complete failure.

• Look at the Clickbank marketplace to look at the sales techniques used by many people pushing affiliate marketing heavily in your vertical, related verticals, or verticals that would appeal to similar audience profiles.
• Do link analysis on competing sites.
• If you see one product appear in the regular search results and search ads many times that may be a hard site to compete with.
• Buy competing products to see their whole sales cycle.
• Look at high ranking search results for competing products names to see how deep their affiliate network is and if they have any mainstream news coverage. Also look to see what bloggers and forums say about them. How can you appeal to the various potential viral marketers of your product?

For most people it is typically going to be easier to work in an under saturated keyword market than it is to work in a hyper saturated one or create a keyword market from scratch. I did it the stubborn pig headed way and just sorta went after making my own market. It is working great now, but for about a year it was somewhat brutal.

Reacting to survey:

• If a market is saturated you may not want to enter it or you may want to focus on a niche within that topic.

• If people seemed to be exceptionally concerned about one issue then that might be a great sub niche to focus on. Especially if that niche seems complex and / or is high margin (or if the niche seems complex to others but is still rather easy to create a fairly automated high value service in).
• If there is one or few exceptionally common problems with information items in your field you may want to use that as your marketing angle.

What is the goal of Creating Your Information Product:

• To help people

• Name recognition
• Influence
• Build a targeted audience or subscriber list
• Direct profit
• Indirect profit

Some ideas will help in multiple areas, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices in some of the categories to help your end goal along in other categories. Generally though if you can build a large enough targeted audience you can get any or many of the above in most fields.

Writing the Book:

• Spend a day or a few days creating an outline before you write the book.

• I used Word and Adobe PDF to make my ebook, although that was like a $600 or $700 spend buying those. If you want to go the cheap route OpenOffice is free. It has a program similar to Microsoft Word and a PDF creator inside of it. I distribute my ebook as a PDF.
• I revised my book many times so it really is a bit hard for me to even say what the original looked like, but using short text, bulleted lists, and not trying to write at exceptionally advanced levels are good tips to live by if you are writing a how to book.
• John T Reed wrote a book on how to write how to books. I think his general thesis and content are great, with the exception of his thoughts on online marketing and DRM. I reviewed his book here, and explained why I thought his views on DRM and search engine marketing were not up to par.
• Do not feel you need to be stuck to a specific format. There are probably other formats that would sell as well or better, and maybe even at higher price points.

Digital Rights Management:

• Piracy is a form of progressive taxation.

• Retail only matters if you have reach and people are buying.
• Time spent creating value is typically time better spent than time spent worrying about value you have yet to create.
• If you intend to market heavily on affiliate networks like Clickbank and your product is internet marketing related expect lots of fraud if you do not use a DRM system. Since I do not use DRM people who buy my ebook are about 10 times as likely to ask for a refund or reverse charge their credit card if they bought through Clickbank than if they bought through Paypal.
• If you plan on using Clickbank and are selling an internet marketing related product you may really want to use some DRM stuff so you can pull their right to use your tool or print your book if they ask for a refund. For $197 eBook Pro provides DRM. If you don't want to spend that much money and want to use Paypal as your shopping cart Payloadz is free off the start, and then its price scales up as you use it more.
• Eventually I expect Google to create a micro payment system which ends up beating out Paypal. Google will become the default amateur video network and then extend the system out to other content formats.
• If you sell a product and give it away to certain people make sure there is some taxing element to it. For example require some sort of authentication and require their email to match a qualifying website. When I did this it cut down on sleazy requests and associated fraudster hate email by over 90%. It made life way better.
• Some people also try to buy feedback or require links to their site in exchange for giving their products to charities. I guess on some fronts that may work, but it is probably not something I would feel good doing, though in some markets doing a technique like that could be the difference between a highly profitable business and a venture that provided little to no returns.

Using Paypal:
You can use Payloadz to set up an affiliate program and to create temporary URLs which only make your download page available to individuals for a limited period of time.

If you are selling an information product and have no digital rights management make sure you encrypt your Paypal button so your order return location is not in the page content. When you create a payment button you also want to click the add more options button in Paypal and set your successful payment URL and cancel payment URL. If you do not set the cancel payment URL I believe visitors hitting the cancel button will be forwarded to your thank you page.

Business Models:
Typically most information products are used to up sell services or make up sells via affiliate links. Some ebooks, like the version of 33 Days to Online Profits I read, seem like they were primarily created to recommend as many affiliate programs as possible.

Do you want to go with a low price point (maybe even free) and try to raise your status, build an audience, and monetize that growing audience by sending them affiliate product offers or high end service offers?

Do you want to go with a high price point? If you go with a higher price point that will filter out many bad leads, but you sacrifice distribution with price. If you go with a higher price point it is recommended that you do not use affiliate links in your work or some will question the motive of your recommendations and why your price point is so high.

One Book or Many?
Many people selling ebooks and information products make far greater income than I do because they create products that rarely need updated, are hyper targeted, and sorta set and forget them after initially creating the sites.

Some people then push those sites via affiliates while others use AdWords and the like.

After you perfect the sales process with one or two it should be easy to churn out dozens more books and sites on other niche topics. If they each make around $1,000 or $2,000 a month you are making a great income.

It took me a while to start earning decent money, so it may take a few months before sales start rolling in. Make sure you are not duplicating errors in the sales process from site #1 on sites #2-12.

Give yourself time to learn from feedback from the early channels before duplicating those problems across a half dozen or dozen channels.

Marketing Your e book:
I started with absolutely zero authority or credibility, so you may not need to do all these steps, but here are the things I did.

• Participate in communities discussing your topic. People who chat about your topic can also recommend your stuff. It is also where people as questions about your topic. If you are new to the market you can also learn a boatload of information by actively participating in topical forums. Forums can also create friendships that may last longer than your career does.

• Write articles. I started writing articles about 4 months before I started selling my ebook. Whenever I wrote an article and syndicated it I noticed my phone started ringing and money flowed into the bank account. Cool for me. I really should get back to writing more articles!
• Try to win the trust of influential voices in your industry. See if you can write an article for their site or if they would be willing to read a free review copy of your book.
• If you ever get any publicity make sure you leverage it. If one of your articles is a hit, while you are popular for 15 seconds ensure the effect is lasting by trying to push other citations or ideas through. For example, while your site is hot and your name is in the news maybe that is a good time to request links from great resource sites or try to do a few link exchanges with sites you like. Of course with asking for links tact is important.
• Write a topical blog. If people read your stuff daily then they can get to feel that they know and trust you. It also makes it easier to market your site in search results if your site is more than a one page sales letter. Conversation is easy to cite. I predict that many people will use a format similar to SeoBook.com to sell information products.
• Writing short witty posts that invoke laughter or other emotions is great, but if you want to convert new people in your industry into buying customers writing at a lower level and doing in depth posts probably works far better than the abstract funny high level stuff. It also helps build a large keyword rich database of pages that will rank for lots of random queries related to your field and target audience.
• As an example of the above, my mother thinks we write Threadwatch in some sort of code. That site is not published in a format that is good for selling to people new to the SEO market. The content on this site probably does a better job of selling market entry products.
• People love pictures of people and testimonials.
• Sometimes the people who recommend your site and give you your authority are not the same people who buy your products. Make sure they have the opportunity to review your product.
• Sometimes the concepts, ideas, and content which make people authoritative are different than what they make most of their money from. Think horizontally. Are there any vertical databases or viral ideas you could create to help market your brand or site?
• Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do. For a while I advertised my ebook on the sidebar of my site. The day I moved it to the content area my income tripled.

Bundling:
If you put serious effort into your brand do not let your name and work be bundled with others without looking hard and long at the potential side effects. I totally screwed this tip up. I wrote a mini version of my ebook for someone else so they could bundle it with their software.

They did things like market their other free guide they wrote using the colors from my site. They also wrote my ebook sales price as the suggested value of my throw in book I gave them the rights to. I got dozens of support requests from their customers and some of them said that they would have bought my book long ago but they thought they already got it. Most people probably do not send me those sort of emails, and I probably threw away about 20 to 30% of my potential income with that one time fee partnership.

Another time I sold rights to a few thousand of my ebooks to a SEO related company so they could give it as a gift to their clients at Christmas. It was a nice cash bonus for me, but that also led to others giving away my ebook and business model without asking me. So even if a deal is a great deal there might be some unexpected side effects.

Joint Ventures:
I believe it is typically worth avoiding most joint ventures.

If you are not serious about being successful there is no point wasting someone elses time and envoking potential lawsuits. If you are serious about doing well most of the time the other person will undervalue what you can do.

If you are not well recognized as a trustworthy expert then the other person is also likey going to undervalue what you can do. If you are already well known then you have to ask yourself what value the other person adds that you can't buy for a one time fee instead of giving up liquidity or creating recurring expenses.

Worse yet, if you are in a category largely dependant on thin margins and the other person does next to no ongoing work and gets a cut that cut might turn shift your business away from profitable venture into the waste of time category, and a bad partnership may even take away your motivation to create and succeed.

Tracking Content Theft:
If you are pushing your name and your brand really hard I do not think you need to spend much time tracking potential content theft and distribution. If you are opinionated and publish frequently most of the market will know who you are. If others start to publish your works one of your kind readers will likely tell you about it.

If you go more of the one page salesletter site route you may want to use Copyscape, subscribe to search results related to your product, or some other method to look out for content theft.

Product Naming:
This is not something I would call myself an expert at, but my short list of criteria in things I would look for in the name of something I was going to work exceptionally hard at would be:

• something I thought I could eventually rank for (ie: if there is a huge open source software project with the same name you probably are not going to be able to outrank them)

• something that is short
• something that is memorable
• something I can get the .com domain name for if possible
• There are arguements for and against using your keywords in your domain and product name. I don't want to go too deep into that idea because that could be a long post on its own. It is something that should be considered though.

Sales Letter Writing:
Read lots of other sales letters in your field. The sales letters at sites like Marketing Tips.com are wrote to convert. Make sure you also pay attention to the tone and voice of your sales message...make it match the rest of your site if you have a content site pushing your information product.

Leveraging Affiliates:
Not something I am good at because I have not done it much yet.

It is important in many markets, especially in categories like internet marketing or if you have the one page salesletter type of site.

Sometimes it helps to be able to give them something that they can give away which is a product of some value that really pushes the value of your product you are selling.

Your price point matters as well. If your price point is too low you can't give affiliates much for their efforts.

I also set my minimum payout to be at the 2 sales level to prevent self sale discounts.

Things I could do far better:
I am good at finding and creating value but am not the best at maximizing value returned for value created. For a long time I sold my ebook for half its current price. I also do not charge recurring fees yet for updates and some of my friends have told me that is a large error.

Affiliate marketing - as noted above.

Write and syndicate more articles - as noted above.

Email marketing and list building - I really do not do it much...and that is a huge error.

Business - in spite of getting inqueries from companies worth billions (and once even hundreds of billions) of dollars I do not leverage my mindshare well enough and work with some large companies. Business in general is not me deal at this point, and I am not sure if it will ever be, for a variety of reasons.

Sales vs the Knowledge Curve:
The demand curve for search marketing is based on what was effective a while ago.

Here is a perfect example: It is well noted that keyword density is typically not that important compared to other things in the grand scheme of SEO. Yet when I recently added many tools to my SEO tool list the only tool someone requested to buy was a keyword density analysis tool, which is probably one of the least valuable tools on the page. (I later made it open source so I gave it to him free).

If I sold any of the following I would make far greater income than I do with less effort, but I probably would not be creating more value for others than I currently do:

• links from high PageRank pages

• link spam software
• link exchange software
• reciprocal link software
• subscription based link network access

By the time the mass market really understands the quality links and trust concepts search may move on to being more focused on user data.

In some fields it makes sense to try to be on the cutting edge, but often sitting back a bit and profiting from the lack of knowledge in the mass market will provide far greater profit.

I love Lee's answers to ideas cheap businesses throw his way while trying to bilk out SEO services for next to nothing.

If you sell SEO services you will love Just Say No to Discount SEO.

I am not certain why, but I have been getting lots of requests from claimed SEO companies that want to outsource 100% of the link building associated with SEO.

My typical response is:

If you don't do link building you are not a real SEO.

That may sound brutal, but it is true. Here is why:

There are the rare sites that have already spent millions of dollars building their brands to where all they need done is descriptive unique page title and making sure their content management system works. Then there are sites like SearchEngineWatch that are just the authority sites in their field, self reinforcing market positions and a decade of writing quality content about a topic the author loves. But most sites do not fall into those categories. If you feel a site needs more links to compete, why - other than laziness - would you want to outsource 100% of the link building project?

If a site is in non competitive fields sure a few directory listings and the like may be all that is needed. But if that is all that is needed I don't think it is hard to develop processes to do that sort of stuff.

If your an individual person who runs one website I guess it may make sense to outsource that to a person who provides affordable services, but if you are an SEO company with recurring work and new clients coming through all the time it doesn't make sense to outsource it.

Sure some people make certain services cheap and are really good at what they do, but if the price gets too cheap and the process is fairly automated the link quality is going to be low.

As far as link builders I would recommend, I would have no problem paying Eric Ward for the connections he has and his solid site announcement history. I also know and trust Debra Mataler well enough to know she would do a good job building links.

As Stuntdubl said, you want to balance the link equation. Get a variety of link types. A good link builder will do that for you. But it is hard to build an SEO business model that

• is profitable

• gives clients individualized attention
• provides end to end solutions

If you guarantee success with your service you are better off doing affiliate marketing than selling SEO services. You get a larger percent of the action that way and have no clients!

Demand for SEO lags what is most effective and many people think they just need more PageRank. And many of the most profitable business models are going to revolve around selling pieces of the pie instead of selling the whole process. Many of the SEO firms that have been contacting me wanted to outsource 100% of their link building to link brokers.

Some links are about social relationships. Those are key in hyper competitive fields. How can you compete in hyper competitive fields if you are not learning the market or pushing social relationships? How can you even know what budget to allocate for link building if you don't do it? If people should buy link services off a link builder then what value does a clueless SEO firm add by taking a cut charging a premium for their own ignorance?

I am friends with a few link brokers, and know pieces of their partner networks, business models, and link types. Some of the content sites in the networks are so good that they provide enough direct value to pay for themselves even if they had no effect on SEO. Of course it would be hard to say that about all link buys. Sure some of the links probably do count well and others probably don't count at all.

Assuming all the links from link brokers counted in all search algorithms (that would be being hyper optimistic) there would still be a few fundamental flaws with only building links from brokers:

• A link profile consisting of only one link type is not a real natural profile.

• If nearly all your links come from a few networks or are brokered through a few people then the odds are pretty good that a competitor is going to come in contact with the person who is selling you links.
• Most people selling links will also sell links to competing sites.
• If you get to the top of the search results there is little effort needed to duplicate your actions if all your links are rented.

I am not trying to hate on any individual type of link. I just think that you should mix what you use. If possible do all of the following

• articles (these make great direct sales)

• press releases (when I was a total no name a well known Yahoo! search engineer saw one of my press releases and reviewed my ebook for me based on a press release)
• directories (most are one time fee)
• viral marketing opportunities, free tools, & ideas (these are hard to do but also hard to replicate, and are the cheapest link opportunities if you land a good one)
• affiliate marketing (you set your payout percent, affiliates only get paid if they convert, and it still builds your brand even if the links do not count for SEO)
• buy links where others are not looking (use Yahoo!'s advanced search page or the concept in this tool. Instead of only entering add URL search for ezine ad, associations, history, and other ideas which may provide greater value than the typical add URL search)
• if you can afford it do off the web marketing that drives online activity
• if you can afford it maybe it makes sense to buy an old site or the rights to publish content on old sites

A couple years ago effective SEO was using the same anchor text everywhere and just getting thousands of low quality links to point at you. That is not the case anymore. A strong link building program

• Should be able to help guarantee usage data and targeted traffic that converts (since people tend to click on legitimate links and trust what is perceived as an unpaid recommendation).

• Should provide secondary links that were not requested. If a site like SearchEngineWatch writes an article about your site you can guarantee that others will syndicate how interesting your site is.
• Is hard to replicate.
• Mixes your link profile.

Your link profile is about who knows you and who trusts you. If you outsource that outside of your client and outside of your business I think you owe it to your clients to at least know enough about the following:

• how to evaluate how competitive a market is

• the value add of different linking strategies
• the risk vs reward profiles of different linking strategies
• why it is important to mix link types

Matt talks about controversy, market timing, niche selection and information quality...everything you need to know about linkbaiting (well that and maybe read a few NickW posts).

Via Gary the second issue of Google's Newsletter for Librarians was released.

In A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust Karen G. Schneider, the Director of Librarians' Internet Index, wrote about what she looks at in deciding weather or not a resource is trustworthy.

The main criteria are:

1. Availability (reliable hosting and free information)

2. Credibility
3. Authorship
4. Link Rot
5. Legality

With this site I have not got much love from the librarian community. Likely largely because of the following:

• bad spelling

• going way off topic
• sometimes expressing opinion that may be taken as fact
• focusing on a topic that is generally hated (SEO) contained within a link rich loved topic (search)
• selling a marketing ebook at a fairly high price point
• having no credentials (in part because there really are none in this industry - though I should make an about page!)

You don't have to have the love from librarians to succeed on the WWW, but if you are in a field where competing channels do it is going to be an uphill battle unless you focus on a niche or get lots of link love and attention love from people within your industry.

It is really worth looking at how librarians review websites, because if you fit their guidelines it should also be easy to get many other links. If Google is sending out a message to 20,000 librarians then maybe they will use that information, and maybe Google likes many of the same things that the librarians do.

One curious question remains: how can Google not use a page title on their newsletter for librarians?

Tom Evslin posted about his experiences working with Gerard Salton in the early 1960's.

Everybody assumed that the best results would be obtained by algorithms which made an attempt at understanding English syntax. (which is very hard to do). WRONG! Turns out that syntax was a waste of time; all that matters is semantics - the actual words used in the query and the documents - not how they relate to each other in a sentence. Sometimes it was (and still is) useful to search for phrases as if they were words. But you get that just by observing word order or how close words are to each other - not trying to parse sentences.

Modern search engines may use quite a large amount of user tracking and heavily emphasize linkage data, but if you want to see the roots of search I highly recommend reading Salton's A Theory of Indexing.

Ho hum...anyone looking for poker links? It looks like The Dartmouth can still fit a few more below the fold.

Some people make software convinced that they are giving away and losing money if they let anyone try out their software. But the retail price only matters if people see it and think it is worth spending money on. The shadier your software is the more of a viral buzz you need to make the marketing work.

A guy contacted me wanting me to promote his blog spam software for free. When I suggested advertising on Threadwatch and giving the software out to members for a day or a week he trumped up the value of his software, which makes me wonder why he had to ask me for free viral marketing if his software was actually worth $197 and already selling well.

If your software / information product / etc. has little to no incremental cost per user and is brand new you are not losing money giving it away in exchange for market exposure. Two years ago I gave away the first version of SEO Book. The first version really was not all that good, but I realized that feedback had value and I should spread it far and wide to get whatever feedback I could get.

Not something I know much about yet, but recently there have been a number of good posts on buying and selling domains.

• 
  ShoeMoney: My tips for buying domains that are taken

• ShoeMoney: Whats my domain worth and how do I handle the sale?
• Jim Boykin had a few good domain buying comments on this post.

One of the best things I ever learned in the navy was troubleshooting and half splitting problems into smaller possible problems. I recently did a bit of microspamming stuff to see what would get nailed and what would not, although I have only tested like 0.0000001% of the market. I want to start focusing more of my efforts on learning how to become a scientific SEO.

I have not built a ton of for profit sites yet, but the likes of Andy Hagans and a few of my other friends have been wearing me down into becoming more of a blog overlord / many for profit site owner.

There are really two main ways to do SEO:

• Manually: Create world class content that is published frequently.

• Automated: Buy and/or build sites that look good to search algorithms and search reviewers even if they are a bit automated.

People tend to dismiss the word automation as meaning it has to be spam, but I can't tell you how many times I have heard people like Mikkel talk about how many of the most popular websites are heavily automated.

Google, Google News, Digg, and Memeorandum are a few of the many automated sites I generate on a daily basis. I also think it is pretty hypocritical for those creating automated websites to push the image of automation as being associated with spam.

I guess the ultimate goal to create a money printing machine would be to create content that is:

• useful and value added (needs to pass the Turing Test and be citation, bookmark, and subscription worthy)

• unique (so duplicate content filters do not catch it)
• profitable
• nearly 100% automated

I am pretty much starting from scratch on the above autogen idea, but friends have left me tips here and there. I hired a cool programmer who is working away at creating value added websites. It should be fun.

In some areas I am partnered with friends who are all about making money, but as much as anything I want to watch and understand how search evolves on many levels. You really can't be a true scientific SEO unless you have some automated content you are working with.

Mike Grehan replied to the wide array of public criticism he received from his latest ClickZ article. In his reply he mentioned that he thought SEO moved from keywords in content to linkage data and that it was moving from links to user data.

So long as you have a channel with decent reach I think it is easier to induce end user activity than it is to induce trusted link popularity. If search engines heavily go in that direction I am so in the money.

They may want to trust user data more because it is harder for web marketers to track user data streams than link popularity, and entry costs to gain influence - in time and/or effort - exceed what most people would be interested in spending.

Mike gave this example for inducing user data:

What about, we give away a discount coupon to everyone on our mailing list (which as a large company may be sizable).

But, instead of putting a link to a promotional web page on the site, we cut and paste a link for a search on Google for brand+product. And instead of using "click here to get your token" as the call to action, we use "Just Google us and click through for your coupon."

His article is top shelf (although his Blogger template is hosed it is still well worth the effort to read).

Some other ideas to induce user data:

• write articles that are intentionally vague or easy to take in an offensive way such that it builds a controversy around your name

• create contests or other ideas that have some shifty sounding rules to create controversy
• hijack others news or ideas by turning them into a controversy to share in the limelight
• if you see viral ideas spreading throw chips in early to try to ride it out
• write posts about emerging social networks or publishing formats and business models, perhaps saying how new ones will kill old ones
• be aggressive in writing about ideas that are spreading quickly
• advertise everywhere to where your ads become so annoyingly overexposed that people end up writing about the topic
• take the contrarian view
• be outright offensive
• get sued
• create a new word or define the meaning to commonly used industry jargon
• if you are a blogger use Technorati tags
• add links to make it easy to tag your site (via Del.icio.us or Digg or Reddit)... I so need to get on the ball with that

A couple ideas I included in this blog for probably well over a year:

• Search the Search Engines for "title of my page"

• Buy the industry standard #1 ranked SEO Book. What do the search engines think? Google Search: SEO Book (#1)

One thing that is a bit of a let down is that most things that go really viral are typically ubber hyped. I like the idea of organic marketing, but the line between strong marketing and pure hype gets thin when one needs to be profitable in a competitive distributed network market...and I may eventually find myself heavily becoming a hype guy.

Not sure how much weight will end up being placed on user data or how heavily it will effect the phrase "you are not going to believe what I read today" but I am already using that phrase. ;)

SEO Question: I am new to the seo world..however I am veteran the ________ digital marketing space. There is a ton of opprotunity in the ________ space in regrads to PPC. I want to start a consulting firm for ___ sellers and help them shift their ad bugets to PPC. I would like you're advice on starting a company like this.

SEO Answer: As far as getting your feet wet in SEO/SEM go to some of the conferences. Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld World of Search are the two largest, but you can often do well going to local ones because it may be easier to access some of the players there. There is a small conference in Dallas Fort Worth next Monday, for example.

If you already have great industry related authority or reputation then it should be easy to add the new services to your umbrella of offerings.

Call up some of the people who really know and trust you. Maybe try to add on the PPC services at no obligation to them to see if they like them. Offer them a free test campaign as a deal to a friend.

A low hanging fruit technique is to come out with a study that says how the ______ industry is screwing up PPC. Make it sound like you were absolutely shocked when you discovered that 82% of ____ companies were not even doing PPC, and that the other 17% were doing it sloppily (this probably works well for regional or topical targeting).

If you can using stats from companies like Nielson NetRatings, ComScore, and Hitwise may make your sales pitch sound more like legitimate research. You then want to try to get your research published on sites like DMNews and Clickz if possible.

Sometimes people are not using PPC and other times they have horrific targeting. You can either create one massive report or create a monthly state of the industry report.

I think Fathom Online shows monthly click prices by industry in their Keyword Price Index. You can ball up that sort of data with some other ideas to create a monthly state of the industry newsletter. Perhaps also track how certain brands are mentioned in the news (a la Topix.net) or on blogs (Technorati, BlogPulse, etc.). Depending on your motivational level you may also want to run an industry related blog to send out that information and any other related thoughts on the industry that you wanted to express.

Another option might be use the Google AdWords API and other tools to not only create your own custom reports, but to also create a tool some people can use that attracts the right audience. Then use that site as a lead generator.

Really love the industry? Maybe it makes sense to create a portal or partner up with someone who has a large portal related to your industry. If need be, perhaps even partner with sites at minimal margins for yourself just to brand your name and leverage that market position. Eventually that should allow you to either take on smaller content partners and make a greater premium there, and/or allow you to sell more search ads.

An aggressive technique might be to buy underpriced ads where people in your industry should be and then link those ads through to a report on how they are not effeciently marketing (and how you can obviously help them).

Disclaimer: while being ok to good at blogging and SEO I don't have a lot of experience on the selling services biz front because I tend to underprice services and thus have been more focused on creating my own sites and content than working for others.

It's all about mindshare.

Over at Threadwatch Massa posted about how a friend's site quickly ranked in Google by spamming bathroom stalls with URL laden yellow stickies.

I'm not telling anyone to spam bathrooms. I'm merely making a point that maybe thinking differently and thinking in terms of something other than tech may offer some answers to this debate. I'm not sure putting up post-it notes in toilets is people marketing, but I'm also not sure it isn't search engine marketing.

SEO Question: How do I promote my art site via SEO and search? I want to drive traffic to my site from Google.

SEO Answer: I have been asked this question in various formats more times than I can count.

How I would Have Marketed Art Years Ago:
A few years ago when I was far greener to marketing I would say get links with the anchor text you want to rank for. Make sure those words are also in your page title and page content. Then mix in a few quality links by submitting to the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and vertical authority sites that are related to your field.

My very first SEO client was an artist by the name of Gregory Christeas who was also a photographer. A couple years ago I used very low level uber spammy techniques and his site started ranking in most of the search engines for "headshots" within a month. I charged him maybe $100 or so and then within a month he had already got a lead that gave him thousands of dollars in profit. He is the one who sorta made me become an SEO...although I sold no services at the time he was demanding that I helped him and so I did. I still thank him to this day for that. SEO has probably got a bit more complex since then, but I digress...

A couple years ago he moved overseas to Greece, his native land. Before he moved I had the chance to meet him and he is probably one of the top 5 most spiritual people I have ever met. He still has an art site. Years ago he used some of my low level SEO techniques I used on his art site and now he ranks at #3 in Google for abstract artist, but the site looks like dog crap compared to how amazing his artwork is. In fact, I think it makes his art look far worse to be on a site that looks like I designed it.

Mindshare is Key to Promoting Abstract Ideas:
Some of my friends think Paris Hilton is really ugly from top to bottom from the inside out. But she gets lots of search volume because she has mindshare and media coverage. Many people think she is this or that because they are told what to think of her and given enough repetition they start to believe it. I guess the theory I am saying here is that if enough people tell you something falls into a certain frame set or category then eventually many people will believe it.

What is beauty? The more abstract an idea is the more inclined we will be to rely on others inputs to formulate our own opinions.

Commodity Artwork:
Now if a person is searching for Pablo Picaso prints, in spite of him being an amazing artist, that is a bit of a commodity and maybe that is a good thing to optimize for since there is low commitment in products with low cost.

Somethings do not make sense to push algorithmically, and some leads have very little value. I don't think SEO is a real solution for most live artists. SEO doesn't really get too many people talking about you.

Artwork from an Amazing Live Artist is Not a Commodity:
Take for example my friend Gregory Christeas. He hid out on the streets of France while in exile from Greece. While living as a street bum / artist without a home he made art out of whatever he could find...coffee grinds, aluminum foil, whatever. His site looks piece meal at best, yet if you hunted about you could find the story about how he met Pablo Picaso.

About two years ago I tried putting his art in a database and tried moving him to become a blogger before I even knew anything about blogging. I don't think I sold him a convincing story though because I didn't really know anything about blogging at that point. Eventually though I would love to work with Gregory to help him do better web marketing because he is a great guy and his art work is amazing. Or maybe I think it is better than it really is because I feel I know, trust, and like him?

It's all about Feelings:
And I am not saying that I am one of those asshats who thinks that blogs will save the world or whatever. What I am saying is that story telling matters. Giving people a reason to come back and learn more about you and get to know you matters. Letting people feel they can know you and trust you and know what your motives are is really just about the cheapest for of marketing you can come across.

In the same way that SEO as a standalone bolt on product has largely died and is dying I think walls blocking off distribution to artwork will prevent many artists from succeeding.

Being Different:
At a place in SOHO I saw the expression on my artist friend Gregory's face when he saw this literally hairy pink and lime green pokedotted striped piece of artwork on the wall. He was pissed at the idea of art teachers telling people to be provacitive without reason.

We are all different, and if we express who we are in what we do that will only work to our advantage. But people run into issues if they try to be different just for the sake of trying to be different.

Create Connections & Tell Stories:
If you can find ways to make people talk about you then you win. The more levels you can connect with fans on the greater you will win.

The Importance of Conversation:
While search engines seem to be pushing many content production models to the lowest common denominator I believe they are pushing artists to become story tellers.

As Cory Doctorow recently posted:

Today there's the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else's, somewhere, and if you're to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity.

You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience. JMS kept Babylon 5 alive by hanging out on fan newsgroups. Neil Gaiman's blog is built almost entirely on conversing simultaneously with thousands of readers. All the indie bands who've found success on the Internet through their message-boards and mailing lists, all the independent documentarians like Jason Scott, comics authors like Warren Ellis with his LiveJournal, blog, mailing list, etc.

So how would I recommend marketing art?

• Research to see what others have done to become successful using the internet. Maybe don't copy them, but consider how their ideas have spread.

• Make sure your site design and format sells the same story you want the content to.
• Don't be afraid to mess up. Many of my past posts are garbage. Many of my future posts will be as well.
• Don't try to connect with everyone. The world is a big place. If you try to be interesting to everyone then you will be interesting to nobody.
• Don't be afraid if sometimes people take things the wrong way or derive an alternate meaning. If people can't get multiple meanings from something how can it be good art?
• Make sure you give people reasons to talk about you regularly.
• Don't be afraid to be opinionated. Isn't art just an open expression of opinions and interpretations anyway?
• Give stuff away. If people really want it they will find a way to access it. Piracy is a form of progressive taxation. Further consumption of your artwork is just going to lead to further consumption.
• Give stuff away. Many artists have made their names by being the first or only person in their field to give stuff away in the format that they give it away. Helping others makes it easier to feel good about the day. Also imagine what type of great marketing it is for a person or a brand to donate to Amnesty International or other cool charities.
• Go where the conversations are on and off the web. If I were an indie rock musician I would try to find a way to get to Coachella.
• If I were any type of artist I would probably go to Burning Man.
• If you want to try to also use search for marketing think laterally. Connect yourself with important ideas and ideas which matter to people you would like to appeal with.
• Probably more stuff, but I don't yet know lots about art and it is early in the morning.

Disclaimer: I have not an artistic bone in my body and I may be full of crap, but I believe the stuff in this post. ;)

Update: Shepard Fairey explained how he marketed the famous Obama poster.

SEO Question: Lets say I have a web service company (sales) site and a blog about proper web design at domain.com/proper-web-design/ Then lets say I have a blog about hot design sites at domain.com/hot-sites/

If the blogs becomes successful would it help domain.com in Google serp rankings?

SEO Answer: In a word, yes.

Quality links to any part of your site make it easier for the rest of your site to rank well. So long as you use good internal navigation your link popularity flows throughout your site.

Although you didn't ask the questions, as to weather your blogs should be 2 separate blogs or 1 blog and as to weather it would make sense to keep them both on your main site it really depends on what your goals are and how much effort you put into them.

If you market your main products or services too heavily on a blog it can become a bit harder for people to want to link at your blog. If your content quality is amazingly high you can probably get away with a good bit of marketing without it hurting your linkability too much, although I would recommend keeping the blog looking really pure and non commercial off the start in most cases to make it easier for people to want to like your site, subscribe to your feed, and link at your site. After a while you can flip the switch and make some bank :)

Also keep in mind that even if your main site did not rank better your blog may help establish you as a known expert in your field. Even without marketing your services on your blog some people will want to hire you based on what you write on it (I so am living proof of that concept). You also are more likely to get better leads from people you would work better with by taking leads from friends or working for people who like to read your blog than the lower quality leads search would provide you.

For higher end service based businesses I do not think search yields very high quality leads as compared to word of mouth marketing, building trust over time, and brand building activities.

Many people also do not realize how lucrative proper contextual ads can be in some verticals. In web design contextual ads may not be too great because most of your traffic is going to be people fairly savvy about the web. My mom is learning blogging and has a weight loss blog. She has been blogging for maybe 2 months now and already has got some organic links from other bloggers. Just yesterday, in spite of putting an affiliate ad in a post and three contextual ad units around it, my mom got a decent link from another blogger. Another friend of mine also recently got some great link love from a high traffic site with a rather plain looking blog because he had one of the few blogs in his vertical.

I think I have updated Link Harvester twice since I last posted new source code. It now allows you to grab link data via Yahoo! or MSN.

On top of allowing you to search for links at a specific page or links to anywhere in a domain it also has a third function called deep links which allows you to get a sample of deep link data without grabbing links pointing at the home page. The theory is that many good sites get deep links. Looking through the deep links may give you a better view of how they were acquired or if they are all garbage scraper links, etc.

By looking through the deep links you can

• check the quality of links pointing at inner pages.

• know what URLs you really need to redirect if you are changing your content management system.
• know what URLs are important to redirect if you buy a site and want to modify the content or gut out pieces that were causing duplicate content or other problems

Another useful feature of looking at the deep link profile is that if you look at the links pointing at sites that were not actively marketed via SEO techniques it can help you see what natural link profiles look like.

MSN tends to give some weird numbers with their backlink count sometimes and typically shows fewer backlinks than Yahoo! so by default when Link Harvester gives link counts like

Showing 421 unique domains from the first 250 results of 1129 total results

it means that between Yahoo! and MSN there were 421 unique results returned in the query. The of first 250 means that the link search depth was set to 250 per engine. The 1129 results is the number of links in the Yahoo! database (although they don't return 100% of what they know of they return most of them). If Yahoo is turned off the third number should be from MSNs database.

Making Untrustworthy Data Trustworthy:

In social networks there tends to be an echo chamber effect. Stories grow broader, wider, and more important as people share them. Tagging and blog citation are inevitably going to help push some stories where they don't belong. Spam will also push other stories.

RSS, the Wikipedia, Government content, press releases, and artful content remixing means automated content generation is easy. Some people are going so far as to try to automate ad generation, while everyone and their dog wants to leverage a publishing network.

What is considered worthwhile data will change over time. When search engines rely to heavily on any one data source it gets abused, and so they have to look for other data sources.

Search Engines Use Human Reviewers:

When John Battelle wrote The Search he stated:

Yahoo is far more willing to have overt editorial and commercial agendas, and to let humans intervene in search results so as to create media that supports those agendas…. Google sees the problem as one that can be solved mainly through technology–clever algorithms and sheer computational horsepower will prevail. Humans enter the search picture only when algorithms fail–and then only grudgingly.

Matt Cutts reviewed the book, stating:

A couple years ago I might have agreed with that, but now I think Google is more open to approaches that are scalable and robust if they make our results more relevant. Maybe I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Matt also states that humans review sites for spam:

If there’s an algorithmic reason why your site isn’t doing well, you can definitely still come back if you change the underlying cause. If a site has been manually reviewed and has been penalized, those penalties do time out eventually, but the time-out period can be very long. It doesn’t hurt your site to do a reinclusion request if you’re not sure what’s wrong or if you’ve checked carefully and can’t find anything wrong.

and recently it has become well known that they outsource bits of the random query evaluation and spam recognition process.

Other search engines have long used human editors. When Ask originally came out it tried to pair questions with editorial answers.

Yahoo! has been using editors for a long time. Sometimes in your server logs you may get referers like http://corp.yahoo.com/project/health-blogs/keepers. Some of the engines Yahoo! bought out were also well known to use editors.

Editors don't scale as well as technology though, so eventually search engines will place more reliance upon how we consume and share data.

Ultimately Search is About Communication:

Many of the major search and internet related companies are looking toward communication to help solve their problems. They make bank off the network effect by being the network or being able to leverage network knowledge better than the other companies.

• eBay
• has user feedback ratings
• product reviews reviews.ebay.com
• bought Shopping.com
• bought PayPal
• bought Skype
• Yahoo!
• partnered with DSL providers
• bought Konfabulator
• bought Flickr
• My Yahoo! lets users save or block sites & subscribe to RSS feeds
• offers social search, allowing users to share their tagged sites
• bought Del.icio.us
• has Yahoo! 360 blog network
• has an instant messenger
• has Yahoo! groups
• offers email
• has a bunch of APIs
• has a ton of content they can use for improved behavioral targeting
• pushes their toolbar hard
• Google
• may be looking to build a Wifi network
• has toolbars on millions of desktops and partners with software and hardware companies for further distribution
• bought Blogger & Picasa
• alters search results based on search history
• allows users to block pages or sites
• has Orkut
• has an instant messenger with voice
• has Google groups
• Google Base
• offers email
• AdWords / AdSense / Urchin allows Google to track even more visitors than the Google Toolbar alone allows
• Google wallet payment system to come
• has a bunch of APIs allowing others to search
• search history allows tagging
• MSN
• operating system
• browser with integrated search coming soon
• may have been looking to buy a part of AOL
• offers email
• has an instant messenger
• Start.com RSS aggregation
• starting own paid search and contextual ad program based on user demographics
• has a bunch of APIs
• AOL
  • AIM
  • AOL Hot 100 searches
  • leverage their equity to partner with Google for further distribution
• Ask
  • My Ask
  • Bloglines
• Amazon
• collects user feedback
• offers a recommending engine
• allows people to create& share lists of related products
• lists friend network
• finds statistically improbably phrases from a huge corpus of text
• allows users to tag A9 search results & save stuff with their search history

Even if search engines do not directly use any of the information from the social sharing and tagging networks, the fact that people are sharing and recommending certain sites will carry over into the other communication mechanisms that the search engines do track.

Things Hurting Boring Static Sites Without Personality:

What happens when Google has millions of books in their digital library, and has enough coverage and publisher participation to prominently place the books in the search results. Will obscure static websites even get found amongst the billions of pages of additional content?

What happens when somebody comment spams (or does some other type of spam) for you to try to destroy your site rankings? If people do not know and trust you it is going to be a lot harder to get back into the search indexes. Some will go so far as to create hate sites or blog spam key people.

What happens when automated content reads well enough to pass the Turing test? Will people become more skeptical about what they purchase? Will they be more cautious with what they are willing to link at? Will search engines have to rely more on how ideas are spreading to determine what content they can trust?

Marginalizing Effects on Static Content Production:

As the web userbase expands, more people publish (even my mom is a blogger), and ad networks become more efficient people will be able to make a living off off smaller and smaller niche topics.

As duplicate content filters improve, search engines have more user feedback, and more quality content is created static boring merchant sites will be forced out of the search results. Those who get others talk about them giving away information will better be able to sell products and information.

Good content without other people caring about it simply means to search engines its not good content.

Moving from Trusting Age to Trusting Newsworthiness:

Most static sites like boring general directories or other sites that are not so amazing that people are willing to cite them will lose market share and profitability as search engines learn how to trust new feedback mechanisms more.

Currently you can buy old sites with great authority scores and leverage that authority right to the top of Google's search results. Eventually it will not be that easy.

The trust mechanisms that the search engines use are easy to defeat and matter less if your site has direct type in traffic, subscribers, and people frequently talk about you.

Cite this Post or Subscribe to this Site:

Some people believe that every post needs to get new links or new subscribers. I think that posting explicitly with that intent may create a bit of an artificial channel, but it is a good base guideline for the types of posts that work well.

The key is that if you have enough interesting posts that people like enough to reference then you can mix in a few other posts that are not as great but are maybe more profit oriented. The key is to typically post stuff that adds value to the feed for many subscribers, or post things that interest you.

Many times just by having a post that is original you can end up starting a great conversation. I recently started posting Q and As on my blog. I thought I was maybe adding noise to my channel, but my sales have doubled , a bunch of sites linked to my Q and As, and I have got nothing but positive feedback on it. So don't be afraid to test stuff.

You wouldn't believe how many people posted about Andy Hagans post about making the SEO B list. Why was that post citation worthy? It was original and people love to read about themselves.

At the end of the day it is all about how many legitimate reasons you can create for a person to subscribe to your site or recommend it to a friend.

Man vs Machine:

For most webmasters inevitably the search algorithms will evolve to become advanced to the point where it's easier and cheaper to manipulate human emotion than to directly manipulate the search algorithms. Using a dynamic publishing format which reminds people to come back and read again makes it easier to build the relationships necessary to succeed. To quote a friend:

This is what I think, SEO is all about emotions, all about human interaction.

People, search engineers even, try and force it into a numbers box. Numbers, math and formulas are for people not smart enough to think in concepts.

Disclaimer:

All articles are wrote to express an opinion or prove a point (or to give the writer an excuse to try to make money - although this saying that SEO is becoming more about traditional public relations probably does not help me sell more SEO Books).

In some less competitive industries dynamic sites may not be necessary, but if you want to do well on the web long term most people would do well to have at least one dynamic site where they can converse and show their human nature.

Earlier articles in this series:

• Why Bloggers Hate SEOs
• Why SEOs Should Love Bloggers
• Dynamic Sites and Social Feedback
• Controlling Data and Helping Consumers Make it Smarter
• Small vs Big and Voice in Brand
• Syndication and How News Spreads
• Trending and Tracking the Blogosphere and Newsosphere

A while ago I started publishing bits of an article that I intended to finish quickly, but life slowed me down. Here were the first parts

Why Bloggers Hate SEOs
Why SEOs Should Love Bloggers
Dynamic Sites and Social Feedback
Controlling Data and Helping Consumers Make it Smarter
Small vs Big and Voice in Brand

I am going to see if I can finish up the article today. Here is the next piece:

How News Spreads:

News has to start from somewhere. It doesn't really matter if it comes from blogs or traditional media. A few things that are important with both publishing formats are

• both have incentives to get the scoop or report on stories early
• both have audiences who can further spread your message
• both are fairly viral
• both have lots of legit link popularity
• getting viral marketing via blogs or news coverage is something that most people will not be able to replicate

Eventually if the story spreads the feedback network becomes the next round of news. If one or two well known reporters write your story other journalists and bloggers may feel like they are missing out if they do not cover it.

The story about me getting sued was picked up by another blogger, then BusinessWeek, then the WSJ. About a few hundred blog citations followed that. Sometimes news that goes a bit national comes back local, and even then you get a bonus links. A Pittsburgh paper mentioned I was sued. That story was syndicated on a Detroit paper, and even got a mention in the blog of the local paper.

Newspapers love to syndicate content from each other to lower costs. Sometimes they even syndicate things that don't make sense because they need fill to surround their ads. I have even seen an Arizona column featuring local Rhode Island bloggers.

Not sure if this has been mentioned anywhere yet, but Google created a movies Onebox

Philipp also noticed them testing drop down home page navigation.

"I sold my soul for a quarter a click"
- a closet millionaire

Brett Tabke recently posted in his blog a definition of web spam:

So much graphical and textual noise that you can't determine whether you are clicking on a paid advertisement or an actual old-fashioned honest link. When ads are so thick, that you must study the page carefully to determine where the content is at.

That is probably a good secret to highly profitable affiliate marketing or contextual marketing of any type: put the ads where people are thinking they are going to find content. That is what Google teaches people to do. It makes more money. Who can fault us for doing it?

Eventually web users may adjust, but there is some serious CPC to be made until they do.

Brett also mentions that building better authority allows you to get away with being even spammier:

There is a point where ads become so pervasive, that they over power the content and hurt the credibility of a site. If you have a authoritarian site, then that point is much higher than most would believe. I know of one site that has over 25 ads on the page right now and is still considered a top site in it's field.

Which is a great reason why it is worth buying older highly trusted sites, or being lily white off the start. Get the trust. Then get the money.

A while ago I posted that there was a noticable trend where it seemed like there was a shift away from content optimization to content creation. It seems many sites are founded upon the principal that the only purpose of content is to get ads indexed.

It is amazing how much control search engines have over the viability of many publishing business models. As long as I still have at least one or two high quality channels I don't think I will feel guilty creating a good number of low quality spamesq ones. If Google wants to fund content pollution does it make sense to by a hybrid car? ;)

SEO Question: I read your book and it said you could get links from charities. Do you have a list of the best charity websites to get on or ones you have gotten on? It feels kind of awkward to ask a charity if they will give you a link back if you pay money, that's why I want to contact ones you have already contacted.

SEO Answers: Not sure how good of an idea this is to answer this one publicly, but why not, eh.

There is a thin line with the etiquette to it, so its really something you need to research and feel out. It is not something you just want to work off a list with.

Search for stuff like

• sponsors

• donors
• donations
• please visit our sponsors
• thanks to the following donors
• etc

After you find a few websites that are leveraging the donation angle
you can follow their paths by doing a Yahoo! linkdomain search for their domain and text that would indicate they were working the donor angle (for example linkdomain:www.site.com sponsors).

A few things I would also say about the donation angle:

• If your site is high profile and the donation cost is far less than the value of the link then quickly others will follow where you have been to lower the value of that link.

• If you do not have many legitimately earned quality links and most of your links come from spammy bits of the web (like junk web directories and scraper sites) and donation pages then that might mess up your link profile (since your co citation data will put you in the neighborhood of a bunch of spammy sites).
• The best donation links to get are things that are a one time occurring event AND on topic. After the one time events have passed you do not have to worry about the page becoming filled with thousands of spammy links. If it is on topic it is icing on the cake as well. Here is a great example: a cat site or pet site helping buy the new server for the Kitten Wars site.
• Sponsoring newsletters and the like can be cool as well, as those tend to get less links per page. Our link suggestion tool may help you come up with a variety of other link getting ideas.
• Donations that do not look like donations are great. The more abstract your donation the better off you are. So for example if you donate an information product you made that might be hard for others to find and replicate that link (or know why a particular person linked at you). The same is true for those who donate hosting, web design, or logos to great causes. Some people even work eBay auctions into their donation angle.
• Even if search engines do not count the donation links for a long time they still are usually cheap enough that the ROI should be there if your business model is sound. Again though they should only be one part of your overall link profile.

Jim Boykin is hosting a free SEO gathering on January 18th in Troy NY. Rumor has it Jim is buying the beer as well.

Dan Thies is hosting an 8 week linking teleseminar from January 18 to March 8. It costs $895 to attend. Dan provides personal access and good value for money in his teleconferences.

Perry Marshall is hosting a 3 day seminar focused on AdWords. It will be in Chicago on April 7-9 and costs $1795.

SEO Question: A friend of mine has a non profit organization. Part of the organization sells topical literature and another large roll of the site(s) will be to give the background information about the charity. Should we use one or two websites?

SEO Answer: When does it make sense to use two or more sites?

• If hosting the product catalog on the same site will make it exceptionally harder to get links to your organizational site you may want to use two separate sites.

• If you are selling to different market segments it may hurt your credibility to sell similar products on the same site at vastly different price points or to different demographics (ie: a site that appeals to uber conserviative right wingers is going to use different ad copy than a site that sells to ultra liberal gay couples).
• If you are in an organization that may come under a bunch of criticsm you may want to use multiple sites to try to clog up the search results so that naysayers do not get as much exposure. Think international flagship site, local sites, sites for business partners, sites for customers, etc. Some companies like Paypal, Dell, and Home Depot have some pretty bad stuff near the top of the search results.

If you are not one of the above (or have similar reasoning) I would recommend sticking with one site (I will likely eventually integrate many of my various domains soon enough), and here is why.

Google has moved further and further along with their duplicate content filters and generally does not like ranking fairly empty product catalog pages high in the search results. Sites that do not have much specific useful original relevant citation worthy content will struggle as they continue to lose marketshare to other sites and evolving search algorithms.

People will not be highly likely to link at the product catalog pages unless they are highly interactive or your site has an amazingly well known brand like Amazon.com.

Link popularity flows more naturally internally to other pages on a site than cross site to a product catalog that may not be well integrated into the web.

Some search algorithms not only look at page specific scores, but also use some domain scores to help boost the relevancy / trust of content hosted on that domain. A great example of this occured a few months ago when someone exploited a cross site scripting problem on Sony.com to add a page about poker to the Sony website. Sony.com quickly ranked in the top 20 results for some queries like poker or online poker (although the page may have since been removed from the Sony.com site).

If you separate your money maker and your best web integrated domain it will likely be substantially harder to leverage your original domain's link popularity for as much profit generation.

SEO Question: I am trying to get a higher listing in Google. I've read a several articles that say the more links that I have, with a high PageRank, the higher up the ranking I should appear. Having said that, what page does Google look at when considering the link to my site? Does Google look at the page that I'm listed on or that websites home page? To say it another way, does Google, when looking at the PageRank for relevant links, look at the page that my website is linked from or does Google look at that websites home page?

SEO Answer: It is hard to say with 100% certainty what all Google looks at when determining link quality, but I think you really want to look beyond raw PageRank score. As a measure of value of a link I think most people place far too much emphasis on PageRank.

These are things I would consider:

• How natural is the link popularity pointing at the site I am getting a link from? Anyone can buy their way to a PageRank 7 renting a few links here and there. Legitimate sites with legitimate link popularity are going to drive direct traffic and value and if you can get links from those sites in a manner where Google thinks it is an editorial vote of quality that is great.

• Will anyone click the link? If the links are tucked away they might not get clicked on. Direct value helps pay for link costs, and eventually some search engines may heavily factor user data into their search algorithms.
• Is the site / page an obvious link seller? If there is a block of links on every page that were bought the odds of Google counting them long term are fairly low.
• Are the other outbound links of high quality? If not does it make sense to cluster yourself with them?
• As far as PageRank goes a site which has a high home page PageRank may be able to carry more weight than a site which had a low home page PageRank, but as far as the strength of the vote in terms of PageRank that is related to the page specific PageRank (instead of the home page PageRank) and how many links are on the page.
• When PageRank started it was pretty close to a fair approximation of page authority. Since then the web graph has been polluted bad, so Google has likely factored in many other things like if they think a link is paid, Topic Sensitive PageRank, TrustRank, and Link Spam Mass when considering how much to trust a link.

SEO Question: What you often hear though is that ideas presented very often work for combined keywords or not so competitive keywords but much less for keywords in competitive areas especially if they are single keywords.

We are building a portal hence single keywords are of interest to us.

SEO Answer: The whole advantage of owning a large portal with a large amount of relevant related content is that you will match for many various longer search phrases.

Sure eventually you can rank for competitive single word search terms, but typically conversion rates are higher for longer search phrases with more implied intent in the query.

One thing you have to remember is that if you are starting a new site from scratch that it is going to have a long way to go to catch up with old trusted estabilished sites. Another thing you have to remember is that if your competitors are not idiots they will be reinvesting profits into further promotion, so it can take a while to rank for short search phrases in hyper competitive commercial categories.

On the page problems with being too focused on a single word:
Some people who chase the single word phrases end up stripping out many valuable modifier terms out of their content to where they no longer have relevant documents for a wide array of longer search queries. The focus on concepts like keyword density also ends up creating mechanical sounding content.

Off the page problems with being too focused on a single word:
When linkage occurs naturally there is a wide variety of anchor text associated with the links. Focusing too heavily on a specific anchor text set may give a site an unnatural linkage profile that prevents a site from ranking in the search results. Many quality sites will not fully allow you to control the anchor text they use to link at your site with.

Links from quality trusted sites help you rank across the board even if those links do not contain your keyword phrases in them.

If you like videos Dan Thies offers a free 75 minute keyword research video.

SEO Question: I'm going to be working on a site that was written in frames. I heard that there is some tag you can put in the code so that search engines can spider a frames site. Do you know about this? And if so, can you tell me how to do it?

SEO Answers: The first step with frames is to convert the site to a non frames site.

Why?

Because if your site is framed it becomes much harder for people to deep link to your content since they dont know the actual url of the interior pages unless they view the source code.

There is the noframes element, but it's just as easy to use PHP or server side includes for the navigation, etc. and avoid using frames all together.

If you want to use noframes HTML Help has a good page on the noframes element, but I would recommend avoiding using frames alltogether.

I think probably 30 or 40 sites mentioned when I bought Threadwatch. Some of them linked through to both sites, and many mentioned me in a good light, saying things like "of seo book fame" and whatnot.

Andy Hagans got a few links to his poker blog by mentioning that he bought it and for how much.

Recently Mick Sawyer posted a for sale ad for his black hat forums on Sitepoint. I don't think he was looking to actually sell the site, but just wanted to place a $10 ad while his site still had good mindshare from other recent mainstream media coverage.

Three downsides to placing legit public for sale ads are

• Some sites are harder to monetize under new ownership.

• If it is a community site some community members may be less interested in the community if they think of their content being sold to another owner.
• You let competitors know your market share data or profitability more than you may wish to.

Some sites can generate significant additional income with minimal effort, but if you buy a large community driven site you also have to factor the value of your time into the buy price.