Corporate SEO

Recently a couple great videos from Gord Hotchkiss and Marshall Simmonds highlighted the corporate SEO field. Corporate SEO is about

• ensuring everyone creating or managing content has at least a base level knowledge of SEO and keyword strategy
• setting up general templates that are useful and optimized
• clearing away technological issues and limitations
• smart structuring of information architecture and internal linking strategies (alternate paths for bots, and blocking lots of duplicate content issues, and sometimes even creating automated internal linking strategies)
• charging a high enough rate that the clients will take you seriously
• presenting your recommendations in a professional looking document and following up with any questions they have about implementation

Corporate SEO is largely about trimming away the fats and fully leveraging the assets you already have.

Ranking Affiliate Sites

Rather than focusing on cleaning out fats, independent affiliate webmastering is more focused on building value and getting the most value out of everything you can. An affiliate has to focus on...

• finding under-served markets (and hiding them under a rock to everyone except prospects in the buying cycle, unless you aim to be the most authoritative webmaster in that space)
• finding loopholes to make a quick buck (see this Shoemoney post about leveraging Google.com's quality score)
• seeing future trends in the web early, and getting out in front of them (see Roger on video content here)
• making sure your site looks as credible as you possibly can (get a good site design, a good domain name, and publicise your publicity)
• setting up a site structure that is well aligned with your keyword pyramid
• creating a wide array of keyword pages focused on brand related queries (that are thus late in the buying cycle)
• creating comparison and contrast pages that answer common questions and authoritatively guide people to a high paying solution to their problem :)
• getting on page SEO as good as you possibly can for each important page
• changing your site structure based on analytics data and conversion data
• creating a second page or a second site for some of your top performers that have limited competition
• keeping your network hidden from Google engineers
• adding some high value content to your site such that Google engineers hopefully will not want to kill your site
• writing sales copy that often does not appear as sales copy, tweaking landing pages for conversion, while testing conversion rates over and over and over again
• scheming for links to build site authority...often creating content built around linking opportunities
• mercenary promotion (del.icio.us bookmark begging and link begging to friends, emails to related bloggers, getting to know everyone in your field, writing guest articles for authoritative websites, link buying, link renting, joining non-profits and trade groups, other promotional ideas, etc.)
• making your affiliate site something that some people care about and follow

Which is Better?

I think of the two options, that the affiliate model pays better for most people who really get the web, but you have to be good at a lot of disciplines to make it pay (and it can pay quite poorly unless you are creative or a fast learner). Ranking a few spots higher or improving landing pages can triple your income as an affiliate. Doing both can increase your income 10 fold.

When markets are healthy and growing that growth can hide major issues, but when the markets swing toward a loss the winners are separated from the losers. As the markets consolidate and the thin arbitrage opportunities fall away the market leaders own a much bigger piece of the market.

The above chart could just as easily be a finance chart comparing Google's 5 year performance to Yahoo's, or any other industry undergoing heavy consolidation. Google's brand is search. Yahoo's brand is ???

Many people view you how you view yourself and label you with the labels you attach to yourself. Something to consider when creating a new business in a saturated field.

If you are not considered the #1 site in your class / vertical then you need to change your brand, find ways to add value (like editorial content, unique data formats, syndication, or open APIs), build an organic advantage (using a strong domain name, a great site design, and through public relations) or do something else to change the rules.

VideoEgg announced $1.5 million in ad revenues over 5 months, which is not much when you consider that they have over 150 top widgets. You can use targeted widgets and gadgets to push things that are already valuable, successful, unique, or interesting outside of the social networks, but traditional advertising is no good.

Rarely will you see the relevancy line up this well unless the gadget was created custom to match the item being advertised. But gadgets need to be extensions of brands, I don't think they can become destinations themselves. And if they do, the network can always change their policies or clone them.

It is harsh doing business on someone else's network. eBay, which has raised rates in the past, but never did much cleanup in over a decade, just announced their first quality score.

And if your offering is just basic data or something that is easy to replicate that is a zero sum game with those profits heading to Google, other market makers, or scammers arbitraging holes in the marketplace:

Data has this really weird quality. In economic terms data has an increasing marginal utility. Anyone who took Econ 101 knows that most physical objects have a decreasing marginal utility. When it is raining my first umbrella keeps me dry, a second may be handy if the first blows out, but a third is unlikely to be used. This is true of shirts, steaks, houses, of almost anything you can think of except data.

Data has the opposite characteristic. Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. It is easy to see this in the context of an advertising network. If the ad network knows that a user is female it can show more relevant ads. But, If the ad network knows that female’s age, it can do even better, and data about location, household income, and recent web sites visited all add value to the existing data points, making it possible to show more and more relevant ads.

Look at how Google expanded their local listings. How long until they own that category? By the time other aggregators want to opt out all of the data (and value) will have already been transferred to Google.

With all the value going to the aggregators who should sue who? Will that grow a broken business model?

The solution to market dilution is information pollution. Oops, wrong quote. What I meant to say was what Brian said here:

The replication process is quite intense and getting faster, which is why we need to focus on building trademark businesses (based on brand) instead of businesses dependent on copyright law.

The old tagline a new chapter every day... was around for about 4 years and I figured a change was in order. The best I could come up with was Learn. Rank. Dominate.

Do you like or dislike the new tagline?

BTW, have been doing a bit of spring cleaning fixing what I can. The archives page was not updating, but I got that fixed. Still lots of small things I need to fix in the coming months.

And Matt Cutts confirmed that the #6 ranking was real for anyone who thought it was just speculation.

I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?

If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.

If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.

Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever...chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.

Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea. :)

On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.