Stuntdubl on doing SEO research:

What I’ve found at the top of search results in most industries is someone who decided to share what they knew. A lot of the time they unintentionally became an expert in the process by sharing that information.

I think it is the missing key in most failing online business models.

If you had every competitive research tool in the world at your disposal you still would need to find ways to make people want to link at you in a profitable manner. Some can no doubt be bought, but that only scales up to a certain point in certain industries.

You do not have to compete on scale or in terms of money if you are more willing to give than the competition is. The best kind of marketing is the stuff you get for free, and the best way to get that is to give away a bunch in a variety of formats, early and often.

Many of times giving stuff away will be an absolute loss liter failure, but you still learn from it, and in aggregate, over time, you will stumble upon a few things that work and spread.

The best products, companies, and/or people don't always win, but you can dramatically increase the chances of creating a sustainable business model if you are unafraid to put stuff out there and see how the market reacts.

My first client hired me before I knew I was selling any sort of service. :) He found an unformatted site that was like a personal notes journal about search and liked it. I was so wet behind the ears he is lucky I got his site to rank, but it made him thousands of dollars and made me feel helpful :)

A couple years ago I knew almost nothing about the web or marketing, and a couple days ago I appreciated that I sorta became a bit of an accidental expert when I was talking to a well known book publisher and speaking about SEO at a marketing MBA class.

www.searchengineoptimizationbook.com, the exact reason building up trust is so important.

Anyone can sell a product just like yours using:

• nearly the same price point

• nearly the same format
• nearly the same sales copy
• nearly the same product name

As you create more value and are more well known more knock off products pop up, but so long as they are not too aggressive in their spamming they should only aid your brand value.

As far as www.searchengineoptimizationbook.com goes, although their "EBOOK COMING SOON!!!NOT AVAILABLE YET" notice is up, it is good to see that they already have plenty of paid customers and testimonials in place :)

I bought your SEO book 3 months ago and without doubt one of the absolute best investments I've ever made. I have tripled my sales in the last 3 months. I love the SEO book. I regret not purchasing your book sooner.

searchengineoptimizationbook.com/SEO_Book.htm#SuccessTestimonials

If only it were available...maybe you could have got it sooner :)

I wonder if this knock off site was a ploy from you know who.

Seth offers his new rules for naming, but unfortunately I think some of them are no good.

This:

This means that having the perfect domain name is nice, but it's WAY more important to have a name that works in technorati and yahoo and google when someone is seeking you out.

Sort of a built-in SEO strategy.

is debatable in it's presentation, but this:

So, that was the first task. Find a name that came up with close to zero Google matches.

is absolutely unnecissary.

The concept of needing nearly zero competition to rank is beyond me. If you are creating something of quality over 99% of the competing pages for any phrase are going to be of zero significance.

If your product or service is truely remarkable you should be able to redefine the meaning of language. That is what remarkable people & companies do.

By looking at the number of hits for a word you are just looking at the number of pages that have that term in it. Want a better glance at the competition? Search for the number of pages which have the word in the anchor text and the page title (that tool will be made better & open source...it is still very beta). Even that number does not matter much though.

You really only need to look at the top few results, because those are the ones you will be competing against if you are trying to own the meaning of a word or phrase.

When Nandini named a directory Web Atlas that was a bad call because there are authoritative well established .edu & .gov domains in that keyword space.

When I created Myriad Search, I did not look through the competition at all (in large part because I wanted to create Myriad Search for link popularity and personal use more than for it to spread widely).

In spite of spending under $1 avertising Myriad Search, in the first month the site already ranks at #11 or #12 in Google for the word "myriad" (out of 28,000,000+ results).

You don't really establish a cult status until after many people are talking about your product. People do not search for your product until they heard about it elsewhere.

You shouldn't think of your site starting from zero and every page that has the term you want to rank for as competition. You should compare the quality of your idea to the quality of the top ranking ideas and see if you think it is possible to outrank them based on that.

Also notice how Seth's post title sounding authoritative is more likely to get comments. New rules for naming sounds much more definitive than naming tips & ideas.

Seth wrote another one of his free ebooks called everyone is an expert.

The biggest problem with search is the lack of meaning. The biggest problem with content are quality & quantity. Citation based information systems make the best content hard to find unless the person creating it is already well known. Various pay per spam formats make bulk content creation too profitable to ignore. Sifting through pay per refuge makes it hard to know how honest a recommendation is. Most legit pages are wrote as being part of an ongoing dialog, and leave something to be desired if read alone.

Seth is creating a network called Squidoo which hosts pages that hopefully can stand on their own as what he calls lenses. They sound essentially like a topical link list with a bit of background information covering a specific topic.

I think off the start the idea may work, but it will still ultimately run into the same problems search & other networks do. User feedback is important, but:

• people buy and sell links & ad space

• people buy and sell old domains
• people buy and sell eBay accounts
• people spam Amazon recommend lists & Amazon reviews
• people vote for themselves

Sure the Squidoo user feedback element may help, but if you weigh the data set on early feedback you create a top heavy system that is afraid to trust new information (sorta like what some people call the Google Sandbox effect in SEO).

Content changes over time or it becomes irrellevant. If people are studying subjects that do not change often then isn't a book usually going to be the proper information format? On most web pages how the information evolves is going to be at least as important as what it looked like when it was initially created.

What happens if Squidoo becomes popular? Is it a system that will grow smarter with each additional link list? As high ranked pages link out to other resources how do you ensure those resources do not change in negative ways over time? While also ensuring they do change in positive ways?

I know there is the financial incentive angle, but that fails frequently on the web. Look for how to create a PDF. You usually are not going to find that Open Office has a free utility. Most people are afraid to try to create something original, unique, & useful. Most businesses are me too businesses just after money.

If people are creating content to help others then why not post at the Wikipedia?

If people are creating content to feed their egos then there is going to need to be a lot more background than a link list.

Sure you can say that Squidoo can make up for the faults of the web, but I don't see how it will weed out bad recommendations while still allowing new information to get found. I think at some level you have to learn whether or not you can trust a person and no system can fully automate that.

The whole concept sounds a bit idealistic with all the frothing spam in other information formats, but it would be cool if Seth can pull it off. I wish him the best of luck in trying, as it sure will be a hard job :)

So a friend re edited my ebook for me. I took about 6 hours to go through the edits and try to learn from them etc. I went to create a PDF from the new version fo the Word ebook and Word hangs up. I can close it and report the error to MicroSoft, but that ends their sloppy at best customer support offering. No followup. Complete trash.

There used to be a saying around Microsoft, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." I wonder if Adobe is today's version of Lotus. Hopefully Adobe has a fix for Acrobat in the works. - Perry Clausen

Maybe this error is my fault? So I tried to download the service pack 2 for Word, but it told me Firefox is the wrong browser. I then started up Internet Explorer and got told I was all hosed for having a firewall. Cool !

Finally got the download to work, but still couldn't create PDFs from that document. No love for me.

I can quickly make PDFs using Open Office, but for some reason it was stripping out the book index links from the Word document.

So then I try to download a trial of the newest Adobe 7.0. Of course, since I already purchased 6.0 and it is running on my computer the trial of 7.0 aborts. Uninstall 6 & try 7. It works! But only if I stripped the internal links out of the document.

After about 50 hours wasted I finally got the software to create my ebook. Gotta love the Office productivity suite & and that friendly document format!

Easy to say MiroSoft is crap here...but so is Adobe. Where is Adobe at with their support. All of their past customer complaints and answers are hidden. Support forums that are not getting indexed. You can't even view them unless you register.

Why when I search for Adobe Word plugins or Word Adobe plugins or Word Adobe Macros am I left in the cold? And just about any "Acrobat + problem" search leads you to a site other than Adobe. Is Adobe that far out of the loop? Most of their forum posts look like this:

When I convert the Word doc to a PDF, the first page footer shows in the PDF, but none of the others do. EXCEPT...When I click the Pages tab in the Navigation pane and view the thumbnails of each page, I can see the missing footers there. - C Pickrell

And most are left unanswered.

So people post their comments on other sites, like Amazon:

Our firm does over $300 Million worth of business a year. We thought that Acrobat Professional ability to create fillable forms that could be shared, updated, and filled out by clients was a blessing. We not have dozens of worthless forms. And then there's the embarrassment when a client with Acrobat 7 can't fill out a form. THINK OF THE COST!

Adobe's site doesn't even mention the issue (although, their site search and help system is so poor that it may be their somewhere - who knows.)

At first, I thought I was doing something wrong. But, when I called support I was told that forms were not compatible. The service person then told me that she thought there might be a fix. However, without a service plan we'd have to pay to talk to Technical Support. We paid good money for this software (we buy multiple licenses) and only had this version for two days.

Considering the magnitude of this issue. I'm guessing there are other major problems with this release of Acrobat..

Adobe should fire its entire staff of software developers and the arrogant managers who let this software hit the market without providing fully functional compatibility.

I don't get how companies can sell so much expensive software and have customer support that is that bad.

I didn't think that much of it when Google announced their toolbar budling with Sun, but I really hope they push Open Office hard enough to kill the proprietary formats. I will be happy when they are either killed off or forced to open up.

My productivity software, like a proprietary format, is pure garbage.