Proven Instant Automatic Wealth Attraction Secrets - Autopilot Cash

Everywhere you look on the internet, there are people who try to convince you that marketing success can be reduced to a formula.

Get rich quick ebooks are a classic example. Hand over $97, follow the guaranteed steps, and you'll get the exact results the author claims. Yes, you, too, will be able to hold up a huge, comedy check, featuring lots of zeros!

SEO forums are filled with questions that presume prescriptive answers: "what keyword density should I use?", "How many links do I need to rank #1?" "How many words should I have on a page?" "How many outbound links are too many? "

Unfortunately, a successful internet business can't be reduced to a simple, paint-by-numbers prescription. If it could, those e-books would be selling for a lot more money, and nobody would be giving away tips in forums.

Paint-by-numbers marketing produces a facsimile of where someone has already been, but the market has long since moved on.

Take A Holistic Approach

The way to approach internet marketing is to do so in a holistic manner.

Once you understand the underlying philosophy of various tactics and strategies, you'll be more likely to apply them successfully, and adapt them to devise new strategies.

There are underlying patterns common to the most successful sites. Once you identify and and internalize these patterns, you can easily out-maneuver any competitors who may be locked into a more inflexible, prescriptive approach.

Bad Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

That quote is often attributed to Pablo Picasso. What I suspect he was getting at is that bad artists copy surface techniques. Great artists, on the other hand, get inside an idea. They internalize it. Then they innovate to produce something genuinely new.

For example, many people will advise you to start a blog.

Whilst that might have been an attention-getting idea in 2001, starting a blog today isn't worth remarking upon. Blogs generated a lot of attention early on because they provided an easy way for people to become citizen journalists, and the writing style was somewhat new, at least in when compared to conventional journalism.

Blogging used the personal voice of the opinions pages, as opposed to impersonal voice to the reporting pages. Blogs also provided immediacy in the days before Google News. Twitter has now leap-frogged blogs and news outlets to provide that very function.

These days, the biggest sites on the internet use nothing but the personal voice i.e Twitter, Facebook etc - and the barriers to producing content are very low. Anyone can publish web content. So the blogging Cluetrain has long since left the station.

Instead of copying the format - the surface - try to provide the type of information people want. That's where the idea for blogs came from. That's where newspapers came from. They solved an information problem for people.

One trend right now is social networking, but this results in a shallow surface of unreliable information. There is a growing flight to quality information, which people will pay to read. Some of the best information on the web is now being locked up behind pay walls.

Ask yourself the fundamental questions. What need is your site serving? Is that need changing? Where will your sites audience be in six months or a years time?

That's where you should aim now.

The future is where Google focuses their efforts:

We started with the early-adopter crowd. That was on purpose. We wanted to build a product for people who were getting hundreds of e-mails a day, because we believe by focusing on the power user, you're designing the product the rest of the market will want in a couple years when everyone's usage habits catch up to the most active users.

Barrier To Entry

When some guru tells you "a secret" - i.e. to get into mobile ring tones - he's safe in the knowledge the area is already saturated and he has moved on.

Once you see that sort of information published in the public domain, it's too late. The horse has bolted. But he will still tell you the market is ripe and that you should sign up under his affiliate link. Even if you lose money he still profits from your efforts. You are the key ingredient of their wealth generation formula, you just don't know it yet. ;)

One good way to evaluate the worth of such prescriptions is to evaluate the barrier to entry. A barrier to entry is some condition that makes it difficult for late entrants to enter a market. An example of a barrier to entry would be, say, the start-up cost of an airline. The capital investment required is significant, which disqualifies most of us ever starting one.

On the internet, if anyone can copy a technique cheaply and easily, then it almost certainly won't work. Once a technique is out there, too many people will copy it, which dilutes the market to the point where it fast becomes uneconomic. Do you think starting a blog today and running Adsense on it will make you money? It might, but it will also require a lot of work, luck and a significant point of difference. Without those fundamentals, it will remain unread, and is highly unlikely to make money.

So look for areas that have a barrier to entry. Do you have an established brand you can leverage? Can you partner with someone who does? Can you spot a niche where none of the players are spending much? What happens if you throw some money at it? Do you have a means of grabbing attention that other people don't have?

What is your point of difference? And can you make it defensible?

Steal A Business Plan, Apply It To A Different Niche

In the financial world, investment firms often use forensic accountants to deconstruct the tactics and strategies of their competitors.

One famous example is Harry Markopolus, who worked out that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. Markopolus bosses wanted to learn how they could match Madoff's double-digit returns. He was assigned to deconstruct Madoff's strategy to see if he could replicate it.

If you've found a new niche, try applying a model that has already proved to be successful in another niche. Deconstruct the features, tactics and philosophies of the successful site, and either go head to head, or even better, apply those same strategies to a new niche.

For example, one characteristic common to many successful sites is that they were first movers. They were in the niche early enough to command attention simply by existing. Can you slice the niche you're in even finer in order to be seen as a first mover?

You could also try the same idea in different geographic locations. TradeMe is a New Zealand version of Ebay. New Zealand is a tiny market, but TradeMe recently sold for $700 million, mainly because it was a big fish in a small pond. The business idea was the same proven idea as Ebay, simply applied to a different regional niche.

Show Leadership & Connect People

As Seth Godin notes, what works today is leading:

Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they'd like to go. Connecting them to one another....a tiny sliver of the market is enough. Bill Niman used to run Niman Ranch, a cooperative raising meat for fancy restaurants and markets. That was already a sliver of the huge huge market for meat. He moved on to start BN, a 1000 acre farm raising goats for a subset of that subset. It's enough. It's enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you.....go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.....People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.

If you look around the search niche, you'll find the biggest sites have very clear leadership. These sites also serve as connectors for the community. The least significant search blogs follow others and repeat information. But the audience doesn't want that. Someone who follows the followers isn't valuable to them.

You don't need to pull in a big community, you simply need to lead whatever niche you happen to be in. Look for ways you can carve out you own leadership niche, then connect people within that niche.

People want to be led. They want someone to follow.

What can you teach others? What can you help them to do? How can you connect them to each other?

If You Don't Rank, Did You Fail?

There's a great Nike commercial starring Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed

How many SEO goals are aimed at winning the battle, and not the war?

Rankings vs Profits

One of the big mistakes those new to SEO make is to focus too much attention on rankings. It's easy to see why, as rankings provide such an obvious scorecard. You either rank or you don't.

The trouble is, rankings are seldom an appropriate measure of success, just as Michael Jordan shooting or missing an easy shot doesn't make him a success or a failure.

For example, I recently saw a comment on a leading SEO site whereby the commenter chastised the site owner for not appearing top ten for the phrase "search engine optimization". As far as the commenter was concerned, this meant the SEO was a failure at SEO, because he didn't rank for that industry-defining phrase.

What the commenter failed to grasp, of course, was the big picture.

What is Your Primary Objective?

I would estimate the site in question receives 100s of thousands of visitors, and that their business model delivers significant revenue. The fact they don't rank for the phrase "search engine optimization" is pretty much irrelevant in terms of their primary objective, which is to make money.

Secondly, the term "search engine optimization" isn't the prize some might imagine. The people who use the term "search engine optimization" may well be optimizers, not potential customers. That's fine if your target market is other SEOs, but not if you're selling services to customers.

Thirdly, you would need to put a lot of effort into ranking for such a term, and you'd have to question whether it would ever pay off. Contrast this with the effort required to rank well for a wide range of related keyword terms that, when aggregated, produce more highly targeted traffic than "Search engine optimization" ever would. This site may well have lost the ranking battle for that keyword term, but they're probably winning the war.

Business is About Making Money

The guy who focuses too much on ranking as an end goal will ultimately fail, because ranking is not a business goal. This is not to say rankings aren't important - a number one ranking for a lucrative term is worth a lot of money - but if the ranking isn't tied into your business goals, then how do you really know if you're succeeding or not?

Michael Jordan's is probably the greatest basketball player of all time. The greatest SEO of all time probably doesn't care that much about rankings day to day, s/he probably cares about the overall goal, which is almost always to make money.

What an Online Business Needs to Succeed

There's an interview here with Shoemoney where he talks about the three things an internet business needs to work:

  • Has To Make Money
  • Has To Grow Virally
  • Provides A Needed Service

Note that those goals are all business orientated. He doesn't say rank well, or get the most traffic, or appear in Technorati's Top 100. Those aspects might be part of a strategy, but if those are an SEOs end goals, then they're probably not going to be in the internet game very long.

Creating Engagement

That second point is one often overlooked by SEOs. If you rank well, and get traffic, and that traffic only engages with you once, then does that really support your business goals? Someone who visits once and leaves is not nearly as valuable as the visitor who returns often, or helps spread the word about you. Does you strategy focus on achieving that very valuable outcome?

Consider the value of an average site visitor to this site versus a person who subscribes to the RSS feed, sets up a user account, installs our SEO tools in their browser, and hopefully becomes a premium member. The average visitor comes and goes - thousands of them, every single day. Most of them are worthless to our business objectives, but those who commit to repeated engagement generate word of mouth marketing and are more likely to become customers. We give our visitors about a half dozen ways to engage with us. The increased engagement builds trust. That leads to subscriptions, and anytime we have an important announcement, we know over 100,000 people will see it.

In the book "The Dip", by Seth Godin, Seth offers some practical suggestions on how you can turn failure to your advantage. Just as Michael Jordan probably learned a lot from the shots he missed, so can we by redefining failure as an inevitable part of success.

when you see failure as a learning event, not a destination, it makes you smarter, faster

In this interview, Seth illustrates how big companies can focus on the wrong (expensive) battles, and lose the war:

Here's an easy one—Bud TV. They've spent more than $40 million on it so far, yet if we look at their traffic numbers they do worse than a site on sheet rubber sales. What happened? Budweiser had a top down, we-speak-to-the-public mindset when it comes to commercials. They buy Super Bowl commercials for $2 million or $3 million each because they can. Bud TV was all about "let's send messages straight to consumers." Hold that up next to YouTube, which was built from the ground up around individuals sharing with each other, and Bud TV lost. Wouldn't it have been better if they had just embraced YouTube and used it for what it was good at, rather than trying to build their own channel and invent their own form of new media?

We Have Failed, Just Like Bud

Not every site we launch is profitable. Sometimes we start a site and then realize we lack the passion to go through with it, other times major algorithm shifts and/or competitors shifting strategies have made sites heavily reliant on certain models/ideas/strategies no longer profitable.

The beauty of failure online is that it costs almost nothing to leave a failed website running, and you can always come back to it later, or use it nepotistically to help make it pay for itself. If you lose $10,000 on building a website then it only needs to about 3 years for it to pay for itself if it makes $10 a day - and less time if you are using it nepotistically. How much does it cost to rent a good link from the clean parts of the web?

And that leads to one of the best tips in the SEO space. If you are successful somewhere, try to work related markets such that you can take best practice knowledge to make your future projects much more successful. You are better off dominating a market than being an average to slightly below average playing in a dozen markets.

And we have sites that have worked far better than expected. Tools like SEO for Firefox give you a good idea of roughly how competitive a market is, but it is hard to know what lucky breaks you will get or be 100% certain you will rank a brand new site in a competitive market. Strategy and experience increase your odds of success, but algorithms can and do change. Take what the search engines give you and keep doing what is working. Sometimes that means buying a site they already like. Don't hate Google, simply create (and replicate) what they want.

What Are Your Goals? Why?

Constantly re-evaluate your marketing strategy to see if it is leading you towards winning the battle, but losing the war.

What are you measures of success and failure in terms of SEO? What are you measuring, and how?

Related Reading:

SEO For Start-Ups

In a startup, people usually adopt a variety of roles through sheer necessity. You switch from writing killer code to making the coffee and sweeping the floors. Along with everything else you need to do, you've got to find a way to market your company.

Does your start-up have a plan for SEO?

SEO is a strategy often ignored by startups. However, with millions of searches performed daily, good SEO can drive people to your door for little expense. By working smart, you can achieve marketing results that big companies often struggle to deliver. One of the biggest advantages a start-up has, in terms of SEO, is starting from scratch, thus avoiding many of the legacy issues that affect established sites and brands.

Let's take a look at a cheap and effective SEO strategy geared towards startups.

Background - Why SEO Is Valuable

SEO, like any other form of marketing, is about connecting with an audience.

Unlike PR and other forms of marketing, SEO isn't about affecting change in the mind of the consumer. Search is conservative in that searchers must already be aware of an idea in order to formulate a search query. People cannot search for something of which they aren't already aware.

This notion would seem to run counter to the marketing goals of a startup, as startups often seek to promote new ideas and approaches. However, start-ups often refine services or products that already exist .

For example, QuickBooks produces accounting software. By appearing under keyword terms, such as "accounting", "accounting software", etc, QuickBooks could sell to people who aren't aware of the Quickbooks brand simply by aligning their site with concepts the potential customer is already familiar with, in this case "accounting software". This approach is especially important for start-ups because they usually don't have a great deal of brand awareness.

Check out the Google Keyword Research tool. You'll discover ists of keyword terms your potential customers have used to describe problems they have, and services and goods they wish to find.

Generate a few keyword lists relating to your niche. What phrases are people looking for? What terminology are they using? How many searches are being conducted? This tool can give you a valuable insight into the minds of your customers. The take-away point is that in order to do well in SEO, you should look to orient your site around the terminology already used by your prospective customers.

Here's a specific six step plan for implementing SEO at a startup. We'll cover the high level concepts, and link to technical demonstrations.

1. Nail The Basics

A lot of companies hamper their SEO efforts in the site design phase. Big companies, due to the conflicting requirements of various stakeholders, often compromise SEO efforts by implementing designs that aren't conducive to high rankings.

There are three main areas you need to nail:

  • Crawablilty - can the spider crawl and index your site?
  • Terminology - are you using the same terminology that your audience is using?
  • Remarkability - do people link to your site?

In order to be crawlable, keep the site design and architecture as simple as possible. Search engines like simple. Simple means standard html links, body text, and clear, hierarchically ordered pages. Search engines don't particularly like flash, lengthy URLs, scripting, Flash, Ajax and other whirls and flashes. The closer you are to W3C conventions, the better.

Wikipedia is an example of a search friendly site. This is not to say your site need be encyclopedic and graphically sparse, however you do need to pay particular attention to your internal linking methods, body copy and site architecture. Wikipedia uses a lot of cross links to other content on the site. A good test of crawlability is that the site can be viewed using a text-only browser.

Your site should use terminology your audience uses. We'll look at ways to find this information out shortly.

Your site should be remarkable. You want people to link to you, as links are one of the most important factors in Google's ranking algorithms. Seth Godin talks a lot about about "being remarkable" in his book "The Purple Cow", which is essential reading for any start-up looking to make a mark.

Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow -- the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows -- is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible

Do you have a strategy to produce content that is worth talking about?

2. Know What Your Audience Is Thinking

Do you know what terminology your audience uses?

If you know this information, you can integrate keywords into your pages, headings and titles, which will improve the likelihood of your results showing up in search results.

Using free tools, such as the Google Keyword Research Tool & the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool, you can gain a valuable insight into the minds of your prospective customers. Here's a video showing how to use them.

The aim is to create lists of keyword terms your audience is already using, and align your site with those keyword streams. Given that most searches are unique, you can create variations on these keyword terms to capture as much traffic as possible.

The Value Of Pre-Testing Keywords

Because search engine optimization can take time to show results, it's often a good idea to test keyword terms using PPC. Once you have a list of prospective keywords, you can set up a PPC campaign, run it for a short period of time, see which keyword terms you had the most and least success with, then use the most successful terms in your SEO campaign.

For example, let's say a fictitious company, CoolBabyBuggies.com is a start up that manufactures a trendy baby buggies. They brainstorm keywords, and comes up with the following list:

baby buggies
strollers
prams
mountain buggy baby
baby jogger

If we put each term into the search tool, we get a lists of potential keyword terms, and the frequency with which they are searched:

If you scroll down to the bottom, you can also see synonyms and related terms:

After such a session, we might end up with a more comprehensive list that looks like this:

Such lists can contain hundreds or thousands of closely related terms, covering the variety of terms people use to describe the same thing.

Next, start a PPC campaign that incorporates these keyword terms.

After a week or so, you'll get an idea of how many people search on each term, and what snippet information they will likely click on. You can use the most successful keyword terms in your SEO campaign. Integrate the most successful terms - successful meaning terms people search on and are closely aligned with the commercial aims of your site - into page titles, headings, and sprinkle them throughout your body copy. Use them as topic starters. Be sure to use semantic variations, too.

If this company really wanted to test the effectiveness of certain terms, they could set up a page that measured a desired action. For example, if they tracked a searcher from the ad click through to a sign-up on an inquiry page or a sales page. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use analytics.

You then use the most lucrative terms in your SEO campaign.

Of course, if the PPC campaign pays dividends i.e. the cost of running the campaign is less than the return, then by all means keep it going. If you appear in both the PPC and search engine results listings for the same terms you increase the likelihood of getting the click. As you can see from this screenshot, FreshBooks ranks well and advertises under the same keywords, boosting their chances for a click.

3. Seek Attention - And Links

News, by it's very nature, is oriented towards the new and different. "News" is something worth remarking upon.

A startup, by definition, is new, and hopefully different enough from existing services to be remarkable. Your traditional PR efforts - appearing at conferences & demos, press releases, news items, etc - can be leveraged for advantage in the search engines.

Search engines place a lot of emphasis on links, and the keywords contained within those links. Whenever you appear in media, try and get a link back to your site. If you have a name or byline that includes the nature of your service, all the better.

For example," FreshBooks - Online Invoicing". The byline in the link that describes the service, if it appears in a link, will help FreshBooks.com rank for the term "online invoicing". A searcher wouldn't need to know the name of the company, only the nature of the service they provide. So be descriptive, especially in your linking.

4. Make Your Content Remarkable

What type of site do you think has more chance of gaining search engine traffic - a brochure site or a site based on a publishing model?

When fishing, you can catch more fish with a net as opposed to a single line. The same is true for sites in search engines. The more pages you have, the wider your net is cast, and the more search visitors you'll receive. So, consider adopting a publishing model. Think about ways you can regularly publish remarkable information. Ways of doing this include blogs, forums and how-to articles.

Search engines reward fresh, rich content. They're less enamored by the sales pitch of the online brochure. The exception is if the brochure site has very strong inbound linking from external sites. Trouble is, it's difficult to get those links unless the service you offer is truly unique and game changing.

Your content also needs to be unique. Search engines have filters that weed out duplicate content. If you don't have the time to produce content, consider starting forums where users ask questions. If the community thrives, they'll provide fresh content for you.

Is there offline documentation you can incorporate into your web site, such as manuals and case studies? Even if such content doesn't form part of the your main navigation, it's a good idea to include as many pages as possible. Link this content back to your money pages, and be sure to use keywords in the links.

5. Get Outside Help

What networks do you have in place? Who are your suppliers, venture capitalists, customers and other partners? Tap them on the shoulder and ask for links.

Write articles and ask your partners to publish them on their sites, then link those articles back to your site. Leverage any presence they may have to increase your own.

Are you part of a broader movement? Is there a bandwagon you can jump on? Web 2.0 was a marketing term dreamed up by O'Reilly Media to describe a wide range of sites that loosely shared a common approach to web development and collaboration on the web.

In reality, these sites weren't doing anything particularly new of revolutionary, but by defining themselves as part of a revolutionary movement, this group made their marketing job easier. Sites became worth remarking upon simply because they declared themselves part of the Web 2.0 club. Look around to see if you're part of a broader collective, and leverage any newsworthy, and link-worthy, opportunities that come your way as a result.

Another approach for those short of money is to form a co-op. Can you swap services with other companies? When you do so, be sure to write about it and swap links.

Whenever you make connections, think links. Once you get into a habit of regularly producing rich remarkable content, and getting links, rankings will naturally follow.

6. Competitive Intelligence

Who outranks you in your niche?

You can learn a lot about SEO by looking at what your high ranking competitors are going .

Use (mostly) free services like Compete.com for the leading sites in your niche. What approach are they using? How often are they publishing? What type of content are they publishing? What does their external link structure look like?

You can reverse-engineer your competitors SEO strategies using the SEOBook Toolbar. Aaron explains how to use it in the video.

One area to focus on is the inbound links your competitors have gained from external sites. If you can get links from the same sources, you'll be able to compete with them on keyword terms. You also might discover some alliances and customers you might not know they had.

Mike Grehan Interview

Many thanks for talking with us today, Mike. We've spent a few messy evenings drinking girly Merlots, but for those who don't know you, can you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

Ahhhh… those halcyon Merlot fuelled days… I remember them well… (truth be known, with all that Merlot, I don't remember much at all!).

So for those folks who are new to the industry, I can give a little background.

I first invented the Internet back in the 1960s. I had a young whippersnapper working for me as my assistant at the time. Al Gore was his name. I believe he grew up and took some sort of job with the government. Not sure where he is now.

In about 1965 I coined the term “hypertext,” which I was thrilled about. It didn't actually mean anything, but it sounded really cool. I used to drink with a guy called Ted Nelson who thought this was a pretty cool word, too. Ted's an old scientist living here in New York. And we do laugh when we get together about all of those people who have assumed that it was him who coined the term. Boy, must we have been drunk that night.

After messing around in physics (it being the new rock and roll, of course) I moved to Geneva, Switzerland and took a job at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It was a pretty dull job actually – same thing day-in, day-out. Atomic nuclei can get pretty boring to interact with. Plus I didn't like the special suit.

On one occasion, I was working with a complete dunderhead by the name of Tim Berners Lee. He was one of those guys that you just knew was never going to amount to anything in life. I explained to him that, during my morning shower, I had this brilliant idea to apply hypertext to the internet. He was so excited.. Mike, he said, I think you've just invented the… interweb!

Stupid boy!

Anyway, after being knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for my sterling work inventing what we now know as the “World Wide Web,” I thought I'd better do something practical with it. By now there was a lot of stuff out there and it was getting difficult to find anything. I was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University at the time and hooked up with a couple of kids called Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

This was not a good experience for me. These guys came to my dorm one night and stole a paper I had written called, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” I even had a pet name for it. I called it “Google.” I thought that was quite cool and trendy, what with Google being a play on the word goggle, which means to ogle women. Some time later, I read some bullshit from these guys who stole my idea that it had something to do with "googol," which is the Californian pronunciation for a word which also means to ogle women… er… I think.

I'm in the process of suing these Google jokers for almost 600 bucks to cover the amount of time it took me to write the paper. I'm not stupid… I'll get every penny of it, I bet!

Eventually, I moved away from search, mainly because it doesn't work properly and never will. So, I invented my latest toy, which I call Twitter. I called it Twitter because it's full of twits talking bits of shit to each other. Shitter.com had already gone by then, unfortunately.

Oh! Fancy me forgetting to mention Wikipedia! I actually invented that as a joke and people started taking it seriously. What fun!! People are failing exams because it's full of false crap. Some people have been seriously injured for the rest of their lives for taking some of the medical advice… ROFL

I'm on the verge of leaving the internet space to work on my new invention, which is very much a green thing. Imagine this: Reusable toilet paper! Heh! How cool is that. Some people have called it a flannel. In fact, some have called it a face cloth. Dood, I wouldn't want that near my face knowing where it had been before. Eeeuuwww!

Anyway… these are just some of the excellent things I've done in my extremely interesting life. What other brilliant things do you need to know about me? Being as modest as I am, I may not be able to answer all of your questions of course…

Every word Mike says is true :)

In your paper "New Signals To Search Engines", you frame search in a historical context - where it has been, where it is now, and where it might be going. What are the major changes coming up that will have the most impact on current SEO practices and goals?

Grehan now puts serious head on…

I've talked about how search engine optimization evolved in the first instance. It was driven by the limitations of the technology used by search engines. Basically, the World Wide Web was developed to do one thing – but everyone wants it to do another. So, crawling the web using the HTTP protocol was the obvious route to go for search engines back then.

But if Google is saying they now have seen a trillion URLs and have no certainty that they'll ever be able to crawl them in a timely fashion, maybe we've reached the zenith of the crawl. Not only that, the end user is expecting a much richer experience. So if the main job of SEO was to optimize static web pages and make them available to crawlers, it's all becoming a little passé now.

Have we seen the end of HTML and the crawler? Absolutely not. But the level of requirement for SEO work is going to diminish, rather like that of the blacksmith when motorized transport was introduced. Do we still have blacksmiths today? For sure, but they're not as required as they used to be.

The main changes will be in existing SEO shops either moving into other technical/development work or retraining in other online marketing disciplines. It's a very exciting time in search. Most marketers can see that. But those people from a purely technical background and used to just doing geeky code for a crawler don't see it that way.

You mention that user trails - as provided by the toolbar, tagging etc - will become some of the strongest signals. That's pretty much the death knell of traditional SEO, isn't it?

If we take what I said in the answer to the last question, you can see that traditional SEO as we know it has had to evolve anyway. I don't really think of link building as SEO, to be honest. For me, link building is the by-product of good marketing. Whereas fixing pages for a crawler is purely a technical process.

What needs to be taken into account most importantly is not where SEO goes to next, or whether it survives at all. It's about where search goes to next and how the end user evolves with those changes. Making pages for crawlers and getting links for the sole purpose of getting links omits one thing from the equation: the end user experience.

So, now that search engines can follow end users they can see where they started and where they dropped off. That kind of data is so important. It's the wisdom of crowds. It's the people's vote. So how does a marketer get involved there? It's going to be a little clichéd, but create an experience - not a web page.

Last year, Eric Schmidt CEO of Google, said an interesting thing in an interview. He mentioned - and I'm paraphrasing here - "that the Internet is a "cesspool" where false information thrives, and that "brands are the way to rise above the cesspool". Do you think brands might be an important signal of quality?

I read that interview too.

He was stating the obvious to be honest. People have long bemoaned the fact that smaller businesses don't get the same shelf space in search as the big brands (the same applies offline, of course). Brand building is all about good marketing. It's all about building trust and reputation. But wait for this… It's not just about the big boys. A local store can build up as much trust and reputation within its community as well as a high street chain.

Social networking sites are all about people building up trust and reputation on a personal level. So, I think the notion of brands as we've known them – such as multi-nationals like Exxon – is going away. I think we're moving more into social search and that's all about tapping into a network of trust.

Addressing your question directly: "Do you think brands might be an important signal of quality?" As long as those brands belong to the end user and not large corporations, and that's certainly what's happening, then yes, a great signal of quality.

Social media, for want of a better term, is a "place" where most content is being generated, and increasingly where many people are spending their time. What are your thoughts on, say, Twitter? What are the implications for Google and other big search engines when people rely on real-time wisdom-of-crowds, and communities, for answers?

So we've already touched on this a little when talking about tapping into a network of trust. Absolutely this is a very important move. The results you get at search engines are hardly verified results and they can be manipulated. That means you have what a mathematical formula (the algorithm) believes are the best ranked documents. And then you have a little re-ranking going on when Ralph Tegtmeir gets to them!

However, if you tap into a network of trust, such as a parenting group, and ask them a about a child's allergy, the information is likely to be much more verified. If 500 parents all agree that a certain method works then that's more trustworthy information than a search engine algorithm can provide.

But there's a whole lot more to it than me Tweeting my followers and asking which is the best Irish pub in New York and wanting an answer now!

Can we talk a little about formats. You make the point that HTML may have served us well up to now, but things are changing. The web is becoming media rich. What does this mean for SEO? Do search marketers become multi-media positioners?

I saw a quote from a senior scientist at Google where he said we’re moving "away from a web of content to a web of applications." So it's more about the end user experience and the method of delivery, as opposed to one protocol over another. I don't think HTTP/HTML is going away anytime soon. But it's not going to be the primary method for internet search going forward.

People are already talking about new platforms. One idea is Flash. I like that. Or maybe pure java. Most certainly social search into networks of trust and live search via apps such as Twitter will further develop in the future.

We spend a lot of time on SEOBook connecting-the-dots between areas such as seo, brand and traditional marketing. You've said "connected marketing" is the future of marketing. Can you talk a little about this? This is the point where big worlds collide, isn't it?

Connected marketing is a kind of generic term for the new audience of always-on, 24-hour-a-day networks. I use the iPhone as a primary example of how to connect with your audience in so many different ways. Sure, it could be the HTTP/HTML route as it comes with a browser. But there are also so many apps you can download. You can get to your audience via email, txt, Twitter. You'll be surprised at this… you can even use it as a telephone!

It is about big worlds colliding. It's not just that technology has changed so we market via different channels to the same people. It's more about how the audience has changed. And so we have to change the way we connect with them.

I don't think that conventional methods such as the 30-second spot are going away anytime soon. But we need to examine all areas of this new marketing mix and get our messaging aligned.

If traditional SEO is at a point of diminishing value, what are the things an SEO can do to adapt to this brave new world?

First of all, stop using just SEO. The job we've been doing to help search engines do a job they should have been doing themselves is not as critical as it was. Crawlers are getting smarter and the communication between search engines and SEOs is much more transparent now. Search engines provide many tools to make the process of letting them know that you have good indexable content available.

But as the end user demands a much richer experience, search engines need to know a lot more about other types of content. Not just the textual HTML pages that SEOs labor over.

It is a brave new world of marketing. It's tremendously exciting. But you do have to start and think more about smart marketing and less about smart HTML coding.

There's a plethora of books and information on social media, optimizing video and perhaps, more importantly, analytics which open up this whole new world of marketing. As the value of providing pure SEO services diminishes, the value of new services increases. This is not a bad time for search marketing: It's the best it has ever been!

Many thanks, Mike.

Mike Grehan is Global KDM Officer with Acronym Media, a leading search marketing company based in New York's landmark Empire State Building. Follow Mike on Twitter here.

Review of SES NYC by Khalid Saleh

Conferences are especially interesting especially in a tough economy. Truth be told, I had low expectations for SES NY when all I was reading was companies scaling back and downsizing.

But the first tweets about SES painted a brighter picture. And with close to 5,000 marketers registered for the conference it was shaping up to be an excellent conference. As I walked through the exhibit hall vendors had a very good show and were very pleased with the large numbers of crowds that showed up. Of all the different SES shows I have attended over the last few years, this particular SES NY had to top the list in both the quality of the lectures, the speaker list and even the small details such as quality of the food J.

Here is a quick wrap up of some of the highlights

I thought that Guy Kawasaki’s choice of topic on using “Twitter As A Tool For Social Media” was an interesting one. And although I am a fan of Guy, my assumption was that most everyone in attendance must have used twitter for some time. I was really wondering if I am going to learn many new things from session. The room was over flowing with people and the few who showed up late had to spend the hour or so standing.

Guy made 9 main points:

  1. Forget the A list (sort of funny coming from A lister ;) )
  2. Defocus
  3. Increase your followers
  4. Monitor the conversation
  5. Copy best practices
  6. Use search
  7. Use the right tools
  8. Squeeze the triggers
  9. Make it easy to share

Guy’s favorite tools to use in conjunction with Twitter

My favorite portion in the presentation was the section on search and utilizing advance search parameters to look for terms people are using. That can be a valuable tool to increase business. Let say you are a web designer who is looking for work. You can setup a search for a term such as web design referrals. That is an excellent time to jump in and introduce yourself.

Twitter hawk is a tool that can be used to send automatic “paid” messages when people search for a term. I am not familiar with the tool but I see the potential to use it for business development. I am sure there are many who will debate the tactics Guy suggested in the session. If you are a believer in pure social media, I think there are many things that will turn your stomach.

The session on Meaningful SEO Metrics focused on measurements that help generate better ROI. Traditional metrics focus on number of visitors, pages per visit, time on site, etc. Ray "Catfish" Comstock discussed how bounce rates for keywords is critical in the process of conversion optimization. Ray suggested examining:

  • High Bounce Rate keyword phrases: which indicate keyword phrases that are generating traffic but users are not finding what they want.
  • High Conversion Rate keyword phrases: which indicate keywords that are working and therefore which phrases you should focus more resources on.

I did not really appreciate the importance of mobile SEO until I chatted with an SEO for a large auto site. He mentioned that their site traffic usually peaks on Mondays and Tuesdays. That is the time where people are searching for cars. The traffic usually dies off on weekends when people are out shopping. If you think about it, people actually shopping in real life is perfect time for Mobile SEO. That discussion was enough to convince me to attend Mobile seo best practices. Cindy Krum who specializes in mobile marketing consulting did a great job covering Mobile Marketing Strategies. While visitors of traditional marketing can arrive at a site at different stages of the buying process, mobile search usually indicate immediate intent. Cindy pointed out that real mobile web browsing, flat-rate data pricing, and faster download speed are all factors help that make mobile web more relevant. Cindy’s advice for basic mobile seo includes:

  • Follow all Traditional & Local SEO Best Practices
  • Submit your Site to Mobile Search Engines & Directories
  • Avoid using flash, scripts, popup windows.
  • Follow XHTML standards
  • Use external CSS

The panel discussion on the most common search marketing mistakes CMOs make promised to deliver an interesting topic. My favorite of the mistakes was failing to assign $ value to every conversion on a website. There are too many times when we focus on a generating sales or leads via a website and forget about the other conversions that can take place. These other conversions might not have the same dollar value as a sale but they are the still conversions. A visitor might subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or subscribe to a blog. Assign a dollar value for each of these activities.

The extreme makeover session with a focus on conversion made for an entertaining afternoon. Jeffry Eisenberg of Future Now, Tim Ash of SiteTuners and Ethan Griffin of Groove Commerce took on a discussion of one of the sites Groove Commerce worked on. You can tell right away the different approach to optimization each of these guys takes. Jeffry is evaluating different customers, looking at what might work for them. Tim is focused on the testing aspect. Ethan is considering optimization as well as implementation details. Jeffry and Tim seemed to disagree even when they were making the same point. As a listed to the panelist go back and forth on what to test and what to remove, some sitting next to me asked, so who should we listen to here? I smiled and said, listen to your visitors!

Night time at conferences is as valuable as day time and SES New York was no exception. So, on the first night of SES NY I stayed up until 4 AM with Frank Watson (AussieWebmaster AKA crocodile man in some Hollywood circles) and Patrick Sexton (who you know from SEOish or his latest venture GetListed.org), every muscle in my body was aching. I am just not sure how Frank was planning to stay up for few more hours.

B2B complex sales involve longer cycles, many stages and different people in each stage. The session on B2B marketing focused on search marketing tactics that can help deal with some of these complexities. Segmenting data becomes more critical in complex sales. This can be done through allowing customers to identify what segment they belong to (enterprise, small business, etc). Another important factor when it comes to complex sales is going beyond the cost per lead to cost per action which is a good indicator of the quality of leads.

Another panel discussion I attended at SES was Slash Your Search Budget. As you can imagine the title hit home with what many companies have to deal with nowadays. Unfortunately, this session was perhaps the most disappointing discussion in the conference. The speakers did not offer real ways to slash marketing budgets. The talk of mobile SEO as an alternative to traditional SEO threw me off completely. How would that relate to slashing a marketing budget? Talk of utilizing social media as a way to generate hits did not resonate with me either. Social media takes a lot of nurturing and a lot of budget. So, at that point, I could not help but raise my hand and ask how is using social media help in cutting SEM budgets? There was a bit of silence there.

The only exception was Aaron Kahlow of the online marketing summit. He offered candid suggestions: It is better to take charge of the budget discussion. Approach your manager/boss and tell him you want to slash the budget. Evaluate which parts SEM activities are not producing results. By doing so, you will be guaranteed a seat at the table.

The 2 nd night at SES included attending live web master radio show hosted by David Szetela, learning more about the SEO community from Jim Hedger and enjoying a lengthy discussion on online marketing with @webanalytic J .

On the third day of SES, I attended News search and SEO. Most notable on that panel was John Shehata of who specializes in news search seo . John provided many valuable tips that ranged from the basic to more advance level. Some of the tips included:

  • Use trends/buzz keyword tools when writing news for online audience (Google hot trends, Yahoo Buzz, Google Zeitgeist, seomoz popular)
  • Print headlines sell the story, optimized web headlines tell the story

Well, before I sign off, I have to congratulate Matt McGowan and his team for an excellent show and raised the bar for upcoming search events. I think Matt is on his way to Australia at this point. If you enjoyed this post and would like to connect, then follow me on twitter.

How Many Trillions Does it Take to Put a Banker in Jail?

About to go to jury duty here in about 15 minutes...which got me thinking about the concept of justice.

I don't mind paying a lot of taxes if it goes toward creating a better society, but in California when you get toward the upper end of the tax bracket you can pay ~ 60% (federal + state + local + self employment/social security) of your income in taxes. And those tax payments probably do not even offset the handouts we are giving to bankers that gambled with trillions of dollars and lost.

News of additional bailouts via a public private partnership (that makes almost all the reward private and almost all the risk taxpayer funded) have spurred Bank of America and Citibank into buying more of the toxic assets that they allegedly need help clearing off the books.

A guy writes $7,000 in bad checks and gets a 24 year prison sentence. These bankers cost tax payers trillions of dollars. So much money stolen that they debased the currency, and they are awarded with free money for being incompetent.

I am not sure what will come of today, but if this country actually had any sense of justice then there would be at least a half dozen bankers serving a few decades in jail. The fact that none of them have been locked up yet shows how perverse our justice system is and how little you should trust the U.S. government. Politicians work for the bankers.

Obama has a poll allowing voters to ask questions about the economy. Most of the questions are about "what about me I am broke and don't know what to do" and "I need some relief" etc. And that is how they will remain until our financial system is fixed. And by fixed I mean these bankers serve the jail-time they earned and pay back their "earnings." Billions of hours of labor have been wasted propping up a ponzi scheme that promotes insider/bank traders winning on both sides of the trade, while handing you the losses.

Is there any wonder why so many people feel overextended?

These bankers put teeth in the consumer bankruptcy law (lying using bogus statistics to pass it) then they wanted a decade long ride on the free money train for their company.

What's worse is that children who have yet to be born have interest working against them starting from the day they are born. They are in the hole from their first breath, having done nothing wrong other than being born into corruption. The politicians take care of their own children, just not our children.

We are so afraid of terrorism...and financial terrorists that cost us trillions of dollars are somehow just part of how the system works. No big deal.

Sorry, but I don't need to pay for someone else's second yacht or fourth home. If anything these career criminals should be scrubbing my floors and taking out my trash. You and I are the people who are actually paying their salaries (and bonuses) through a collective billions of hours of OUR LABOR that was confiscated and handed over to the banks. This makes me angry enough to want to go unemployed and stop working and/or move to another country. I hope I get to be a juror over a banker some day. And I hope you do too!

Update: here are a couple relevant articles in Rolling Stone & The Atlantic, and a nice video.

Google Expands Snippets & Related Searches Word Relationships

Google announced that they are rolling out a new technology to better understand word relationships and extend their snippets on longer search queries.

Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Note that they claimed that this is "one of its first applications." If they can improve relevancy with integrating this technology directly into the core search algorithms then it will lower the importance of on page optimization (since you only need to be close rather than use the specific words that were searched for). Such a change would likely decrease the traffic to low authority sites held up largely by strong site structure and on page SEO, while increasing the amount of traffic going to high authority sites and well branded sites that are poorly structured from an SEO perspective.

I am not sure if this sort of algorithm change would favor shorter or longer content pages. In most cases I would guess longer pages if they were kept on theme, and broken up to relevant chunks. The expanded snippets on longer search queries show a lot more information directly in Google's search results, which helps thicker pages show off their offering more than thinner pages, but cedes more control of the information over to Google as they can show close to 250 characters in the search results.

If the technology was applied to anchor text it might also limit the value of anchor text manipulation by boosting up the value of related phrases (if Google knows that the word Salesforce is relevant to CRM then they might count that anchor text more).

Greg Sterling noted that this change came from the Orion technology that was purchased by Google from Ori Allon in 2006. He also interviewed them:

I spoke yesterday to Google and Ori Allon. To the extent that I understood his discussion of the way Orion’s technology had been applied to refinements here’s what’s going on at a high level: pages are being scanned in “real-time” by Google after a query is entered. Conceptually and contextually related sites/pages are then identified and expressed in the form of the improved refinements. This is not solely keyword based but derived from an “understanding” of content and context.

It is hard to speculate if/when this technology will move from sideshow to becoming a big deal. The current usage is fairly trivial, but it could get much more well ingrained into many parts of the relevancy algorithms.

As search engines get more sophisticated with how they show word relationships (on branded and non-branded search queries) that is one more thing that can be optimized, though likely one that will require a holistic marketing strategy to optimize, because you will need to create a lot of co-citation (or some other signal of relevancy) across many pages on the web.

A couple years ago Lord Maurice Saatchi described their brand strategy as being built off of One Word Equity.

In this new business model, companies seek to build one word equity - to define the one characteristic they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.

It is the modern equivalent of the best location in the high street, except the location is in the mind.

Is Your Website Credible?

I saw a link-bait article at the top of TechMeme this past weekend entitled ""Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet".

The article outlines how internet advertising will fail because it (apparently) holds people captive and forces them to watch ads (huh?). I'm paraphrasing, but that's the jist of the conclusion reached by the author, Eric Clemons, of the University of Pennsylvania.

I certainly hope a lot of would-be advertisers listen to his view on search advertising, because it will reduce the bid competition for the rest of us:

Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model....Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid"

Bizzare.

For starters, what is the searchers "preferred" company? That statement assumes the searcher already knows what company they are looking for. Perhaps, as is often the case, they are looking to solve a problem, not locate a specific company.

Secondly, anyone who has paid for ads would know that the last thing you want to do as a search advertiser is to "misdirect" visitors to your site i.e. visitors who aren't interested in what you're selling. It costs a fortune, makes no money, and Google will likely demote such ads due to a poor quality score.

Sergey Brin is of the opinion that advertising can add value, so long as it is relevant:

"....it fits with the notion of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page that ads can and should be at least as useful to people as search results and other online content. "We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you,"

Of course, he would say that, but I think it is true. Ad content need not be intrusive. Relevant advertising, delivered when the customer wants it, can and does solve problems, and thus adds value. Advertising also facilitates a lot of web content that simply couldn't be offered for free if the advertising didn't support it. Google itself could not exist without advertising.

Anyway, Danny Sullivan does a good fisk of the article. We'll worth a read.

Website Credibility

Danny brought up an interesting aside about credibility, which I thought I'd riff on and hopefully we can share some ideas in the comments.

Here is how Danny decides if a travel website is credible:

I have this “travel guide” test to use to help determine if an expert source knows what they’re talking about. Ever struggle to decide which travel book for some vacation destination might be the best one? Me, if it’s a travel series, I pull the guide for a destination I know well, like my hometown. I know my local area in an expert way — and if the travel guide suggests good stuff for my area, then I feel better about trusting it in other areas.

In this case, because Danny has established the credibility of the source, he is more likely to go to places the guide recommends. He is certainly more likely to keep reading the site, which means more opportunity for advertisers to be seen.

What Makes A Website Credible?

Credibility means the quality of being believable or trustworthy.

The markers we use to determine credibility online have a lot in common with the way we determine credibility offline: are we familiar with this person or business? Have we had previous, beneficial dealings with them? Do they come recommended by someone we trust? Does it look and feel right? This last point might be more important than we've been led to believe. More on this shortly.

Various articles have pointed to prescriptive credibility markers, such as displaying your address, having a privacy policy, showing a photo of the site owner etc, but I'd argue these are pretty much useless unless more fundamental credibility markers have been established first.

One of the problems on the internet in terms of establishing credibility, is that the internet is largely unregulated and anonymous:

the Internet has no government or ethical regulations controlling the majority of its available content. This unregulated flow of information presents a new problem to those seeking information, as more credible sources become harder to distinguish from less credible sources (Andie, 1997). Moreover, without knowing the exact URL of a given site, the amount of information offered through keyword searches can make finding a predetermined site difficult as well as increase the likelihood of encountering sites containing false information

The task of deciding the level of credibility lies mostly with the individual, rather than an external agency. A research report by Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab found:

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.This reliance on a site's overall visual appeal to gauge its credibility occurred more often with some categories of sites then others. Consumer credibility-related comments about visual design issues occurred with more frequency with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce sites (46.2%), and with less frequency when assessing health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites. In comparison, the parallel Sliced Bread Design study revealed that health and finance experts were far less concerned about the surface aspects of these industry-specific types of sites and more concerned about the breadth, depth, and quality of a site's information.

The emphasis people place on a sites visual design when trying to determine credibility is interesting. This is not to say having a blinged-up site will make you appear more credible, as it very much depends what market you're in. A slick site is likely be credible if you're selling lipstick to teenagers, but not if you're providing weather data to climatologists. Wikipedia and Google appear credible as information resources partly because they look staid and academic.

So the first step to making your site credible is to know your audience, and meet their expectations in terms of look and feel.

Accuracy Of Information

The studies also point to the accuracy of information as a credibility marker.

It stands to reason that a site that contains obvious lies or inaccuracies, as perceived by the reader, isn't going to be credible. Having said that, there are plenty of scam artists on the internet, and people pedaling incorrect information, but the difference is that their readers aren't aware they are being lied to or being given incorrect information.

This is why it can often pay to cite known authorities to add credibility to your content. Besides the value of citation in terms of establishing accuracy, naming a credible resource can make you appear more credible by association. Go to Yahoo Answers are notice how most answers lack credibility. Those answer that are credible tend to cite external known authorities.

A Way With Words

Closely related to visual presentation is format and the way you use words.

In a study by Indianna University, Matthew Eastin looked at the credibility markers for online health information:

More recently, Rieh & Belkin (1998) identified criteria used when evaluating online information......they found that: (1) institutional sites were seen as more credible than individual sites, and (2) accuracy of content was used to assess online information. Respondents used knowledge of citations within the content and the functionality of hyperlinks as cues to evaluate the information. ....in addition to source and link accuracy, they also recommend that users consider peer evaluation, navigability, and feedback options (i.e., email, chat room, etc.)

Academic essays sound authoritative, even if what they say is nonsense, because they are long winded and use big words. Even the length of an essay can lend credibility. For example, long Wikipedia pages appear more credible that short pages, simply by virtue of their length. Various studies in the direct marketing field appear to back this up, which is why you'll often see those long, single page sales letters. Short letters don't sell so well. "Thoroughness" either reduces anxiety in the buyer, or ehances the credibility of the seller, or most likely both.

Again, the way you use words depends on your audience. An academic approach isn't much use if people can't comprehend what you're saying. Likewise, if a an article is lightweight and flippant, it isn't going to appear to an academic community.

In The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that looks at communication within markets in the internet age, the authors assert that markets are conversations. And that conversation is conducted in the human voice, not the cliche ridden hype language of the marketing brochure. The use of colloquial "voice" often carries a lot of credibility on the web, presumably because it signifies a human presence.

The Reef Fish Effect

People like to go where other people are.

There is perceived to be less risk in crowds. This is why Amazon's customer reviews are so powerful. People's choices are affirmed by the wisdom of the crowd. It just feels safer.

Include as many human touches as you can. Reviews from known authorities, signs of activity, signs that other people have visited your site before, and their experience has been positive. Being a known quantity makes you appear more credible.

What do you look for when trying to determine credibility?

SEO & Marketing Links of Interest

I have been saving these links up since January 21st. Time to share about 50 of them. :)

Niche SEO Guides

The Rising Commoditization of Everything But Experience

Graywolf shared this great video about the ongoing process of commoditization.

  • materials get commoditized
  • due to competition products become materials
  • customized service and personalization help create sustained value

The Fear of Success in Creative Arts

This Elizabeth Gilbert TED video talks about how to live with knowing your best work is likely behind you, which is true for many popular artists and authors.

More Search News

Yahoo! Search makes it easy to embed videos & docs with SearchMonkey.

Amazon is trying to use DMCA to block other ebooks from getting onto Kindles. Sony and Google partnered up to make 500,000 ebooks freely available on the Sony ebook reader.

Yelp was accused of extortion. Pay us or that negative review stays at the top. Lovely mafia-styled business model :)

Bryan Todd shares a powerful story about how words are powerful:

There is no such thing as right language or wrong language, good grammar or bad grammar, correct English or incorrect English. There is only language that got you want you wanted, or didn't.

Perry Marshall highlights how Google considers some businesses to be illegitimate businesses. If only they would get to the government grant stimulus ad scams.

Gab Goldenberg offers tips on online branding. Lance Loveday wrote a great article about the overlap between search and branding. In our member forums I started a thread called branding in the search channel.

George Michie explains why budgeting search is a bad idea and offered some SEM RFP questions worth asking. Generally I have avoided clients that needed an RFP because I felt they were still in the shopping phase.

Searchers have been using longer search queries.

John Andrews explained how he thought Sphinn moved on from its roots.

CJ shares some ideas for how search engines can hunt for paid links.

Joel Spolsky highlighted why you should not use Google apps for anything important. I am really hoping they never screw up my email account!

Michael Gray took a look at the influence of article directories on organic rankings.

Debra Mastaler offers a link building stimulus plan.

Rob explains how some sales techniques, particularly in social settings, work well by hiding the upsells in the price. Online if you sell a non-commodity you can make the core price higher (to increase perceived value) and then let people de-select the pieces they do not want or need.

Back in January Robert Scoble highlighted that Facebook is studying sentiment behavior.

Andrew Goodman highlighted how dumb some clever nanotargeted marketing is. Funny :)

Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt were on the Charlie Rose show. A couple interesting quotes...

  • from Eric - Technology has brought us closer together, but makes us more stressed.
  • from Marissa - speech to text technology on Youtube that is searchable should be around in 5 to 10 years
  • from Marissa - credit card companies know if you are going to get divoriced with 98% certainty something like 2 years ahead of time.

Eric Schmidt also suggested that as netbooks get cheaper they may subsidize them to buy marketshare.

The Economist published a story about Brewster Kahle and the idea of an open library.

Tons of great free research from FutureLab.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin riffs on the purpose of schooling, including ideas like...Teach future citizens how to conform & Teach future consumers how to desire

Here he talks about the concept behind his new book Tribes.

Danny Sullivan Highlights Google's 2 Tier Justice System

Danny highlighted how many aggregators of aggregators and content cesspools are bogusly clogging up Google's search results with sites that would be viewed as spam if the owner was not socially well connected:

You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe. Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

Alltop, Mahalo, Squidoo -- none of them dominate Google. But seriously, Squidoo has a PR8 home page? Alltop has a PR7? Search Engine Land, which actually produces original content, sits with a PR6 -- but these guys that simply compile content from others get a big fat PR kiss on the lips?

Hey, I don't fret about PR scores. I know how meaningless they can be. But Joe Schmoe who tried to launch one of these types of sites wouldn't get any PR at all. Google would have shut them down long ago. Lesson here? To be a really successful SEO, get successful at something else, then jump into your SEO play.

Danny Sullivan is probably the only neutral reporter in the search space with a decade + of experience AND a background in traditional journalism. He is usually quite neutral, so for him to say that, you know Google is screwing up pretty bad.

If you are good at public relations you can have all the PageRank you want. Can't afford a proper public relations campaign? Have no brand equity other than being branded as an SEO? You are the scum that makes the internet a cesspool. Better luck next life!

If you can't be found you don't exist. As Google's "spam team" grows more subjective with the definition of spam (hey I know him it's not spam, never heard of him it's spam, etc.) the web loses out on its diversity. Meanwhile how about you view some great fraudulent government grant ads through AdWords.

Google's public relations team publicly lied about cleaning those fraudulent ads up.

"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."

The above LIE was quoted from an article published 3 weeks ago, but Google is still making over $10,000 a day carpet-bombing searchers with that reverse billing fraud (and probably $10,000's more on the content network).

Spam is only spam *if* the spammer is not paying Google and they are too small to fight back against the often arbitrary and injust decisions of the irrational Google engineers that "fight spam" while turning a blind eye to grant scam ads.

Pretty worthless hypocrisy, Google. Who is trying to turn the web into a cesspool full of fraudulent ads and corporate misinformation? This company:

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