People talk about things everyday. When most people talk about SEO (especially those who have never tried to understand anything about how search engines work) they typically tend to spew out biased ignorant garbage that needs corrected.

Of course I don't want to make it sound like I never make mistakes or do stupid things. They both happen all the time. And people have corrected me as well.

The error I tend to have a distaste for is one of intent...the people talking trash about SEOs...what percent of them even tried to learn anything about the industry before they paid a scammer and got mad, or just posted some hate speech with no knowledge on any level?

It is the equivalent of me saying all PHP programmers or web designers are scum because I was cheap and lazy and hired a bad one. I try to go out of my way to make sure I express my name and brand as being a person not being afraid to call a spade a spade. Sometimes people like it. Sometimes they hate it.

Sometimes I intentionally piss people off. One of the most effective ways to do that is to change the frame of reference of the conversation to use their own words 100% against them to make them look silly. The beautiful thing about the web is that you can take a few minutes to craft your response. You don't even have to be immediately good with words to drive a point home.

You can also do well being exceptionally polite to people if you prefer not to be known for calling people out. Any way you slice it, each ignorant post is a marketing opportunity for hungry SEOs. Sometimes even when well respected people outside the industry make positive comments about members of the industry (or reference their content) someone will come along and quickly denounce their posts.

Here is a quote from Andrea, who tends to think Todd is a bad person because his is guilty of being a knowledgable SEO:

BS. That guy is a SEO consultant, most of which are purveyors of snake oil to the unwary. And that's putting it politely. Traffic comes from content, from passion and from something, anything that actually means something to people. If you haven't got something worth talking, nobody will be talking about it, SEO optimized or not.

to which I replied (not sure if he will post it there, so I will post it here):

Andreas,
Anywhere that there is $$$$ and confusion sleazeballs will follow and sell snake oil. But for you to write off the entire industry is ignorant at best. And that's putting it politely.

I recently wrote an article about some of the reasons the SEO industry has a black eye. seobook dot com/archives/001561.shtml

Part of it was that sleazeballs sell snake oil. Another part of the equasion was that most clients are lazy.

>If you haven't got something worth talking, nobody will be talking about it, SEO optimized or not.

People talk about stupid crap all the time. Some people even talk about things they know nothing about. Take yourself, as an example.

You really believe that quality content and passion are the only thing that makes pages rank?

How come I have pages ranking in Google right now that are only page titles, waiting for me to develop and place ad filled content on them? For terms that are worth thousands of dollars a month?

In fact, I have ranked domains where the site was not even up. One of my sites was ranking #6 for "search engine marketing" when Google's cache showed no content at the URL. Since the site was not even up clearly it was ONLY links that made it rank.

The term it was ranking for? search engine marketing.

Here are a few screenshots. This is the search result:
seobook dot com/images/no-page-1.gif
Here is the cached copy of the site not existing:
seobook dot com/images/no-page-2.gif

>I can tell you first hand that SEO only works for sites with great content since building link popularity is nearly impossible for sites without great content.

I have made thousands of dollars off sites that were of such low quality that I was ashamed to have owned them...some of which now only exist as trophies for how to make bad sites.

You can get links to ANY site if you are creative enough. Links are just citations or references.

Look at this page, published today no less:
problogger dot net/archives/2006/03/24/pixel-ad-site-targeting-bloggers-with-deception/

Also some people will sell a link to anyone. And as shown from that Problogger post, some people get links exclusively because their content quality is so low.

MetaFilter and MSNBC even referenced an auto content generator
www dot metafilter.com/mefi/41549

Content quality typically does not get much lower than that which is automated or machine composed.

Whenever people talk in absolutes they are easy to shoot down, because the array of human emotion and human activity is so broad. Those who speak in absolutes typically (although not all the time) do not consider much beyond their own perspective.

For anyone who thinks Andrea had any credibility on any level to talk trash about SEO, check out what Google sees as their home page. As of writing this it has no text, no links, and the even the word BIG in the page title is ran together with numbers with an underscore separating them BIG_v1.02 (so Google sees the page title as two words - BIG_v1 and 02). That is literally the single worst SEOed page I have ever seen in my life.

Via SER the latest SEO scam marketing technique is to cold call and threaten well ranking sites that their site will be banned if they do not pay you. If you say no, they threaten to turn you in for spamming to get your site blacklisted quicker.

According to David Wallace the firm that is allegedly doing this is Paramount Webmasters. A funny detailed email exchange is posted here.

Important to note that this blackmail issue is not any of the arbitrary black hat seo vs white hat seo crap. Search spamming actually has the ability to teach you algorithmic criteria for ranking well in the engines. Many of the best SEOs are also search spammers. Think of them as field tested experts. But search spamming is not the problem here.

This problem is purely a business ethics issue. In any market where business owners are uninformed some sleazeballs will come along and try to bilk a few hundred or few thousand dollars out of businesses. Those people are just like the pieces of garbage that mail me domain monitoring, domain registration, and trademark monitoring scam mail.

I think the reason SEO gets more of a black eye than domain registrars, hosts, and web designers is largely determined by roughly 12 criteria (3 here and the rest later on):

• legitimate SEO services may have a fairly high price point due to their great value

• most people seeking SEO preclude honest service providers because they think in terms of free traffic
• many people only hear of search engine marketing WHEN a scammer contacts them

Because you notice registrars have a practical function BEFORE scammers contact you, if you ever get ripped off by a bogus bill you don't associate that with registrars, you associate that action with scammers. You have to have a certain sense of curiosity or an analytical mind to naturally want to think about how and why search engines determine relevancy. In SEO all too many webmasters discover the topic WHILE a scammer has contacted them offering to blackmail them. Thus their mental frameset is first determined by their interaction with scammers.

Worse yet, after getting scammed once or twice a business owner might feel beat down and never have enough trust in the field to be able to spend enough to afford someone who would do honest quality work, so they keep going back to

1. scammers OR

2. new SEOs who do not know the value of their services, which are also likely to have many of the following downsides:
   • limited experience

   • spreading themselves too thin because they need to do too much work to get by
   • limited self confidence
   • poor communication skills
   • such a low price point that massive algorithmic updates could cause their service prices to go into negative margins
   • a lack of understanding how SEO fits into the broader marketing spectrum
   • a margin based business that undercharges off the start is doomed to fail as the medium grows more competitive (Some businesses may change their prices, but the odds of finding one that is deeply undercharging which raises their rates prior to a huge algorithm shift almost destroying their business is probably next to none. If they raise their rates after an algorithm has caused your traffic to diminish your business relationship stands a good chance of ending.)

Either way, after a business is burned once or twice they are likely to keep getting burned due to a fear of committing too many resources.

Other issues that give SEO's a bad rap are:

• many business owners are lazy and want to outsource the blame for their own failures and lack of ability to adapt to evolving technologies

• some updates cause bad algorithms to roll out and screw with even well establishes sites
• while new updates are rolled in SEO's may get contacted by nearly all of their customers at the exact same time, and until things settle down sometimes it does not make much sense to make any changes
• SEO is a game of margins. Unless you are creative or really understand social networks creating a future proof well ranking site costs much more than satisfying the current ranking criteria.
• many people carpet bomb the web with marketing messages. some of those messages are used to manipulate search results. blogs are viral in nature and blog software makers were slow to adapt.
• some people scraping by at low price points seeing more of their budget getting turned toward search instead of design or other services are chuck full of envy
• SEO is largely an invisible process to the average business (ie: they don't see the link building or much of anything until they see the results weeks or months after a campaign starts), but if it works most businesses are not likely to share that information. Would you share the secret to your success? If it doesn't work people are far more likely to share a complaint. With so many people chasing the top results most of them are going to end up disappointed. Not everyone can rank #1.
• Competition: With the algorithms advancing and the field getting so hyper saturated it is getting harder for any one SEO or SEO company to stick out in a good way and get noticed. Often one of the best ways to create new buzz is to mention controversy or when things go awry elsewhere. Thus for the sake of interest or plublicity we - as an industry - eat our young. The media also prefers to paint the controvercial angle - because it sells more news print.
• Competition: Search is an easy concept to like. Google has a strong brand. It hurts their relevancy and revenue when people manipulate their index. As recently as a week ago Matt Cutts was quoted in the Economist saying renting links was unethical. Financially Google is primarily a link broker, making roughly 99% of their revenue from selling links. Google is worth over $100 billion and makes roughly 99% of their revenue by selling links. By their own standard Google must be exceptionally unethical, especially since they sell links promoting child prostitution!

In the same way I would like to disassociate Paramount Webmasters from the SEO field, it is also worth noting that a business can use direct mail or the phone for marketing (even Yahoo! cold called me asking me to join their ambassador program) and be an ethical business, but it is important to look for independent signs of quality and do a bit of research before buying from anyone who first contacts you. It is usually better to chose your business partners than to let them chose you.

Rand interviewed Ammon Johns (Ammon is also known as Black Knight, and is one of the most respected names in the industry):

Pepsi don't go to the same ad agency as Coca Cola and say "I want the exact same ad Coke just ran, but with our brand instead of theirs". It doesn't work that way. Companies and brands are not interchangeable and a package that attempts to serve all companies with the exact same thing is just a nonsense. In fact it is obviously ridiculous.

In all honesty, it seems like the vast majority of SEO practitioners and web marketers out there have developed one simple package that once worked and then just re-use it over and over until they have milked it dry.

When you get to the level Ammon is at you can be rather selective with which clients you are willing to take. Via SEW Benjamin Pfeiffer recently wrote an article titled What To Do If You're The SEO Client Nobody Wants?

It seems as though increasing opportunities for experienced SEOs, evolving search algorithms, and increased competition over time are making it much harder for unbranded businesses to find SEOs to service competitive marketplaces unless they have a holistic marketing strategy.

Ben also wrote an article titled Why The Big SEO Company Is Killing The True SEO.

This year alone, 60% of all new clients I have taken on have been what I like to call the "recycled SEO". A recycled SEO client is a client who has previously worked with another SEO company, who was either got scammed, not delivered upon, or cheated in some way.

I still think lowly of most large firms, but as Ben noted, if 60% of your leads come from one source are they doing your marketing for you? I got ripped off by a sleazy SEO outfit, and perhaps underpaying and getting junk or overpaying and getting junk is just part of the SEO learning cycle. I certainly am not scared when I read that WPP (or other large ad agencies) create SEO divisions, as I have never believed that SEO services scale, and ultimately large providers end up sending leads to smaller and better companies.

There has been buzz about conversational marketing recently, including exposure on Poynter and Performancing.

I think conversational advertising works primarily for the following groups:

• those who can give away their entire product free because they realize that the viral buzz around it will cause many more follow on customers...this works especially well if the product is informational related or downloadable software that has negligible per unit cost

• network based companies that can offer a free trial (perhaps even lifetime free trial) of a high value product which increases in value through subscriber growth. Think VoIP companies, etc.

When CashKeywords sponsored Threadwatch it was a hit, largely because they offered the option of getting their entire product free of charge. Typically though marketers are greedier and/or short sighted, you get people who:

• want someone to review the low end version of their product; or

• people who want free marketing without respecting the time and effort needed to create a site that draws a large niche audience.

While idealistically conversational marketing should work great there are many fundamental errors with it.

1. People are skeptical of advertising.

2. By default the group of people asked to comment on an ad are going to be more inclined to offer negative feedback.
3. The people who buy and like your product and comment on it would likely give you more useful feedback directly.
4. Threads often run on tangents. If it is a paid ad the odds of the tangent being a negative one are much higher.
5. Most legitimate companies have made a few mistakes and/or have a few skeletons in their closet. If they have not made any mistakes then they probably are not interesting enough to be comment worthy.

The problem that makes conversational marketing sound appealing is that many of the best content providers do not make near enough off their content due to limited ad sales resources and content topic selection of hypersaturated low value topics.

As an ad buyer, when I am buying ad space in hyper-saturated markets I respect the fact that there is going to be under-priced ad inventory. Marketers market on spyware because it has a positive ROI. Marketers market on stolen or garbage content funded by Google AdWords because it is profitable.

When doing the pay per influence model you don't buy the influence of those with reach. If they are selling that they lose their credibility...and eventually their reach. All you are merely doing is overpaying for ad space near their content.

Look at the Superbowl. Those ads are likely overpriced largely because they give advertisers such large exposure. Now some of them may have viral follow up elements that add value in other ways, but most ads do not do that.

I sell conversational ads on Threadwatch and get like 1 enquery a month. Not much considering that is one of the 10 or so most powerful sites in this industry.

I have also cut back most of my ad spend for this site outside of AdWords because most of it offers a net negative ROI...whereas I might make a slight profit with AdWords.

Do I get some love from conversational marketing? You bet your ass I do. In the last couple days I stumbled across this SEO Book mention and another great thread at Digital Point. That is conversational marketing. You commenting on this thread is likely going to be good conversational marketing. Sites that make you feel you know the owner will continue to grow in reach.

You can't make happy customers want to give positive feedback on someone else's site by advertising there. They have to already want to do it. And you can't pay for it or some people will question it for being fake.

Seth posts about how controlling your category is important if you want to earn more traffic.

Even one of the world's leading authorities on links think the key to internet advancement is content:

For me it’s about the content. Can I help the content get known or not? I don’t care if it’s a FORTUNE 500 company or a mom and pop site. If the content is about a specific topic and well done, then it deserves to be known and linked. If the content is crap, even if it’s produced by a large corporation, then why bother? It’s not me that gets the links for the content; it’s the content itself that earns the link. I’m just a conduit.