Most SEO Strategies Are Not Focused on Hitting Home Runs

Seth Godin explained that the most reliable and highest converting SEO strategy is that of the white page variety. Build a brand and own a unique word. But at the same time he dismissed the concept of most other SEO strategies

The problem: how to be the first listing, because being the 40th listing is fairly worthless.

The answer: You probably won't be. There are 14 million matches for Plumber, and no, you won't be #1 or #2. You lost. In fact, in just about every keyword worth owning, your chances are winning are small.

Most people do not want to rank for something as generic as plumber. If they want to rank for that broad of a keyword for a local service they should

use geo-targeted AdWords
optimize for local search inclusion (see image below)
consider building their regular SEO strategy around more specific keywords

None of those require luck. Just patience, effort, and investment.

When I searched Google for plumber I saw this in the search results

It looks like some of the local players have a good chance at ranking if they believe the relevancy algorithms to be more than luck, particularly if they read this document and local search blogs like this one.

There is little point in trying to rank for a big money keyword right out of the gate. Smart SEOs generally insist on ensuring you use relevant keyword modifiers and alternative word forms. Why? Longtail keywords have less competition, are easier to rank for, rank quicker, and are more likely to convert (since they are more targeted).

Rather than making the page title plumber you could make it something like Oakland Plumbers - 24 Hour Local Plumbing Repair in Oakland, CA. That type of page title helps make the page relevant for a wide array of relevant keywords like

oakland plumbers
oakland plumbing repair
oakland, ca plumbers
plumbers in oakland
etc.

Google claims that from 20% to 25% of search queries are unique.

Some of our pages rank for hundreds of unique keyword phrases because we employed in-depth keyword research, appealing page titles, and strong on page optimization strategies. Even when we rank #1 for link building, that page still gets way more traffic for related longtail keywords.

Once you begin to profit from the long tail keywords then you can reinvest in going after some of the more competitive and broader related keywords. And you can use your AdWords data, search analytics data, and organic ranking data to help you figure out what keywords to focus on next.

When I have a great idea do I try to turn it into a home run? Yes. But it is doing all the other things that makes the occasional home run so powerful. A strong foundation increases the value of everything you do.

Creating content that is well optimized not only helps you rank for a wide array of relevant keywords, but it also makes your content easier to find down the road. Generally I am a big fan of Seth, and I cite him often. I am a rather sophisticated searcher, but sometimes it can take me 15 minutes to find one of his posts because Seth is so dismissive of some SEO best practices...which is a bit unfortunate for the thousands of people who are not finding his blog ranked as well as it could, and are instead landing on inferior content that was published using better SEO strategies.

It perplexes me how Seth can be so forward thinking and brilliant with so many marketing concepts, and then not really see SEO as a viable channel.

If your SEO strategy is reliant on some misconceived notion of the natural order then you are losing money. Hope is not a business strategy. Neither is content without promotion, particularly in markets saturated with similar competing products. And that is why SEO is important.

Links Based Economy? No. Passion Based Economy? Yes

Speaking at a conference for newspapers Eric Schmidt said:

"We've been careful not to bias it using our own judgment of trust because we're never sure if we get it right. So we use complicated ranking signals, as they're called, to determine rank and relevance. And we change them periodically, which drives everybody crazy, as or algorithms get better. ... The usual problem is you've got somebody who really is very trustworthy, but they're not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don't 'in their view' get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way."

So the big flaw in the algorithm there is "to be well known." SEOs have exploited that since Google first got on the web - buying, trading, borrowing, and stealing links as needed. Arianna Huffington claims that to succeed today you need to work in the links based economy

But what won't work -- what can't work -- is to act like the last 15 years never happened, that we are still operating in the old content economy as opposed to the new link economy, and that the survival of the industry will be found by "protecting" content behind walled gardens.

But the problem with that line of thinking is that the link based economy is quietly disappearing. Links are not flowing as well as they once would have. Take for example, this post - it covers a currently hot topic, is 8 pages long, contains multiple custom images, is easy to consume, and is published on a blog with over 30,000 RSS subscribers. The reward for such work? Less than 30 links so far, and maybe a total of 5 links if you back out the temporal social media links. (And some of those 5 links are on sites that routinely link back and forth).

Would you be willing to write for 4 or 5 hours to only get 5 links to a fairly non-commercial page of a site that already has over 1 million inbound links? No way...totally not worth the effort if we were operating in a "links-based economy."

A couple days ago I talked with a friend who works for some news companies, and they wanted to use rel=nofollow on their editorial selected links because they were afraid of leaking PageRank. To say that we are entering a links based economy is to ignore the corruption of nofollow and how "social" media is pulling editorial links away from those who earned it. But the web changes, and so must we, lest we become the mainstream media writing our own obituary each dawn.

We have moved past the links-based economy into a passion based economy.

In Someone Can Charge for News Content, but Who? John Andrews reminds us of today's most popular news programs:

Today Bill O’Reilly reports the news, and Jon Stewart reports the news. Very popular news shows, right? Think about it.

If the links are not counting in the algorithms then you need to get paid another way to make creating in depth high value content worthwhile. To do that, you need to publish content that is aligned with a particular passion, niche, and/or bias.

Call it tribe based or fan driven marketing. Your customers must play a critical role in your marketing for you to succeed.

Trying to maintain a false appearance of objectivity (as the media does) simply can't compete with deep rooted biases founded in passion, experience, and expertise. I would rather trust a known bias than fake objective with hidden agendas I later need to figure out.

The mainstream media sites can profitably build businesses if they focus on high value niches and create stand alone brands for each that are worth charging for access to.
The mainstream media sites can profitably arbitrage Google's organic search results by filling their sites up with eHow-like junk content that costs less than $5 per page to produce.
But doing what they doing, half-assed generic publishing while slowly trimming costs off huge inefficient organizations guarantees bankruptcies & consolidation. Their current strategy gives them neither passion driven content nor cost efficiency...they are wounded animals mindlessly roaming awaiting their death - the one topic they cover with passion.

Ironically, some of the best content online comes in the form of walled garden paid membership websites. But, it turns out, we don't need the media to figure out who shares our passions.

In A Down Economy, Add Value

When an economy is booming, companies can risk being sub-optimal.

They can get away waste and inefficiency. They can get away with providing less value, because customers aren't as focused on the bottom line as they are when cash is tight.

In a down economy, it is less likely people will be prepared to pay too much for things they don't really need.

So now we're in a down economy, how will things change? What can the webmaster do to adapt to these changes?

Here are a couple of interesting articles:

One on Gapingvoid.com, which predicts a return to value. Another on UnlockTheGame, where a 96 year-old ex-business woman talks about what happened during the last depression.

.... I remember seeing bankers standing in their fancy suits at street corners selling apples......there are millionaires made in good times and in bad times.so the lesson there is the "times" have nothing to do with it.......If you're going to read the news, it's important to read it separating yourself from it. .....Read between the lines and look for the silver lining, because behind every negative news story is a turnaround success story waiting to happen.

While the Gaping Void article makes a number of broad assumptions, the important points of those two articles are that things are going to change, and where there is change, there is opportunity.

So where is the opportunity going to come from?

The Gaping Void article points out:

It was quite a disconnect for me to hear the guys on CNN yapping endlessly on about THE RECESSION, in contrast to all the groovy cats I met at SXSW, who told me how their businesses were booming. It was like two alternate universes colliding. Which one was the real one?"

Been hearing those stories a lot lately? So have I.

It is probable that traditional marketing money (i.e. television, radio, print) is shifting to internet channels, because the internet is seen as providing better value. Also, people may use their cars less often, and shop on the internet to save money. Bad for brick n mortar retailers, good for internet stores.

The UnlockTheGame article talked about surviving the last depression by adding value i.e. selling a freezer stock full of meat.

A good approach in a down economy, especially for the little guy who seldom does enough volume to compete on price alone, is to think about ways to add value.

It is good we're in the internet game :)

How To Add Value

1.Re-Focus On User Needs

What do users really need? As money gets tight, people focus more on their needs than their wants. If you're selling a "want", can you twist it round into being perceived as a need?

For example, one of the first areas to get cut from corporate budgets during a downturn is marketing spend. But a company still needs to talk to consumers. If you sell internet advertising, you could address this need by comparing various channels i.e internet vs tv/radio/print.

Frame your message in terms of results and benefits. In a down economy, positioning is often a lot less important than the bottom line.

2. Segment Your Market

Typically, the wider your market, the more average your service or product. By being all things to all people, chances are you aren't delivering excellent value to some.

If customers are more driven by excellent value because cash is short, the generic products and services may miss out to a competitor more focused on a segments needs. Look for ways to segment your existing market.

3. Improve

Can you be more timely? More convenient? More accurate? Can your offering be customized? Can it be made more usable?

What more can you do for people?

4. Seek Feedback

Your users and customers know what their needs are. Do you make it easy for them to tell you? Ever asked them about it? How do you currently evaluate their needs?

5. Partner

Are there opportunities you see, but can't act on because you don't have the resources? Does someone else have those resources? Are there opportunities to partner up to create more value?

How about within your own company? Is every member of your team focused on providing customer value? Make every team member a partner in the adding value process.

6. Assess The Value Of Existing Relationships

It might seem like a strange time to cut customers, but the customers that aren't making much money present a huge opportunity cost to provide real value to someone else. Assess which customers make you the most money and focus on their needs. What extra value can you create for them?

Which Form of Advertising is More Efficient & Effective?

The above billboard's ad inventory (behind the tree) promoted an important charity. But less than 1 in 1000 people who passed by it knew what was being advertised. They couldn't see it even if they wanted to, but few people wanted to, which is why they could only afford the discount billboard inventory. Almost all traditional advertising is heading in that direction - noise to be ignored.

Worse yet, when you buy ads you usually end up paying for some such ad inventory...

the phantom distribution created by newspapers and magazines that were printed then burned (or never even printed in the first place)
the newspaper website that creates inventory by refreshing the page every 5 minutes
the TV ad that runs at the wrong time and/or is delivered to the wrong audience
the niche clean traffic source that pads their numbers with low value & low cost social media traffic
the ad unit at the bottom of the page that nobody sees
the incidental ad clicks in Gmail
the social media and warez junk your AdWords account subsidizes if you stick with default settings
the "cheap" AdSense ad clicks that are clicked on by nothing but robots
the shady Yahoo! Search "partners" which make AdSense look like a clean source of traffic and allow Google to charge 3X as much per click

By the time there is a standard ad unit advertisers and publishers are busy perverting it while everyone else is learning to ignore it. The best advertising typically looks more like information than advertising.

The liquor store looks like something right out of the white pages. Simple, direct, effective. They could have a fancy sign that is hard to read, but the clarity and location of the sign makes it compelling.

I think that picture is a strong analogy when comparing the efficacy of advertising elsewhere versus making your own website better and creating a service that is worthy of word of mouth marketing. Make your site better & deliver more value and anyone who finds you has an opportunity to benefit from it. There are a lot of ways you can improve your authority, but the stuff you do on your site is generally going to have the best ROI

Advertising that looks like advertising is rarely as effective as the type of advertising you can generate by creating something remarkable. People spend money with the goal to influence and manipulate. But when you get word of mouth coverage it is more like helpful tips, advice, and information from a friend. Just yesterday there were 2 unsolicited Tweets about our membership program.

Each of their kind reviews is worth far more than 20 or 50 or 100 typical AdWords clicks because we don't trust advertisers - particularly in the internet marketing space. A customer who bought something and likes it provides independent social proof of value. Customer recommendations become a form of advertising that resonates.

Advertising That Resonates

In the 1960s, advertising was all about the faceless masses.

The idea was that you devise and build a product, throw it over the wall to the marketing department, who would figure out an angle, then engage in a marketing blitz. They'd try and get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, for the lowest CPM.

In the cynical, jaded 00's, advertising works on a more personal level. People are bombarded with messages, so instinctively tune most of them out. The most effective messages are those that people internalize, make personal, and pass on.

Marketing Models

Traditional marketing looked like this:

Very linear.

Modern marketing looks more like this:

Who controls the message now?

The audience.

The audience is no longer a passive recipient. The audience can pass a message on. They become a vector by which your message travels. If people don't pass your message on, chances are your message is dead.

The audience has control, because they have their hand on the remote, and on the mouse, so bombarding them or interrupting them no longer works. This is why companies try to engage people on a personal level, Google being a fine example.

Word of mouth, in other words.

Why Is Word Of Mouth King in 2009?

Word of mouth advertising is powerful because it resonates on a personal level, and it travels via established, personal networks. Those networks by-pass the mass marketing blitz, which people have long since tuned out, as those channels are low trust. They aren't trusted because they are impersonal, and politics in the 00's is all about me, me, me.

And my friends.

Word of mouth is how social media marketing is going to work. It isn't going to work using interruption or mass market techniques.

Review you message to see if it has a word of mouth quality. Is it remarkable enough for people to repeat to their friends?

Seth Godin, who I like to quote, because he puts his ideas in such a way as you want to repeat them, illustrates it like this:

First, Ten

This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing.

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you...

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they'll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don't love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They're not anonymous and they're not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten".

The thing I often find frustrating about Seth Godin is that he offers few practical examples. Perhaps his goal is to make us think.

Let's start with a checklist:

Is you product or service remarkable? If not, can you twist and shape it so that it is? If not, start again.
Who are the ten people in your niche who matter? Identify them. You need to spend your time and money being remarkable to them
Who are the ten people who are really resonating with your brand? Survey them. Find out why they are attracted to your service. Give them tools and reasons to spread the word

One example that springs to mind is the MLM sales launch.

These launches often target trusted industry players first, who in turn spread the message to their readers. It's celebrity endorsement. The tools are the free giveaways and marketing collateral.

Social media marketing is going to work in much the same way. In social media, people listen to people, not networks. So find out who the ten people are you need to talk to, and make your message remarkable to them. Hopefully, they'll do the rest. Handing a bottle of expensive water to Paris Hilton was no doubt a good idea.

Check out this post on developing a social network platform. Notice how he integrates outside people into the internal processes of the company.

Perhaps that's the new version of MLM.....

Differences Between Word Of Mouth And Going Viral

One of the differences between word of mouth and going viral is that in order to go viral, people need to become part of the network in order to pass the message on.

Roelof Botha, the guy behind PayPal and YouTube points out:

Many people think the word "viral" is interchangeable with "word of mouth"--implying that the product or service is so good that people are compelled to talk it up with their friends. But there's more to it than that. Google and Amazon.com are both great Internet companies, but they aren't viral businesses....word of mouth is when I tell you to shop on Zappos because I think the service is great," explains Botha. "It becomes viral when you have to be ‘in the system’ to use it. For example I can post a video on YouTube but then you would need to go to the site in order to see it

Where Does SEO/SEM Fit?

But hang on, I hear you say. I'm an SEO/SEM, what does this have to do with me?

You're already slicing up the niche and targeting via keywords. But if you're buying clicks, or targeting SERPs, you're wasting a valuable opportunity if people visit your site and forget you the moment they click away. Perhaps that person didn't buy or sign up now, but they might tell someone else about you if your message resonates with them. Your message could then skip from the search channel into their closed social networks - Twitter, Facebook, et al - which increases your exposure and reach.

To do this, your message needs to be remarkable on a personal level.

Does your site convey such a message? If I click on it for the first time, do I know the one unique thing you do that no one else can? The problem you solve for me? And would I tell my friends about it? And will you provide me with the means/tools to do so?

Proven Instant Automatic Wealth Attraction Secrets - Autopilot Cash

Everywhere you look on the internet, there are people who try to convince you that marketing success can be reduced to a formula.

Get rich quick ebooks are a classic example. Hand over $97, follow the guaranteed steps, and you'll get the exact results the author claims. Yes, you, too, will be able to hold up a huge, comedy check, featuring lots of zeros!

SEO forums are filled with questions that presume prescriptive answers: "what keyword density should I use?", "How many links do I need to rank #1?" "How many words should I have on a page?" "How many outbound links are too many? "

Unfortunately, a successful internet business can't be reduced to a simple, paint-by-numbers prescription. If it could, those e-books would be selling for a lot more money, and nobody would be giving away tips in forums.

Paint-by-numbers marketing produces a facsimile of where someone has already been, but the market has long since moved on.

Take A Holistic Approach

The way to approach internet marketing is to do so in a holistic manner.

Once you understand the underlying philosophy of various tactics and strategies, you'll be more likely to apply them successfully, and adapt them to devise new strategies.

There are underlying patterns common to the most successful sites. Once you identify and and internalize these patterns, you can easily out-maneuver any competitors who may be locked into a more inflexible, prescriptive approach.

Bad Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

That quote is often attributed to Pablo Picasso. What I suspect he was getting at is that bad artists copy surface techniques. Great artists, on the other hand, get inside an idea. They internalize it. Then they innovate to produce something genuinely new.

For example, many people will advise you to start a blog.

Whilst that might have been an attention-getting idea in 2001, starting a blog today isn't worth remarking upon. Blogs generated a lot of attention early on because they provided an easy way for people to become citizen journalists, and the writing style was somewhat new, at least in when compared to conventional journalism.

Blogging used the personal voice of the opinions pages, as opposed to impersonal voice to the reporting pages. Blogs also provided immediacy in the days before Google News. Twitter has now leap-frogged blogs and news outlets to provide that very function.

These days, the biggest sites on the internet use nothing but the personal voice i.e Twitter, Facebook etc - and the barriers to producing content are very low. Anyone can publish web content. So the blogging Cluetrain has long since left the station.

Instead of copying the format - the surface - try to provide the type of information people want. That's where the idea for blogs came from. That's where newspapers came from. They solved an information problem for people.

One trend right now is social networking, but this results in a shallow surface of unreliable information. There is a growing flight to quality information, which people will pay to read. Some of the best information on the web is now being locked up behind pay walls.

Ask yourself the fundamental questions. What need is your site serving? Is that need changing? Where will your sites audience be in six months or a years time?

That's where you should aim now.

The future is where Google focuses their efforts:

We started with the early-adopter crowd. That was on purpose. We wanted to build a product for people who were getting hundreds of e-mails a day, because we believe by focusing on the power user, you're designing the product the rest of the market will want in a couple years when everyone's usage habits catch up to the most active users.

Barrier To Entry

When some guru tells you "a secret" - i.e. to get into mobile ring tones - he's safe in the knowledge the area is already saturated and he has moved on.

Once you see that sort of information published in the public domain, it's too late. The horse has bolted. But he will still tell you the market is ripe and that you should sign up under his affiliate link. Even if you lose money he still profits from your efforts. You are the key ingredient of their wealth generation formula, you just don't know it yet. ;)

One good way to evaluate the worth of such prescriptions is to evaluate the barrier to entry. A barrier to entry is some condition that makes it difficult for late entrants to enter a market. An example of a barrier to entry would be, say, the start-up cost of an airline. The capital investment required is significant, which disqualifies most of us ever starting one.

On the internet, if anyone can copy a technique cheaply and easily, then it almost certainly won't work. Once a technique is out there, too many people will copy it, which dilutes the market to the point where it fast becomes uneconomic. Do you think starting a blog today and running Adsense on it will make you money? It might, but it will also require a lot of work, luck and a significant point of difference. Without those fundamentals, it will remain unread, and is highly unlikely to make money.

So look for areas that have a barrier to entry. Do you have an established brand you can leverage? Can you partner with someone who does? Can you spot a niche where none of the players are spending much? What happens if you throw some money at it? Do you have a means of grabbing attention that other people don't have?

What is your point of difference? And can you make it defensible?

Steal A Business Plan, Apply It To A Different Niche

In the financial world, investment firms often use forensic accountants to deconstruct the tactics and strategies of their competitors.

One famous example is Harry Markopolus, who worked out that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. Markopolus bosses wanted to learn how they could match Madoff's double-digit returns. He was assigned to deconstruct Madoff's strategy to see if he could replicate it.

If you've found a new niche, try applying a model that has already proved to be successful in another niche. Deconstruct the features, tactics and philosophies of the successful site, and either go head to head, or even better, apply those same strategies to a new niche.

For example, one characteristic common to many successful sites is that they were first movers. They were in the niche early enough to command attention simply by existing. Can you slice the niche you're in even finer in order to be seen as a first mover?

You could also try the same idea in different geographic locations. TradeMe is a New Zealand version of Ebay. New Zealand is a tiny market, but TradeMe recently sold for $700 million, mainly because it was a big fish in a small pond. The business idea was the same proven idea as Ebay, simply applied to a different regional niche.

Show Leadership & Connect People

As Seth Godin notes, what works today is leading:

Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they'd like to go. Connecting them to one another....a tiny sliver of the market is enough. Bill Niman used to run Niman Ranch, a cooperative raising meat for fancy restaurants and markets. That was already a sliver of the huge huge market for meat. He moved on to start BN, a 1000 acre farm raising goats for a subset of that subset. It's enough. It's enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you.....go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.....People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.

If you look around the search niche, you'll find the biggest sites have very clear leadership. These sites also serve as connectors for the community. The least significant search blogs follow others and repeat information. But the audience doesn't want that. Someone who follows the followers isn't valuable to them.

You don't need to pull in a big community, you simply need to lead whatever niche you happen to be in. Look for ways you can carve out you own leadership niche, then connect people within that niche.

People want to be led. They want someone to follow.

What can you teach others? What can you help them to do? How can you connect them to each other?

If You Don't Rank, Did You Fail?

There's a great Nike commercial starring Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed

How many SEO goals are aimed at winning the battle, and not the war?

Rankings vs Profits

One of the big mistakes those new to SEO make is to focus too much attention on rankings. It's easy to see why, as rankings provide such an obvious scorecard. You either rank or you don't.

The trouble is, rankings are seldom an appropriate measure of success, just as Michael Jordan shooting or missing an easy shot doesn't make him a success or a failure.

For example, I recently saw a comment on a leading SEO site whereby the commenter chastised the site owner for not appearing top ten for the phrase "search engine optimization". As far as the commenter was concerned, this meant the SEO was a failure at SEO, because he didn't rank for that industry-defining phrase.

What the commenter failed to grasp, of course, was the big picture.

What is Your Primary Objective?

I would estimate the site in question receives 100s of thousands of visitors, and that their business model delivers significant revenue. The fact they don't rank for the phrase "search engine optimization" is pretty much irrelevant in terms of their primary objective, which is to make money.

Secondly, the term "search engine optimization" isn't the prize some might imagine. The people who use the term "search engine optimization" may well be optimizers, not potential customers. That's fine if your target market is other SEOs, but not if you're selling services to customers.

Thirdly, you would need to put a lot of effort into ranking for such a term, and you'd have to question whether it would ever pay off. Contrast this with the effort required to rank well for a wide range of related keyword terms that, when aggregated, produce more highly targeted traffic than "Search engine optimization" ever would. This site may well have lost the ranking battle for that keyword term, but they're probably winning the war.

Business is About Making Money

The guy who focuses too much on ranking as an end goal will ultimately fail, because ranking is not a business goal. This is not to say rankings aren't important - a number one ranking for a lucrative term is worth a lot of money - but if the ranking isn't tied into your business goals, then how do you really know if you're succeeding or not?

Michael Jordan's is probably the greatest basketball player of all time. The greatest SEO of all time probably doesn't care that much about rankings day to day, s/he probably cares about the overall goal, which is almost always to make money.

What an Online Business Needs to Succeed

There's an interview here with Shoemoney where he talks about the three things an internet business needs to work:

Has To Make Money
Has To Grow Virally
Provides A Needed Service

Note that those goals are all business orientated. He doesn't say rank well, or get the most traffic, or appear in Technorati's Top 100. Those aspects might be part of a strategy, but if those are an SEOs end goals, then they're probably not going to be in the internet game very long.

Creating Engagement

That second point is one often overlooked by SEOs. If you rank well, and get traffic, and that traffic only engages with you once, then does that really support your business goals? Someone who visits once and leaves is not nearly as valuable as the visitor who returns often, or helps spread the word about you. Does you strategy focus on achieving that very valuable outcome?

Consider the value of an average site visitor to this site versus a person who subscribes to the RSS feed, sets up a user account, installs our SEO tools in their browser, and hopefully becomes a premium member. The average visitor comes and goes - thousands of them, every single day. Most of them are worthless to our business objectives, but those who commit to repeated engagement generate word of mouth marketing and are more likely to become customers. We give our visitors about a half dozen ways to engage with us. The increased engagement builds trust. That leads to subscriptions, and anytime we have an important announcement, we know over 100,000 people will see it.

In the book "The Dip", by Seth Godin, Seth offers some practical suggestions on how you can turn failure to your advantage. Just as Michael Jordan probably learned a lot from the shots he missed, so can we by redefining failure as an inevitable part of success.

when you see failure as a learning event, not a destination, it makes you smarter, faster

In this interview, Seth illustrates how big companies can focus on the wrong (expensive) battles, and lose the war:

Here's an easy one—Bud TV. They've spent more than $40 million on it so far, yet if we look at their traffic numbers they do worse than a site on sheet rubber sales. What happened? Budweiser had a top down, we-speak-to-the-public mindset when it comes to commercials. They buy Super Bowl commercials for $2 million or $3 million each because they can. Bud TV was all about "let's send messages straight to consumers." Hold that up next to YouTube, which was built from the ground up around individuals sharing with each other, and Bud TV lost. Wouldn't it have been better if they had just embraced YouTube and used it for what it was good at, rather than trying to build their own channel and invent their own form of new media?

We Have Failed, Just Like Bud

Not every site we launch is profitable. Sometimes we start a site and then realize we lack the passion to go through with it, other times major algorithm shifts and/or competitors shifting strategies have made sites heavily reliant on certain models/ideas/strategies no longer profitable.

The beauty of failure online is that it costs almost nothing to leave a failed website running, and you can always come back to it later, or use it nepotistically to help make it pay for itself. If you lose $10,000 on building a website then it only needs to about 3 years for it to pay for itself if it makes $10 a day - and less time if you are using it nepotistically. How much does it cost to rent a good link from the clean parts of the web?

And that leads to one of the best tips in the SEO space. If you are successful somewhere, try to work related markets such that you can take best practice knowledge to make your future projects much more successful. You are better off dominating a market than being an average to slightly below average playing in a dozen markets.

And we have sites that have worked far better than expected. Tools like SEO for Firefox give you a good idea of roughly how competitive a market is, but it is hard to know what lucky breaks you will get or be 100% certain you will rank a brand new site in a competitive market. Strategy and experience increase your odds of success, but algorithms can and do change. Take what the search engines give you and keep doing what is working. Sometimes that means buying a site they already like. Don't hate Google, simply create (and replicate) what they want.

What Are Your Goals? Why?

Constantly re-evaluate your marketing strategy to see if it is leading you towards winning the battle, but losing the war.

What are you measures of success and failure in terms of SEO? What are you measuring, and how?

How Many Trillions Does it Take to Put a Banker in Jail?

About to go to jury duty here in about 15 minutes...which got me thinking about the concept of justice.

I don't mind paying a lot of taxes if it goes toward creating a better society, but in California when you get toward the upper end of the tax bracket you can pay ~ 60% (federal + state + local + self employment/social security) of your income in taxes. And those tax payments probably do not even offset the handouts we are giving to bankers that gambled with trillions of dollars and lost.

News of additional bailouts via a public private partnership (that makes almost all the reward private and almost all the risk taxpayer funded) have spurred Bank of America and Citibank into buying more of the toxic assets that they allegedly need help clearing off the books.

A guy writes $7,000 in bad checks and gets a 24 year prison sentence. These bankers cost tax payers trillions of dollars. So much money stolen that they debased the currency, and they are awarded with free money for being incompetent.

I am not sure what will come of today, but if this country actually had any sense of justice then there would be at least a half dozen bankers serving a few decades in jail. The fact that none of them have been locked up yet shows how perverse our justice system is and how little you should trust the U.S. government. Politicians work for the bankers.

Obama has a poll allowing voters to ask questions about the economy. Most of the questions are about "what about me I am broke and don't know what to do" and "I need some relief" etc. And that is how they will remain until our financial system is fixed. And by fixed I mean these bankers serve the jail-time they earned and pay back their "earnings." Billions of hours of labor have been wasted propping up a ponzi scheme that promotes insider/bank traders winning on both sides of the trade, while handing you the losses.

Is there any wonder why so many people feel overextended?

These bankers put teeth in the consumer bankruptcy law (lying using bogus statistics to pass it) then they wanted a decade long ride on the free money train for their company.

What's worse is that children who have yet to be born have interest working against them starting from the day they are born. They are in the hole from their first breath, having done nothing wrong other than being born into corruption. The politicians take care of their own children, just not our children.

We are so afraid of terrorism...and financial terrorists that cost us trillions of dollars are somehow just part of how the system works. No big deal.

Sorry, but I don't need to pay for someone else's second yacht or fourth home. If anything these career criminals should be scrubbing my floors and taking out my trash. You and I are the people who are actually paying their salaries (and bonuses) through a collective billions of hours of OUR LABOR that was confiscated and handed over to the banks. This makes me angry enough to want to go unemployed and stop working and/or move to another country. I hope I get to be a juror over a banker some day. And I hope you do too!

Update: here are a couple relevant articles in Rolling Stone & The Atlantic, and a nice video.

Is Your Website Credible?

I saw a link-bait article at the top of TechMeme this past weekend entitled ""Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet".

The article outlines how internet advertising will fail because it (apparently) holds people captive and forces them to watch ads (huh?). I'm paraphrasing, but that's the jist of the conclusion reached by the author, Eric Clemons, of the University of Pennsylvania.

I certainly hope a lot of would-be advertisers listen to his view on search advertising, because it will reduce the bid competition for the rest of us:

Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model....Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid"

Bizzare.

For starters, what is the searchers "preferred" company? That statement assumes the searcher already knows what company they are looking for. Perhaps, as is often the case, they are looking to solve a problem, not locate a specific company.

Secondly, anyone who has paid for ads would know that the last thing you want to do as a search advertiser is to "misdirect" visitors to your site i.e. visitors who aren't interested in what you're selling. It costs a fortune, makes no money, and Google will likely demote such ads due to a poor quality score.

Sergey Brin is of the opinion that advertising can add value, so long as it is relevant:

"....it fits with the notion of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page that ads can and should be at least as useful to people as search results and other online content. "We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you,"

Of course, he would say that, but I think it is true. Ad content need not be intrusive. Relevant advertising, delivered when the customer wants it, can and does solve problems, and thus adds value. Advertising also facilitates a lot of web content that simply couldn't be offered for free if the advertising didn't support it. Google itself could not exist without advertising.

Anyway, Danny Sullivan does a good fisk of the article. We'll worth a read.

Website Credibility

Danny brought up an interesting aside about credibility, which I thought I'd riff on and hopefully we can share some ideas in the comments.

Here is how Danny decides if a travel website is credible:

I have this “travel guide” test to use to help determine if an expert source knows what they’re talking about. Ever struggle to decide which travel book for some vacation destination might be the best one? Me, if it’s a travel series, I pull the guide for a destination I know well, like my hometown. I know my local area in an expert way — and if the travel guide suggests good stuff for my area, then I feel better about trusting it in other areas.

In this case, because Danny has established the credibility of the source, he is more likely to go to places the guide recommends. He is certainly more likely to keep reading the site, which means more opportunity for advertisers to be seen.

What Makes A Website Credible?

Credibility means the quality of being believable or trustworthy.

The markers we use to determine credibility online have a lot in common with the way we determine credibility offline: are we familiar with this person or business? Have we had previous, beneficial dealings with them? Do they come recommended by someone we trust? Does it look and feel right? This last point might be more important than we've been led to believe. More on this shortly.

Various articles have pointed to prescriptive credibility markers, such as displaying your address, having a privacy policy, showing a photo of the site owner etc, but I'd argue these are pretty much useless unless more fundamental credibility markers have been established first.

One of the problems on the internet in terms of establishing credibility, is that the internet is largely unregulated and anonymous:

the Internet has no government or ethical regulations controlling the majority of its available content. This unregulated flow of information presents a new problem to those seeking information, as more credible sources become harder to distinguish from less credible sources (Andie, 1997). Moreover, without knowing the exact URL of a given site, the amount of information offered through keyword searches can make finding a predetermined site difficult as well as increase the likelihood of encountering sites containing false information

The task of deciding the level of credibility lies mostly with the individual, rather than an external agency. A research report by Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab found:

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.This reliance on a site's overall visual appeal to gauge its credibility occurred more often with some categories of sites then others. Consumer credibility-related comments about visual design issues occurred with more frequency with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce sites (46.2%), and with less frequency when assessing health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites. In comparison, the parallel Sliced Bread Design study revealed that health and finance experts were far less concerned about the surface aspects of these industry-specific types of sites and more concerned about the breadth, depth, and quality of a site's information.

The emphasis people place on a sites visual design when trying to determine credibility is interesting. This is not to say having a blinged-up site will make you appear more credible, as it very much depends what market you're in. A slick site is likely be credible if you're selling lipstick to teenagers, but not if you're providing weather data to climatologists. Wikipedia and Google appear credible as information resources partly because they look staid and academic.

So the first step to making your site credible is to know your audience, and meet their expectations in terms of look and feel.

Accuracy Of Information

The studies also point to the accuracy of information as a credibility marker.

It stands to reason that a site that contains obvious lies or inaccuracies, as perceived by the reader, isn't going to be credible. Having said that, there are plenty of scam artists on the internet, and people pedaling incorrect information, but the difference is that their readers aren't aware they are being lied to or being given incorrect information.

This is why it can often pay to cite known authorities to add credibility to your content. Besides the value of citation in terms of establishing accuracy, naming a credible resource can make you appear more credible by association. Go to Yahoo Answers are notice how most answers lack credibility. Those answer that are credible tend to cite external known authorities.

A Way With Words

Closely related to visual presentation is format and the way you use words.

In a study by Indianna University, Matthew Eastin looked at the credibility markers for online health information:

More recently, Rieh & Belkin (1998) identified criteria used when evaluating online information......they found that: (1) institutional sites were seen as more credible than individual sites, and (2) accuracy of content was used to assess online information. Respondents used knowledge of citations within the content and the functionality of hyperlinks as cues to evaluate the information. ....in addition to source and link accuracy, they also recommend that users consider peer evaluation, navigability, and feedback options (i.e., email, chat room, etc.)

Academic essays sound authoritative, even if what they say is nonsense, because they are long winded and use big words. Even the length of an essay can lend credibility. For example, long Wikipedia pages appear more credible that short pages, simply by virtue of their length. Various studies in the direct marketing field appear to back this up, which is why you'll often see those long, single page sales letters. Short letters don't sell so well. "Thoroughness" either reduces anxiety in the buyer, or ehances the credibility of the seller, or most likely both.

Again, the way you use words depends on your audience. An academic approach isn't much use if people can't comprehend what you're saying. Likewise, if a an article is lightweight and flippant, it isn't going to appear to an academic community.

In The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that looks at communication within markets in the internet age, the authors assert that markets are conversations. And that conversation is conducted in the human voice, not the cliche ridden hype language of the marketing brochure. The use of colloquial "voice" often carries a lot of credibility on the web, presumably because it signifies a human presence.

The Reef Fish Effect

People like to go where other people are.

There is perceived to be less risk in crowds. This is why Amazon's customer reviews are so powerful. People's choices are affirmed by the wisdom of the crowd. It just feels safer.

Include as many human touches as you can. Reviews from known authorities, signs of activity, signs that other people have visited your site before, and their experience has been positive. Being a known quantity makes you appear more credible.

What do you look for when trying to determine credibility?

Links & Relationships vs the 'Social' Media Monster

John Andrews highlighted how the narcissistic "social" media platforms are in many ways replacing links

The players producing platforms are manipulating the currency that they see those platforms aggregate — which is mostly links. As you type type type your content into Twitter or Wordpress.com or Wikipedia you are fueling the coffers of an elite group of benefactors, and if they continue to manipulate the open web, we lose the “free” benefits of our world wide web. They used to encourage you to sign onto their systems, but now they need you. We’re not linking because our tools don’t make it easy enough to express our linking selves. Those who make the flexible tools today do so for personal gains, not the betterment of the web, and so they manage the linking. Greed is the new black.

If enough such platforms keep growing then Google will have to evolve their algorithms to look beyond links, placing significant weight on other factors and/or some nofollowed links.

A while ago I mentioned how Twitter was pulling blog links away from bloggers (lowering the ROI of blogging from super explosive to only explosive). This trend is not only spoke about in the SEO industry, but is starting to receive coverage in broader channels. Brian Solis recently mentioned this trend, noting that many of the top blogs are seeing lower link counts in Technorati. People would rather write about their status than spend the effort needed to digest and compile something deeper.

Since more links are occurring on networks like Twitter that will lead to a rise of tools like BackTweets. Until the search relevancy algorithms evolve more, we need to look for ways to encourage as much conversation as possible to happen on independent websites. How do we do that? I have a few ideas, but would love to read some of yours first. :)

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