I have been interviewed and/or profiled and/or done some guest columns around the web that I have not yet mentioned here. Here is a short list of some such media worth checking out...
It seems everyone (but you) is getting a bailout right now, and we didn't think that was fair. So we decided to do something about it - on tax day. :)
On Wednesday, April 15 at 2pm Central, I'll be interviewing Perry Marshall on Google AdWords and Pay Per Click strategies.
Perry is author of the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and is the most referenced AdWords specialist on the Internet.
Perry will explain how to get AdWords clicks for 20% to 70% less money than your competition is paying for the same traffic, and how to get maximum leverage out of your advertising investment. He'll discuss why "SEO people" often avoid Pay Per Click and how to blend both worlds together for not just 2X results, but 3X.
Time: 2:00pm Central Time (3pm EST / 12pm Pacific / 19:00 GMT)
Date: Wednesday April 15, 2009
MP3's/transcripts will be available for purchase.
This call is perfect for beginner and intermediate AdWords advertisers. If you're spending more than $100 per month on Google clicks, this information is essential.
The economic downturn has driven more companies to advertise on Google; Google had a record quarter at the end of '08 and it's more important than ever before to employ the right tactics with AdWords!
Perry will show you how to structure a Pay Per Click campaign and discuss recent changes to Google's system that require a different approach.
Perry will also be interviewing me 2 hours earlier, at 12pm Central time. I'll be giving his audience my tips for Search Engine Optimization techniques and what's working in 2009.
What better way to "celebrate" Tax Day than to get more visitors to your website and more sales after they get there? Talk to you then!
How cool is this? Back in 1989 I started collecting sports cards and Tony Mandarich was the #2 draft pick in the NFL. He has since built an SEO company, and was recently interviewed by Patrick Gavin:
So my wife and I started from scratch, learning the web design and SEO business. That was five years ago. I had an above-average understanding of how the Internet worked, for someone who wasn’t doing it full time. Once I committed to learning it and applying it to our own business of photography and videography, within 6 months we were ranked on the first page of Google for the key phrases we were going after. The one crucial piece of literature that helped me immensely in SEO was Aaron Wall’s “SEO Book”. I applied his principles and – Voila – it worked!
A couple of our members recently reviewed our site. From SEO Rabbit:
SeoBook is not a fancy 8 hour long SEM workshop for which you have to pay several grand, only to leave with more questions then you originally had, or to very quickly figure out that the only fancy thing about persons conducting the workshop is their ability to market themselves. SEOBook community is a workshop that constantly asks questions and does its best to answer them, more often then not it does. Being a member for few months made me realize that members don’t hold back when it comes to sharing experiences, giving advices, and answering questions.
I recommend SEOBook for anyone who is serious about Internet marketing. The only way I can see that SeoBook membership is not worth it, is if you don’t use it or don’t participate.
Even if you are a very sophisticated marketer and/or have spent a lot of time with the training modules, the SEO Book forums are excellent. They’re populated with:
Aaron Himself – He responds to seemingly every post (he has over 11k posts on the board). I have asked three or four questions and started a handful of threads, and he’s answered/participated in every one. The answers are outstanding. If you think of this type of access in terms of what it would cost outside of this offer (to have a top SEO on retainer) a price point of 100 dollars a month is a pretty staggering value.
The Moderators – I don’t know what kind of arrangement is set up with the moderators but they are all experienced Web marketers and are extremely active and helpful answering questions, as well. This makes the 100 feel like it’s going towards a team of consultants (or “coaches”).
The “Customers” – The really fascinating thing here is that the people who are “members” are often affiliates and/or marketers themselves; the people asking very basic questions are hungry to learn (they actually paid to get in!) and then seem to come up the curb quickly to start contributing some great stuff. Affiliate marketers investing this kind of time to discuss and learn tactics are often the people doing the testing, and generally have bleeding edge insight into the way the Web works.
Since I signed up I’ve probably found three or four really great link sources that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about, and that would be worthless if they were published on a free blog. I’ve also had multiple questions given a lot of attention and lengthy responses.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Majestic SEO just released free graphs tracking link growth rates, which can be used to compare the overall link profile of competing sites, and how they are growing month to month
Such data can be used to compare sites against traffic growth of sites.
These data points can by synched up to help evaluate if a site is particularly strong or weak in any area, and how to address that weakness or build off that strength to further grow a site.
Have way more links than competing sites, but few pages? Create content.
Have way more content than competing sites, but few links? Work on link building.
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)
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.
I recently read a story in Forbes about how Rupert Murdock thinks Google is undermining copyright
"Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, " 'Thanks, but no thanks.' "
and came across a quote about how SEO is some dark art, which kinda annoyed me. In the past I have posted examples of how media is often corrupted, but I figured another round wouldn't hurt.
Google Inc. has blacklisted all CNET reporters for a year, after the popular technology news website published personal information of one of Google's founders in a story about growing privacy concerns for the Internet search engine, according to a CNET statement.
Google strategically undermines copyright, but not just in the way that guys like Rupert Murdock think. The way they *really* do it is through ranking whoever stole your content if you chose not to be indexed. Simply put, Google has partnered with virtually every online content thief (as needed) to force premium content providers to make their stuff available. Either you get credit for your work, or someone else does.
To quote Google's leaked internal review documents:
Lyrics, poems, ringtones (that the user programs rather than downloads), quotes, and proverbs have no central authority. When you see pages with this content, you cannot judge it to have been copied, and the pages should not be assigned a Spam label.
Unfortunately, some content is written specifically for Spam pages and you will not find it on another source. Although you may be convinced that the intent is to deceive, if the content makes sense and appears original, you will not be able to label such pages Spam.
If you brand something and build up perceived value and demand for it Google will offer customers "solutions."
Google further harms intellectual property holders by recommending search suggestions, and not cleansing the suggestions of illegal activities. 70% of the population doesn't care that much that 30% of the population is involved with music or software piracy, but when they conduct a Google search for "Stylewriter" and see that the some of the most popular searches for that software program are torrents then that adds social proof of value to the concept of stealing (and distributing) that copyright software. That forces publishers to offer a free trial download, or lose out on the opportunity to engage with many potential customers intercepted and misdirected by Google.
Offer Matching
Google's ad network is optimized to agnostically maximize earnings. Earnings are often optimized through the promotion of scams, fraud, and offers with hidden costs in them. Machines do an excellent job of maximizing earnings, in large part because machines have no morals.
A month ago the Google public relations team lied about cleaning up the scammy reverse billing fraud government grant ads that were polluting the web via AdWords and AdSense
"Our AdWords Content Policy does not permit ads for sites that make false claims, and we investigate and remove any ads that violate our policies," said Google in a statement e-mailed to ClickZ News. "We have discussed these issues with the Federal Trade Commission and reaffirmed our commitment to protecting users from scam ads."
In spite of allegedly being handled a month ago, those scam ads (Google's words, not mine) are still on Google today!
In spite of such scams in broad daylight, how often do you here of the dark arts of AdWords?
If you look at their video game patents they want to go so far as understanding personality flaws and character weaknesses such that they can target ads against them.
The dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users.
What might behavioral ads target at your flaws? How much could that cost you in your lifetime?
The Media Manipulates the Media for Profit
Shaping News to Generate Favorable Public Policy
In the following video Rupert Murdock mentions that he attempts to shape the news to promote some of his goal and promote things like the bogus war in Iraq.
In spite of such scams in broad daylight, how often do you here of the dark arts of mainstream media?
Ads as Content
About a year ago I remember seeing a local Fox News affiliate site in Google News, and when I clicked into the "news" article, the page was actually nothing but a lead generation form. :)
Have you looked at WebMD recently? Look at how the line between ads and content has vanished with custom "sponsored content" sections published on their site. If you didn't look closely you would think that this webmd.com/learning-manage-depression/ was editorial content. As many bad health practices as there are, it is quite scary to think of all the bad health practices still practiced, and how filtered public health information is.
From the Forbes.com article that forced me to write this entry:
Sites like WSJ.com rely on Google to send them readers, working hard to game how they appear on Google through the dark arts of search engine optimization
If the media is employing the tactics and seeing results then why are they still using that stupid dark arts lens to describe SEO? Even Forbes.com is selling text links to pass PageRank (example pictured below).
Via an email to affiliates, Amazon.com announced they are scaling back their associates program in North America by disallowing direct linking from paid search results:
After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.
As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.
As the paid search market has matured and competitive research tools have improved the value of using affiliates for discovering new keywords has been sharply reduced. Other merchants will follow Amazon's lead. Some might wait for the economy to pick up first, but the fact that Amazon is trimming this in a down market (recession/possible depression) shows how little they feel they benefit from affiliate arbitrage of paid search results.
