After talking with Andy Hagans and a few other friends I have got to thinking a lot more about tactical vs strategic SEO and marketing.

Many SEO tactics work well at achieving a certain goal, but to be wildly profitable you usually needs more than tactics, you need love from the strategic front. Many people who are great tactical SEOs do not build much equity because tactics without strategy have little value. Here are some examples:

Tactical:
Buy AdWords and AdSense ads to drive revenue.

Strategic:
If you are new to a fairly saturated market use AdWords and AdSense to roughly break even, hoping to increase your site exposure, link equity, and mindshare in the process...knowing that the real profits from an ad campaign can show up indirectly over time via organic search and product recommendation on other sites.

Tactical:
Get links.

Strategic:
Avoid actively seeking low quality links until your site has a significant history which includes many trusted backlinks.

Tactical:
Get quality links.

Strategic:
Create content, tools, or other packaged value systems which allow you to gain high quality viral links for a low aggregate cost. Create things that will make competitors want to talk about you.

Tactical:
Do anything to get links. Link bait link bait link bait.

Strategic:
Consider the potential outcome of your link bait if you are trying to cut others down to prop yourself up. As you build a trusted brand become more risk adverse.

Tactical:
Blog spam for links.

Strategic:
Talk about and become friends with the people you want links from.

Tactical:
Put everything on one exceptionally authoritative domain.

Strategic:
Own multiple brands that allow you to tap different market segments, or publish things that might not fuse too well with your main brand without hurting your brand. Design the brands so that they can extend in different directions.

Tactical:
Keep all your profits by doing almost everything yourself. Stick to what you know.

Strategic:
Admit your weaknesses and take on partners where neccessary. Find partners who add value where you are lacking.

Tactical:
Create high quality content.

Strategic:
Control content costs and make boatloads of average content. Build the authority of the site using exceptionally high quality content. Leverage that authority to profit from your boatloads of average content on that site. Segregate your high quality and high attention content from your lower value content, but after attention has passed ensure that the high quality content links trough to your lower quality content.

Tactical:
Use descriptive page titles to improve CTR and anchor text.

Strategic:
Title your pages such that the story spreads far. After the story has initially spread, consider changing the page title to something more descriptive.

Tactical:
Create a niche site in a low competition vertical.

Strategic:
If the vertical should be easy to dominate, make your core brand name broad enough that if you later want to expand you can.

Tactical:
Make as much money as you can right now.

Strategic:
Invest and reinvest. Make less upfront. Create passive income streams from properties that were designed around minimal customer service and growing into dominant self-reinforcing market positions.

Tactical:
Montize right away.

Strategic:
Limit initial monetization. Make the site look like a hobby or fan site made out of love for the topic so it is easy to link at. Program it such that it is easy to turn on monetization when the day to monetize comes.

Tactical:
Use consistant ad formats and layouts throughout your site.

Strategic:
On the home page and other high attention portions of your site use less ads to make your site more linkworthy.

Tactical:
Design for maximum ad clickthrough rate.

Strategic:
Consider linkability as a cost. Place ads in a slightly less aggressive position to make your content easier to link at.

Tactical:
Stay on topic to reinforce brand image.

Strategic:
Write some content for links, while writing other content for conversion. Occassionally drift off topic if there is a way to make a high link equity / high value / high authority idea relate to your site. If you are creative enough, everything in the universe belongs in a relational database that is tied to your content ;)

I am sure you probably have lots of other good examples about why strategy is important. What are your favorite SEO strategies?

Not sure how much it is for, but Google is giving out more free AdWords coupons at services.google.com/ads_inquiry/ecomxpo2006. Update: Barry says the AdWords coupons are $50 each, but unfortunately they are expired now. All is not lost though!

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This is old news, but a while ago on TW I posted that UPI, a 100 year old company, was overtly selling PageRank, even mentioning PageRank on their advertisement pages. Search works so well because they measure relevancy using things that are hard to manipulate or things that people wouldn't generally think to manipulate. Thus, if a 100 year old slow moving company is doing something you know that the method of relevancy they aim to manipulate is generally likely already dead.

Google will likely filter out overt link buys like this

especially when they are marketed this aggressively on Google's own ad network

If a link buy is so overt that people would talk about it, then an engineer or algorithm has probably caught it already. But that sort of example can be seen as a proxy for the market as a whole, and Google have also significantly lowered the weighting on raw PageRank scores over the past few years, because too many people know about it and manipulate it. Just looking at PageRank is nearly as useless as a meta keywords tag.

Google recently launched their Google Customized Search Engine, which allows webmasters to easily integrate Google search results into their site while also giving webmasters editorial control to bias the results.

Webmasters can bias the results harnising the power of Topic Sensitive PageRank, tag relevant results, allow editors or users to tag relevant results, and select a seed set of sites to search against or bias the results toward (and sites to remove from the results).

Surely some shifty outfits will use this as a way to show their ranking success, but this also makes me wonder what the net effect on Google's brand will be if people see powered by Google on sites which provide terrible relevancy, or results that are obviously biased toward racism or other horrific parts of humanity. Will searchers learn to trust search less when they start seeing different Google results all over the web? Or will anyone even notice?

Will most people be willing to subscribe to relevancy which reinforces their current worldview?

This release essentially will make Google the default site search on millions of websites, which is great for Google given the volume of site level search. I still think Google's stock is priced ahead of itself trading on momentum and short covering, but this release gives Google a bunch more inventory and further establishes them as the default search platform.

By allowing webmasters to easily integrate results biased toward internal content, backfilling the results with other content when the site does not meet all of a searchers needs, and then allowing the delivery of profitable relevant ads near the content, Google is paying webmasters in numerous highly automated ways that build great value by being layered on top of one another.

I also have to think this is going to further place a dent in the business model of running directories, or other sites with thin content that do not add much editorial value to the subject they talk about. This blend of editorial and algorithms is invariably going to kill off many editorial only listing companies.

As an SEO, I think this customized tool can also be used to help further test the depth and authority of a site relative to others in its group by allowing you to bias the results to multiple similar seed sites and see which pages on those sites that Google promotes most. This could even be used as a tool to help you determine which domain is more valuable in terms of ranking potential if you are comparing a couple domains that you are thinking of buying.

Brett Tabke recently created a supporter's only thread about the potential downfall of blog ad networks, claiming that they may end up undermining our ability to trust what we read. Bill Hartzer (who I am generally a big fan of) added

There are still unbiased sources out there, you just have to look for them.

I responded to the thread with (roughly) the following (edited on my blog for better formatting and grammar, and I added more depth to my opinions here):

There is no such thing as an unbiased source. Unbiased = unreal.

I think as user / consumer is transferred into a market participant beyond just what they consume that we will

• see our own influence (and influences) better

• take better care of our attention
• be more likely to find things we are passionate in
• get better at judging the intent of others
• generally trust most things we see less.

While on the surface it is easy to paint that lack of trust as a negative thing, I think a lack of trust toward authority (ie: questioning what you see, why you were shown it, and who placed it there) is an important component in any functional society.

The only reason that learning to not trust what you see is a negative is because there is so much fraud in the world perpetrated by power source who only retain power through the ignorance of the average citizen. Why are most articles in the mainstream media about SEO usually focused on black hat techniques? Anything that challenges any established authority system is deemed to be wrong by default, especially when evaluated by existing sources of power.

Would I have joined the military if I knew more about the military industrial complex? Not a snowball's chance in hell. Should I be quiet about them doing illegal things like destroying some of my work records prior to processing me out of the military? Not a snowball's chance in hell.

I believe consumer generated media will transfer power away from macro-parasites toward creative and passionate individuals who are driven to change the world.

I also think that anyone who communicates, even if only for themselves, is selling something...even if that potential gain is just trying to understand our own faults and why we think the way we do.

On another front, which is more ethical and legitimate? Blindly trusting an ad system that promotes products you know nothing about and is pushed to no end by the goal of achieving an efficient market. Or, writing about things you know about, and occasionally getting paid for the value of your time, feedback, and influence?

How relevant is a Google AdLink with my name and brand name in it that links to a list of ads that does not even include me? How is that any more legitimate than getting paid to review things you find interesting?

Some of my other blogs have no commercial intent to them, but they still rank for a lot of things, and I still learn a bunch from other's feedback, and I also think I learn a lot about myself by reading how I was thinking when I was doing different things.

The biggest thing that is killing off traditional publishing is the lack of personality, lack of passion, and a lack of bias (or watered down pro corporate bias) which is contained in nearly every piece of content they create.

I would rather read a passionate author than one that abides by some arbitrarily crafted ethical standards. Would a newspaper ever publish a self analysis like this? No. And if I read a person long enough I can understand their biases much greater than I can by reading random published articles. And if earning the trust of readers is harder then it will be valued more.

The big reason that people are against open networks, paid placement, free markets, paying individuals what they are worth, or anything that redistributes power is that many of the most powerful sources in the world stand to lose power if we question authority. And so they must play down the roll of or try to undermine the credibility of competing business models (or anything that threatens the ideology they sell or their business model). Nothing new there, it has been going on forever (even if the sources of power do not hold themselves to the same standards they want to hold amateurs to).