Brian Clark recently linked to a 51 page Michel Fortin PDF which was against writing long copy salesletters. It is a great read for any web marketer. A few highlights:

• Human nature extends through all mediums.

• The early web mimicked offline direct marketing. This is why long sales letters worked so well.
• Due to increasing competition for attention (more websites, more web users, more email, more IMs,
  more spam, audio and video content, games and widgets, statistics programs, and software making the
  reach of one person greater) we have to package attention grabbing content in smaller easier to
  consume pieces if we want it to be consumed.

• We look for proxies of trust and proxies of value. More people are looking for signs of trust
  away from sales letters, shifting sales from a sales letter to a sales process.

• "Web 2.0 is about giving the user more control and selling them in the way they want to be sold."
• "The more technology-driven we become (i.e., the more automated, static, robotic, and
  impersonal we become, as is the case with the web), the more we will crave and seek out human interaction."

• Some people learn better with video and for many people video is far more stimulating that reading.
• People are becoming more insatiable and want quicker answers and more free samples.
• Many people are seeking more content upfront instead of getting it after they get on your newsletter.
• Even after the purchase videos can be used to help orders stick.

How Salesletters Relate to Search:

You can take Michel's thesis on salesletters and extend it out to everything else on the web. Search is largely a proxy of how well people trust a website, a merchant, or person.

If a person searches for your brand name do they find any feedback about your company? Or is it just a bunch of ads for competitors and a few customer complaints? Or, worse yet, is nobody talking about your brand?

If a person searches for THEIR needs how THEY want to do you have any relevant trustworthy content to lead them into your sales process?

Cutting Edge Search Engine Marketers on Video:

Martinibuster recently posted a fabulous entry titled Creating Authority and Link
Development. Like Michel Fortin's report, it is worth reading from end to end, but here is a sample:

Every selling point relative to the product is appropriate subject matter for demonstration.
It can be presented as one long presentation or it can be broken down into chunks. Yes, it’s an infomercial,
but it’s a way to demonstrate your product in a manner that site visitors are coming to expect and
appreciate. Giving them a way to preview the product is an excellent way of providing value with quality
content. It’s something to link to.

Roger also recently mentioned the move from text to video.

Matt Cutts, WebProNews, and a few search marketers like Lee Odden and Rand Fishken have been using video much more than in the past. Over the past few years Google has been the leading innovation platform at scale. And they recently bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. All of these should be seen as a signal of where things are headed.

Video was shunned in the past largely due to bandwidth costs, and because it had little to no text associated
with it (and was hard to find). But that is changing because:

• bandwidth costs are dropping - essentially free

• transcription costs are dropping
• within a few years audio search will significantly improve (think of how approximate general search is, yet people use it because it is good enough, audio search does not have to be perfect)
• aggregators, taggers, and bloggers are making it easier to find interesting and unique valuable video content, and are making it easier to find in general search indexes by writing about it
• if people are talking about me and linking to my site it raises my authority and the authority of every document on my site...so even if one of my videos does not have a lot of text near it but still gets linked to it still adds value to my site

Killing Off Small Players

Currently there is a large blurring between ads and content. It is what Google teaches publishers to do, and targeted ads as content is one of the reasons smart affiliates have been able to make a killing over the past decade.

But due to improving duplicate content filters and an increasing amount of people producing editorial content and editorial links it is getting hard to rank a site which is targeted ads as content unless you attach some sort of editorial or other value add to your site. Plus easy to organize link lists are losing value to improving search technology, social bookmarking and news sites, vertical search engines like Google Custom Search Engine, and the editorial value added by bloggers and media discussing their topic and reviewing related websites.

Large players are wising up to search, with companies like eBay and AOL buying up vertical authorities like TradeDoubler and StubHub. Yahoo! has been pushing splog-like brand universes to leverage traffic streams associated with well known brands.

And it is getting harder to buy the search ads too. Minimum ad relevancy and quality score improvements make some terms out of reach for newer and less sophisticated players. And even traditional content sites like large newspapers are buying keywords to boost their exposure.

If you are logged into a Google Account Google just stopped giving you the ability to see
which results are personalized as they ramped up personalized search. AdWords manipulate the organic search results. And as noted in a comment by Hawaii SEO, the large brands will not only have more authority to rank for the more generic terms, but they also will be able to afford keyword ads early in the buying cycle, even if those keywords offer a negative ROI. If that early broad exposure leads to those sites being biased for long tail keywords as the buyer does deeper research that will also bias traffic streams to larger sites.

Major corporations, which typically are slow at reacting to new markets and opportunities, are already using keyword based search data to determine what products to make and how to name their products.

A while ago I wrote a post about how Google could commoditize nearly everything. I wasn't writing that to be a pessimistic wanker. My point was that as they get better at distinguishing the differences between real brands and non brands it is going to be much harder to keep making money from Google trust if you aren't also heavily trusted AWAY from Google.

Video & Interactivity Helps Keep Small Players Competitive:

Those who are getting into video now have a head start on people who still think of the web exclusively in terms of text. Think of the current video players as the equivalent of early domainers or people who were creating legitimate domains in your field a decade ago.

Video Summary:

This video is 15 minutes 17 seconds long. Directories are easy sources of links, but links from lower quality web directories may not get indexed by some major search engines, may not carry much weight in Google, and may put your site in a bad community. This video covers evaluating the quality of a directory as a link source.

Resources Mentioned in This Video:

• Web Directories... Are They Relevant to SEO? - overview article similar to the video.

• TrustRank and the Company You Keep - article about how most lower quality directories are not well integrated into the good trusted parts of the web.
• Yahoo! Directory Registration & Search Engine Marketing - Tips on what categories are best and how to fudge your Yahoo! listing.
• Google Custom Search Engine - easy to use vertical search service
• Del.icio.us - social bookmarking site

Examples of Quality Directories:

• Curlie - formerly DMOZ, which was also referred to as the Open Directory Project or ODP. Free submission, but it may take a long time to get listed as it is ran by volunteers. The original DMOZ shut down on March 17, 2017.

• Yahoo! Directory - $299 per year for commercial listings. Free for non-commercial listings. EDIT: dir.yahoo.com was shut down on December 27, 2014
• Business.com - allows listings in multiple categories and you can point a few deep links at important pages on your site. EDIT: no longer an actual directory
• BOTW
• JoeAnt
• Gimpsy

Find More Directories:

• Drill down on in the ODP for categories of directories. ex: ODP Software Directories

• Search for your keywords, related keywords, or your keywords + directory. Sites that rank might be decent link sources (depending on other quality signals).
• Look at inbound links pointing to competing websites.
• Use lists of directories. Please note that many directory lists are nepotistic (recommending their own directory as being the next best thing) or heavily influenced by advertising, and small niche high quality directories that are not on lists of 1000 cheesy directories are probably better than lists of directories commonly used to spam search engines. Each list will have some good directories and many junk ones. PageRank is nowhere near as important as other quality signals. Here are a few lists: Strongest Links, SEO Company, ISEDB, and Search Engine Guide.

Things I Should Have Mentioned That I Forgot:

• The Google Directory is a clone of DMOZ, organized by PageRank. EDIT: directory.google.com was shut down in July of 2011.

• If a directory does not charge a submission fee take extra effort to make sure your description and title are clean and proper (ie: factual and not keyword stuffed). Emulate other listings.
• It is important to mix your anchor text and descriptions to make your link profile look natural. Emulate other listings in your category, and try to use your keywords in some of your link anchors if the directory will allow it.
• Directories count more in verticals where the competition is weak and not well integrated into the web. If your competition is frequently mentioned in the active portions of the web on news sites, blogs, and social sites then you will need to be mentioned on there as well if you want to compete.
• An established site well integrated into the web which already has a clean link profile can be more risky with what sites they get links from, whereas a new site or a site with limited authority would likely do better building links from the higher quality sources first, then maybe getting lower quality links later, only after their site has proven trustworthy.

WebmasterWorld has been running a series of threads about various penalties and filters aligned with specific URLs, keyword phrases, and in some cases maybe even entire directories.

Some Threads:

There is a lot of noise in those threads, but you can put some pieces together from them. One of the best comments is from Joe Sinkwitz:

1. Phrase-based penalties & URL-based penalties; I'm seeing both.
2. On phrase-based penalties, I can look at the allinanchor: for the that KW phrase, find several *.blogspot.com sites, run a copyscape on the site with the phrase-based penalty, and will see these same *.blogspot.com sites listed...scraping my and some of my competitors' content.
3. On URL-based penalties allinanchor: is useless because it seems to practically dump the entire site down to the dregs of the SERPs. Copyscape will still show a large amount of *.blogspot.com scraping though.

Joe has a similar post on his blog, and I covered a similar situation on September 1st of last year in Rotating Page Titles for Anchor Text Variation.

You see a lot more of the auto-gen spam in competitive verticals, and having a few sites that compete for those types of queries helps you see the new penalties, filters, and re-ranked results as they are rolled in.

Google Patents:

Google filed a patent application for Agent Rank, which is aimed at allowing them to associate portions of page content, site content, and cross-site content with individuals of varying degrees of trust. I doubt they have used this much yet, but the fact that they are even considering such a thing should indicate that many other types of penalties, filters, and re-ranking algorithms are already at play.

Some Google patents related to phrases, as pointed out by thegypsy here:

• Phrase-based searching in an information retrieval system

• Multiple index based information retrieval system
• Phrase-based generation of document descriptions
• Phrase identification in an information retrieval system
• Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system

Bill Slawski has a great overview post touching on these patent applications.

Phrase Based Penalties:

Many types of automated and other low quality content creation cause the low quality pages to barely be semantically related to the local language, while other types of spam generation cause low quality pages to be too heavily aligned to the local language. Real content tends to fall within a range of semantic coverage.

Cheap or automated content typically tends to look unnatural, especially when you move beyond comparing words to looking at related phrases.

If a document is too far off in either direction (not enough OR too many related phrases) it could be deemed as not relevant enough to rank, or a potential spam page. Once a document is flagged for one term it could also be flagged for other related terms. If enough pages from a site are flagged a section of the site or a whole site can be flagged for manual review.

URL and Directory Based Penalties:

Would it make sense to prevent a spam page on a good domain for ranking for anything? Would it make sense for some penalties to be directory wide? Absolutely. Many types of cross site scripting errors and authority domain abuses (think rented advertisement folder or other ways to gain access to a trusted site) occur at a directory or subdomain level, and have a common URL footprint. And cheaply produced content also tends to have section wide footprints where only a few words are changed in the page titles across an entire section of a site.

I recently saw an exploit on the W3C. Many other types of automated templated spam leave directory wide footprints, and as Google places more weight on authoritative domains they need to get better at filtering out abuse of that authority. Google would love to be able to penalize things in a specific subdomain or folder without having to nuke that entire domain, so in some cases they probably do, and these filters or penalties probably effect both new domains and more established authoritative domains.

How do You Know When You are Hit?

If you had a page which typically ranked well for a competitive keyword phrase, and you saw that page drop like a rock you might have a problem. Other indications of problems are if you have inferior pages that are ranking where your more authoritative page ranked in the past. For example, lets say you have a single mother home loan page ranking for a query where your home loan page ranked, but no longer does.

Textual Community:

Just like link profiles create communities, so does the type and variety of text on a page.

Search results tend to sample from a variety of interests. With any search query there are assumed common ideas that may be answered by a Google OneBox, related phrase suggestions, or answered based on the mixture of the types of sites shown in the organic search results. For example:

• how do I _____

• where do I buy a ____
• what is like a _____
• what is the history of ______
• consumer warnings about ____
• ______ reviews
• ______ news
• can I build a ___
• etc etc etc

TheWhippinpost had a brilliant comment in a WMW thread:

• The proximity, ie... the "distance", between each of those technical words, are most likely to be far closer together on the merchants page too (think product specification lists etc...).

• Tutorial pages will have a higher incidence of "how" and "why" types of words and phrases.
• Reviews will have more qualitative and experiential types of words ('... I found this to be robust and durable and was pleasantly surprised...').
• Sales pages similarly have their own (obvious) characteristics.
• Mass-generated spammy pages that rely on scraping and mashing-up content to avoid dupe filters whilst seeding in the all-important link-text (with "buy" words) etc... should, in theory, stand-out amongst the above, since the spam will likely draw from a mixture of all the above, in the wrong proportions.

Don't forget that Google Base recently changed to require certain fields so they can help further standardize that commercial language the same way they standardized search ads to have 95 characters. Google is also scanning millions of books to learn more about how we use language in different fields.

Almost any marketing method can deliver good or bad messages, be tied to good or bad causes, or be of value or negative value. I think whether marketing is targeted and effective is much more important than the delivery method. SEO gets a bum rap for a variety of reasons, but one thing about good SEO is that it is targeted. Most marketing is not.

SEOs Are Scum:

A person who sold text links for scuba blackjack is considered credible when calling most SEOs scum? By who? And why?

Banks:

I pay my credit card bill and get ads for stamps, soccer, and health insurance. And the envelope contains coupons which, if redeemed, enroll me in worthless programs that cost 10x the value of the coupon. Banks the size of Chase have to do stuff like that to be profitable?

Ad Networks:

Now ad networks are writing things on people's foreheads to get buzz and attention. If the only way you can get people to talk about you is to create controversy or do stupid things that associate you with BumFights is there any satisfaction in that model? And then on the back of that you have your PR firm emailing an owner of a competing network, alerting them to the latest inside scoops and strategy? And then send that same person email spam pitching the SEO value of your wares without my name in it and the email titled "strategic partnership". Where is the relevancy?

Directories:

In spite of already writing the most popular Work.com guide I get emails inviting me to see what Work.com is all about. Why?

Search Engines:

Google is now pushing selling off topic branded advertising and continue to sell ads on sites they banned for spamming. Google sells AdWords ads for software that they specifically say not to use in their webmaster guidelines. Why?

Yahoo! is so desperate that they are reduced to marketing via phone spam. They call that innovation?

The Truth:

But everyone is fighting to say they have the best ad targeting, while the goal of many quality updates is to drive up ad costs, even if that precludes quality or relevant ads. But in some cases targeting is what will make the ad network more efficient. Let me run through an example...

Imagine that you use Google Checkout and one of your customers bought your product and uses Gmail. Now imagine I am a competitor who bids on your brand. Do you think Google may show my ad in your customer's email? Why wouldn't they?

But most people can't serve ads with the precision Google can. And at some point, even if you are targeted, you still have to do some amount of push marketing to get seen. Look how much push marketing and public relations work Google still does even after they are worth over $100 billion. You don't get to be a market maker without first being a market manipulator.

Be a Relevant & Profitable Marketer:

I think whether marketing is targeted and effective is much more important than the delivery method. If you are lacking on scale or budget you can always make up for it using creativity and targeting. Here are a few targeting methods I find exceptionally effective:

• Frequently sharing my thoughts.

• Asking for feedback.
• Answering emails.
• Participating in forums.
• Bidding on new buzzwords before others.
• Linking to a site I want to be seen on. (Bonus points if I write a bunch specifically about them).
• Legitimate blog comments.
• Interviews.
• Reviewing other well known products in the vertical.
• Going to conferences.
• Syndicating articles to well read sites.
• Buying site targeted AdSense ads.
• I have tried buying ReviewMe ads on sites that decided they did not want to accept money to review my stuff, but decided to review it anyway. When they reviewed it I left a comment on their blog. Another well known blogger then linked to me based on that comment.
• Personalized emails.

Marketing doesn't have to be expensive if it is targeted, especially if what you are marketing is of real value and you are good at conveying the value.

Yahoo! Pipes is a visual RSS slicing, dicing, and meshing tool. Basically you can take any feeds you like, add them together, and apply a bit of filtering. It is fairly intuitive and a lot a of fun for a wannabe programmer like me. And then when you create something, someone else can clone your pipes and add more stuff to it.

Here are some cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes:

• track the latest news in your industry (filtering by sources, keywords, or both)

• track domain and marketplace offers like Shoemoney does here
• track inbound links or mentions by syncing up blog search tools
• see how fast ideas are spreading by tracking all the major social sites and blog search engines at the same time
• watch eBay price trends (and just about any other trend which you can subscribe to)
• see which Yahoo! Pipes are spreading, think of how you can improve those ideas or apply them to other markets
• if you are dirty or aggressive about monetization ;) create a Pipe that is a core to many other pipes that pulls data from major websites like eBay while using your affiliate links in your Pipes

Tim O'Reilly has a great post about how the concept of Pipes could be highly valuable.