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The Real Cost of Buying Links for SEO: $4 Million

Written on September 1, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo

I was reading a copy of the Inc. 500 issue on my flight back from Dallas this weekend and came across an article about a seasonal online retailer that was “penalized” right before the Holidays for paid links. He estimated the revenue loss due to plummeting organic search visibility at $4 million in sales.  Now he’s “thanking” Google for the spanking because he’s mended his ways and is reborn as a social media enthusiast.

I’m not sure I buy the “social media has turned things around” story exactly, but I do wonder how many companies and consultants roll the dice and take shortcuts and loopholes to get ahead only to find out later it’s worthless? The notion of paid links is an old story (Paid Links Evil? Dec 2005) but many of the tactics used to shortcut results for SEO will always be a fresh topic of discussion.

It turns out the retailer in the Inc. story was doing SEO internally then hired two SEO companies to help out. The story goes on to say that a SEO company was to “reach out to relevant sites and ask them for links. Instead, one of the companies admitted it was paying for links.”  That’s worded in a way that makes you think maybe the retailer didn’t know the SEO company was buying links.

We don’t buy links at TopRank Marketing.

We never have. Not ever in 10 years of being in the search marketing business. As far as the retailer in the Inc. article, it’s surprising because buying links isn’t cheap.  If a company didn’t know the SEO consultant was buying links, it’s peculiar any way you look at it. Where did the money come from to buy the links? How did the SEO company not report what it was doing? How did the company owner not know what the SEO company was doing?

I polled followers of @leeodden on Twitter whether they or someone they knew knew had ever been penalized for buying links. Almost all of them said yes. When I’ve mentioned that we never buy links to other search marketers, the disbelief was like I told them I didn’t need to breathe air.

The point of relating this story to you isn’t so much about the risks and rewards of paid links, defining exactly what “paid means” (what about a 3 way barter?) or even judging those that sell and buy links. The point is that the online retailer in the story says social media tactics were largely ignored and now they’re committed to blogging, Tweeting and being active on Facebook. He claims all is now well in their SEO world. “We’re back on top.”

The point:  Why didn’t the online retailer commit to a better online marketing strategy in the first place?

It’s been promoted for years that paid links can carry consequences.  People like Google’s Anti-Spam Czar Matt Cutts make their perspective clear and make it easy to report paid links. Right or wrong, it’s the way search engines want to play.  Obviously, paid links with the right anchor text from very authoritative and relevant websites have a positive impact, or SEOs and website owners wouldn’t participate.  It’s important to note that Google doesn’t have a problem with paid links per se, but with paid links that pass PageRank.

The question I have for companies that rely too much on shortcuts and loopholes is, “Why not suspend the “free money now” attitude and invest in a smart and competitive online marketing program that can get results AND stand the test of scrutiny?”  Won’t a customer focused marketing effort that provides optimized and linkable content to a growing social network earn more links, more traffic and more revenue anyway?

I don’t think there’s much reason to put your brand and revenue at risk if you have a long term view of how the search and social web works. The investment in understanding and engaging customers plus the staff, software and time to implement content, analyze performance data and ongoing content marketing is well worth the cost and there’s virtually no risk.

“Don’t bring a sword to a gun fight”

Years ago at a search conference discussion about black hat and white hat tactics, Tim Mayer, ex head of Search at Yahoo! made the comment “”If you’re being entirely organic and going after ‘Viagra,’ it’s like taking a sword to a gunfight. You just aren’t going to rank” when discussing acceptable tactics in really aggressive industries like “PPC” (pills pron casino).

The temptation and pressures to profitability are great in industries that are flush with heavily optimized and marketed web sites.  However, most companies don’t fall in that category and I think smarter and more creative marketing can still win for the vast majority of websites, especially in the long run. We’ve seen it happen with our own clients nearly 10 years.

Why rent when you can own?

The reason I’ve never participated in link purchases or endorsed the practice isn’t as much about Google’s rules on paid links that pass PageRank. It’s because I could never understand why anyone would “buy” something with such risk associated with it when they could “earn it and own it”?   With roots in Public Relations, our online marketing agency has been accustomed to earning media placements and often times highly desirable links since we started the business in 2001. It can take more time to see aggressive results, but when you focus on making creative content and doing the hard work of promotion to earn traffic and links, the cost is one of investment vs. the often higher cost of advertising with no equity in what you’ve purchased. Then there’s the cost if the links are devalued by the search engines and subsequent lost revenue. I’d rather build, promote and earn those links that will be in place indefinitely.

Using that strategy, Online Marketing Blog has accumulated a substantial number and quality of links (according to Majestic SEO). The devil is in the details with this sort of thing of course, since it matters very much what the topic, anchor text and PageRank are of the link sources. But suffice it to say, we experience very good results in each of those areas as evidenced by over 21,000 different keyword phrases that sent organic traffic each month and top visibility for important and challenging keyword queries.

What’s your experience with managing risk with SEO tactics? Have you experienced what the online retailer above went through and focused anew on a sustainable and longer term online marketing strategy?

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HootSuite Rolls Out Paid Plans

Written on August 11, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

They’ve been twittering about it for awhile now and today HootSuite rolled out their Freemium pricing plan which goes into effect immediately for new users and next week for all current subscribers.

The packages range from free to 99 dollars a month. The deciding factor for most of these plans is how many accounts you run and how many team members you need to run it. Since the pricing plan is mostly aimed at businesses, the higher levels include enhanced stats and even a branded short URL as part of the premium plan.

The only thing you’ll get for free going forward is 5 accounts, 1 RSS feed and no additional team members. You’ll also have to deal with ads. If you don’t pay, HootSuite is going to make their money by placing ads in your Twitter stream. Interesting. . .

The worst thing about this roll out is the lack of detail. There’s a chart showing the tiers but there’s not a lot of explanation in regard to what each item means. For example, “enhanced stats,” is that more than they’re currently offering or will they be removing current stats from non-paying users.

Also, “ad free” – for those who choose not to pay, what kind of ads and how often? If I’m a marketer, can I get in on this?

HootSuite is getting around the questions by saying that you can have a 30 day free trial of any service level. ‘This period will allow you to experiment and discover which plan best fits your needs,” says the HootSuite blog.

Unless you need team members, most small businesses will likely stick with the free version, though I know of clients who will have a problem with the 5 network limit.

If you are managing multiple Twitter accounts, $4.99 a month isn’t too much to ask for the service, but it’s enough to make me want to look around at their competitors to see if I can get something comparable for free.

It was speculation before, but now it’s a decision you’re going to have to make if you’re a HootSuite users. Is it worth paying for?

You can click here to see the pricing plans

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HootSuite Rolls Out Paid Plans

Twitter is for People, Not Corporations Says a New Study

Written on August 4, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

It may seem like the Twitter-verse if full of companies hawking their wares, but a new survey by 360i says it isn’t so. They recently published a report called Twitter & the Consumer-Marketer Dynamic and frankly, I’m finding a large part of it hard to believe.

The report, which you can read in full here, has three key conclusions.

1. Twitter is primarily for people, not corporations.

– More than 90% of tweets come from consumers
– Only 12% of consumer tweets mention a brand
– When someone mentions a brand name on Twitter, they’re most likely talking about a Social Network (22% of mentions), or an Entertainment (17%) or Technology brand (17%). The top brands mentioned on Twitter are Twitter itself, Apple products/brands and Google

The trouble here lies in the definition of consumer vs brand. It doesn’t appear to be the same as consumer vs business, or marketer or anyone else with a financial agenda. The methodology states:

For this report 360i analyzed more than 1,800 tweets published between October 1, 2009 and March 31, 2010. Spam was removed from the sample and not counted in the final analysis.

What’s considered spam? Maybe a large number of tweets from marketers thus skewing the sample toward consumer usage. Since the survey goes on to define “brand” representation, one has to assume that the goal of this report is to look at how large companies are using Twitter for marketing, not your average small business person.

The other thing skewing the results is frequency. There are people (consumers) who tweet fifty times an hour as part of a full conversation with their friends. Most companies only send out a few tweets a day so they’d fall on the low side of the average.

2. Twitter makes the private space public.

– 94% of tweets are personal (vs. professional/self-promotional)
– 92% of users keep their tweets public
– 85% of tweets reflect original content (non-RTs)

No surprises here. Most people have no filter when it comes to posting on Twitter and they don’t seem to care who sees it.

3. Companies tend to talk at people – not with them.

– 43% of consumer tweets are conversational (@replies to other users)
– Yet only 12% of all marketer tweets demonstrate active dialogue with consumers
– Only 1% of consumer tweet that mention a brand are part of a conversation with that brand.

This is easy to see and fits in with the earlier statement about frequency of tweets. Most companies don’t have the time or the money to carry on this kind of conversation. But it’s also an issue of business vs. pleasure. It’s one thing for Kraft foods to send recipes out on Twitter but should their rep be responding to tweets about the latest celebrity scandal or pics of Susie’s new dog? Would consumers even accept that kind of behavior from a corporate entity or would it be seen as a bogus attempt to gain customer loyalty?

What do you think? Should companies attempt to emulate the tweeting habits of the consumer in order to fit in? Or should there be a clear dividing line between corporate behavior and personal behavior in social marketing?

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Twitter is for People, Not Corporations Says a New Study

Facebook SEO: Optimizing for an Audience of 500 Million

Written on August 4, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

At the 2009 MIMA Summit I gave a presentation on the intersection of SEO and Social Media suggesting that companies become publishers in their marketing and that the opportunity for search doesn’t just lie with Google, but also with social search.  At the time, Facebook’s internal search emerged as one of the search engine engines tracked by comScore. The idea being marketers can optimize their website content for standard search but also the content they publish within social networks and on social media content sites.

Fast forward to today:  comScore’s June 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings report shows that Facebook search queries have grown from 395 million in January of 2010 to 621 million queries in June. That’s almost half the monthly queries reported for Bing (1.7 billion) but not anywhere near the 10 billion plus queries on Google.

With over 500 million registered users worldwide, Facebook still presents an opportunity for marketers to better connect their social content with searchers through optimization. The optimization and search visibility opportunity with Facebook comes in two forms:

1. Facebook hosted pages ranking well in external search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
2. Content that can be displayed in the search results from Facebook’s internal search engine such as Facebook hosted pages, Facebook Questions and web pages served up through Facebook’s search results partner, Bing.

What to expect from Facebook Search:

Facebook internal search will show a mix of results from your Facebook network or other Facebook content like apps or groups, off-Facebook web pages and with the launch of Facebook Questions, might send you to Questions pages others have created. If the query reflects a question where none exists, it might prompt you to create one.  To segment the the type of Facebook content that’s searched, you need to use the search page, which interestingly does not allow you to filter by Questions.

Here are several tips to better understand what you can optimize for better search performance with Facebook content:

On Page Facebook SEO:

Pick your page name and vanity URL wisely. Use keywords in the “about” box when you write your description of the page as well as in the Overview section of the info tab.  Also, take advantage of FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to add custom content (text, images and links) that can includ relevant keywords that work together with your other keyword use.

When adding content like photos, discussion topics and status updates, think of keywords in titles when appropriate. Whenever you create a unique page on Facebook such as a discussion topic on a Fan page, there is an opportunity to implement most of the standard SEO tactics you would use with a web page.  If permissions allow, external sites can link to the discussion page, helping it to rank well in standard search engines outside of Facebook.

The newest opportunity to create content on Facebook that shows prominently in Facebook search results are Questions. Be thoughtful about keywords as you title your Facebook Question and the description. The more likes you get for your Question, the more like-ly it will show in search results, so make it interesting, descriptive, interactive (add a poll) and promote it to your network. You could also ask and answer your own questions.

As for getting your website’s pages into Facebook search results, Bing is the gatekeeper.  Facebook search results for out of network web pages are provided by Bing so inclusion in Bing is a necessity.

You can incorporate Facebook Open Graph protocol into your website and add a Like button to web pages for things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants but there are many other types supported. Basically, this is a set of meta tags that you’d add to the template or source code of your site. Jesper Astrom offers his thoughts on how to get indexed and rank in Facebook Search here that explains how the meta data plus the signal of Likes performed by readers of your web page content can influence rankings on Facebook.

Off Page Facebook SEO:

Get links to your fan page or any other public pages from relevant, external web sites. That could be your blog or other social profiles as well as author bios or wherever it makes sense to link to your Facebook Fan page.  You can also attract links to your page by attracting more fans/likes. Each like is a link or vote for your page, so be sure to give them a reason to “like” your content.

It is not the nominal number of fans on a page or in a group that makes your page rank. It is the social closeness of the page to the searcher that makes it rank. This means you shouldn’t spend all your money becoming number one. But you should spend your money on acquiring the right people to put you as number one, making you show up to all their friends and friends of friends when they search on related topics to you.

Amongst all the things you could be spending your digital marketing time on, does it make sense to focus SEO efforts solely on Facebook? I agree with David Harry, and would say probably not.

However, companies that have already committed to improving search performance of their web content on standard search engines and who are actively building a community on Facebook would do well to understand the additional opportunities for reach afforded by Facebook SEO. In other words, if you’re already under the hood, why not make sure you gain Facebook search benefits too?

Other useful Facebook SEO resources:

• Facebook SEO: Of Links and Likes – John Greer on Search Engine Watch
• Facebook Tests Show SEO May Be Possible With Open Graph – Nick O’Neil on All Facebook
• 10 SEO Tips For Maximizing Facebook Visibility – Marty Weintraub on Search Engine Land
• 10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know – Justin Smith on InsideFacebook

Have you tried optimizing content for better performance within Facebook? What about optimizing Facebook content for better visibility within external search engines?

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Portrait of an SEO

Written on July 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

The following is a guest post by Kpaul.

A long time ago, on an Internet far, far away (when I wrote for fun - and for free), I did a piece called Portrait of a Blogger. The year was 2002 and blogging was just beginning to really hit the mainstream hard. If you’re not familiar with the audience at Kuro5hin.org, they’re a snooty version of slashdot readers if you can imagine such a thing. (Mentioning both of these websites is outing my age, I think. I better not mention Compuserve.) The story was published on K5 and is still available today. I was told once that it drew a lot of traffic, although Mr. Foster never would share the exact numbers with me. (I imagine he’s laughing somewhere on his yacht these days.) It’s interesting to see how many of the links are still active in that article.

In any case, I thought about that story the other day when I was lamenting the fact that I didn’t start publishing my own content on my own sites earlier. (I spent the bubble years working for corporate media on the Death Star.) I let the idea of the piece gel in my mind for a while. I knew I couldn’t do another portrait of a blogger piece. I mean, I could, but I don’t think it would do as well as the previous one did. Also floating around in my mind was an okay from the esteemed Aaron Wall to submit a guest post for SEO Book. Eventually, these two ideas crossed paths, exchanged emails, and set-up a plan to combine the old Portrait of a Blogger piece with something relevant for Aaron’s audience.

So, without further ado, I give you a portrait of an SEO circa 2010

The SEO Newbie

Favorite software: SENuke
Favorite website: webmasterworld.com
Favorite drink: Jolt (cause that’s the stereotype and it was in Hackers the movie)
Favorite viral video: Numa Numa
Favorite rapper: 50 cent

A friend of their friend’s sister’s little brother makes money online, so it’s totally going to be possible. The SEO newbie looks forward to a life of an hour of work every week for untold riches. While more and more people are trying to make money online, many of them just don’t have what it takes to work for themselves online. While chasing the magic button - also known as the golden tip, the super duper affiliate secret, or even the extra double tip for making money online - the SEO newbie tends to get distracted from the one obvious thing that equals sucess - i.e. work. Once most SEO newbies find out making money online takes work (more and more of it as time passes and competition increases), they drop out of the game and go back to whatever it was they were doing. Before that, they’re usually found on Webmaster World gabbing about the latest “Google Dance.”

SEO Auto-Blogger

Favorite software: WordPress MU
Favorite website: Any with an RSS Feed
Favorite drink: Watered Down McDonald’s Pop (mass produced sugar water that sorta resembles soda)
Favorite viral video: Lazy Sunday (something everyone copied)
Favorite rapper: Black Eyed Peas

If one page in the SERPs is good, and ten pages in the SERPs is great and so on and so forth, what about 1 billion pages? That would be best, right? But how to write a billion pages worth of content? Enter the auto-blog. This spray and pray method of SEO is still tried by many new to the industry, but it is becoming more and more difficult to keep a site like this going for more than a few months. That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist, but there are few low level auto-bloggers who don’t end up getting burned. And yet auto-bloggers make up a large slice of the SEO landscape. This will undoubtedly change in the years ahead.

SEO Link Merchant

Favorite software: Yahoo! Site Explorer or any Online Link Tool
Favorite website: Any that will buy or sell a link
Favorite drink: Absynth (not legal anymore)
Favorite viral video: Star Wars Kid
Favorite rapper: Tupac

These people live and dream about links. From the value of links to anchor text to placement to link wheels, their world revolves around the power of the link. Since link selling and buying has gone into a shady black market type atmosphere over the last few years, some of these characters can be shady. A common technique is to peddle “text advertisements” for a low monthly rate to unknowing webmasters. While there are some websites and email accounts still operating in the open, there are also black hat link merchants in some very bad neighborhoods. While I probably shouldn’t mention it, there are some who see short term success using these methods. The thing is, online you want to play the long game. And for that, buying and selling links is out.

Phony SEO Guru

Favorite software: The autoresponder
Favorite website: forums.digitalpoint.com
Favorite drink: Acai Juice
Favorite viral video: That annoying frog techno thing!
Favorite rapper: Vanilla Ice

The schemes and scams are plentiful in the world of the phony guru. Yes, you too can make money by showing others how to make money. A lot of these so called gurus don’t even make money on the Internet other than peddling their ebooks and membership sites. The problem with these people is that after a person is burned by so many, they run the danger of not spending ANY money online. This can be just as bad as wasting money on worthless, phony gurus. For example, an SEO Book membership is a wise investment that will pay off in the long run. Don’t be afraid to invest money wisely after being burned by phony SEO gurus.

SEO Tail Chaser

Favorite software: The latest WSO!
Favorite website: warriorforum.com
Favorite drink: Budweiser (or something domestic and bland)
Favorite viral video: Anything their neighbor liked
Favorite rapper: Eminem

Usually found huddling around the phony gurus (which grow in numbers every month it seems as more and more people try to monetize the web), tail chasers are those people who try to copy current successful marketing methods online. If you study the whole rebill period of Internet marketing, there were a few people who started off strong (and somewhat legit), but as more and more people got into the game, the boundaries were pushed more and more. The highlight for me, I think, was seeing an elderly lady talking on a YouTube video about posting links to Google to make money. While some tail chasers may be able to make small (or even moderately large) amounts of money in a short time, they lack the skills (and vision) to replicate the success on a continual basis.

We interrupt this guest blog post for a shameless plug. On one of my blogs, I’ve started using D&D character alignments instead of ‘colored hats’ to tag various methods for SEO and marketing online. Okay, it’s not really unique and I doubt it catches on, but it gives more opportunities to categorize Internet marketers. We now return to our regularly scheduled guest blog post. Thanks, Aaron!

White Hat SEO

Favorite software: Vanilla Internet Explorer
Favorite website: mattcutts.com/blog/
Favorite drink: Water (good for you)
Favorite viral video: Anything LOL cats
Favorite rapper: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince

When not wearing their “I Heart Matt Cutts” t-shirt or coming up with ways to make their website more unique and useful for visitors, these individuals like to volunteer at local homeless shelters and nursing homes. But seriously, these people make an effort to do things above board online. Many are still able to make a good living while doing this. Many don’t have the patience for white hat SEO, which is a shame, because it’s one of the better long term methods of success online. Think of your visitor after they get to your site more than trying to trick Google into ranking you high in the SERPs and you’re on your way to becoming a high level white hat SEO, which comes with many special abilities and powers.

Black Hat SEO

Favorite software: xRumer
Favorite website: Any that will take a link - willingly or not
Favorite drink: Whiskey (wine is fine but liquor is quicker)
Favorite viral video: Anything from 4chan
Favorite rapper: NWA

There are some who fall between the tail chasers and the SEO grandmasters (of all persuasions) who have the ability to recognize an opportunity and jump on it, making a bit of money along the way. The problem is that most methods used with Black Hat SEO are short term. They may have a huge payout, but the model is not sustainable unless you can stay somewhat ahead of the crowd when it comes to new things to exploit online. While some are fine with this, most at this level have the ability to come up with unique ideas on their own. When you consider that there’s about the same amount of work involved and the non-black hat techniques last longer, it makes sense to try to get beyond this stage in your SEO evolution.

Grey Hat SEO

Favorite software: A little of this and a little of that
Favorite website: wickedfire.com
Favorite drink: Coffee (some mornings with a dash of rum)
Favorite viral video: Boom Goes the Dynamite
Favorite rapper: Drake

If you mix black and white, you get grey, of course. The grey hat SEO uses both white and black hat techniques. While they’re more open than those who wear a black hat most times, they are generally more cautious than people into white hat SEO. For the most part the mix of both (good and bad) vary at any one time with grey hat SEO. Over the years, this label has morphed somewhat into a blue hat SEO, with a few key differences. Grey hat SEO, to me, means more about techniques while blue hat SEO concentrates on a mixing of web properties with different values.

Blue Hat SEO

Favorite software: A little of this and a little of that
Favorite website: wickedfire.com
Favorite drink: Coffee (some mornings with a dash of rum)
Favorite viral video: Charlie the Unicorn
Favorite rapper: Ice Cube

I’m pretty sure I know who came up with this phrase, although I’m not exactly sure of their definition of the term. To me, it follows the ‘SEO Empire’ line of thinking that was created by Eli at Blue Hat SEO. So, it would be a mix of pure white and somewhat grey (or downright black) websites in a network online. So, garbage sites at the bottom of the pyramid point up toward the money sites at the top of the pyramid. How this differs from straight grey hat SEO, I’m not sure, but it’s used by quite a few people these days. For the most part, Blue Hat SEO peoeple are well versed in the way the Internet works. And if they don’t have skills, they have someone in their network who does. There are quite a few high level blue hat SEOs currently operating online.

Article Marketer

Favorite software: Google Docs
Favorite website: ezinearticles.com
Favorite drink: Green Tea (proven weight loss, act now!)
Favorite viral video: None (text based viral only)
Favorite rapper: Mos Def (very lyrical)

When they’re not actually banging out articles for their own or other sites, they’re thinking up ideas and topics for their next round of articles. They know the value of content online. This group is split like most others into various levels of quality ranging from garbage to modern literature and everything in between. You will notice if you look closely that the more successful article marketers have higher quality content. This is no coincidence. Of course, good content is only one small piece of the puzzle, but you may want to consider outsourcing your content needs to an article marketer.

Viral SEO Ninja

Favorite software: Anything related to email
Favorite website: digg.com
Favorite drink: Tang (it’s orange, it’s different)
Favorite viral video: lonelygirl15
Favorite rapper: Kanye West (marketing magic man - good or bad)

When it comes to linkbait and causing ripples in the blogosphere, there’s nothing like the skills of a high level viral ninja. Part Charlie the Unicorn, part Star Wars Kid, and with a dash or two of LOL cats and one very, very, extremely tiny bit of 4chan, the viral ninja can mix media to send a message, get a laugh, or compel people to tell their friends about the content. As more and more people come online and try to be viral, it’s becoming more and more difficult to be unique and stand out from the millions of other people online who are vying for attention. The viral ninja understands this and is already working on three or four projects that will drown the numbers for the “Please don’t taze me” video.

SEO Grandmaster

Favorite software: LAMP
Favorite website: SEOBook.com
Favorite drink: Vitamin Water (expensive, but worth it)
Favorite viral video: Dancing baby (old school…)
Favorite rapper: Grandmaster Flash

You don’t hear from these people too much on the forums or at conferences. They don’t typically have a very active blog. They do, however, spend their time making money online - most times quite a bit of it. They apply their SEO knowledge quietly in the background, slowly building their empire piece by piece. They understand marketing and business principles and employ them. These people learned early on that wasting time online - especially at forums chasing the magic button - is not a good thing. They learned how to buckle down and apply the knowledge that everyone who’s anyone has. They know it’s all about applying the information rather than just knowing about it. While you don’t hear much from these people publicly, when they do talk quite a few people tend to listen.

Real SEO Guru

Favorite software: Firefox browser + extensions
Favorite website: Any that they own or are involved with
Favorite drink: Orange Pineapple Juice (sweet, sour, but good for you)
Favorite viral video: All Your Base Are Belong To Us (cause they do)
Favorite rapper: Jay-Z (making piles of money)

What are the lyrics from Ghetto Boys about real gangsters not talking much? Go Google it. (Sorry, Matt, it’s a verb now. You know there are secret Google parties celebrating the fact. Smile.) But yeah, real gurus aren’t all talk and no action. Real gurus of the industry don’t pitch anything and everything just to make a buck. The real gurus are few and far between, but they do exist. If you run into one, be nice to them. Unlike the SEO grandmasters, they’re more public and don’t mind interacting with the public. That said, they tend to value their time, so don’t waste it. This path has the most opportunities for people who are into SEO. (In gaming terms, it has the highest level cap.) It’s a long road, and it’s not a quest that can be undertaken alone, but if you’re serious about SEO, this is the route you want to take.

The Future of SEO?

If you’ve been around for any length of time, you know that the Internet is still constantly changing. Some of the changes are for the better and some aren’t as good, but they all are something that everyone who works online has to deal with. The SEO of last week - or even today - isn’t the same SEO that is going to be in operation over the next decade. Personally, I see the word organic being more important.

By organic SEO, I mean not mass produced, not a trick, not a scam, not a scheme, but an actual relationship between publishers and website visitors. The sites that are able to build communities around themselves are going to be the ones that survive, I think. And there is no method of SEO known to man that can create a community - a real one - out of thin air. That said, SEO can be useful to help draw people to a website that is worthy of a community forming around it.

—–

The above was a guest post from K. Paul Mallasch, who runs kpaul media, which publishes local news communities like Anderson Free Press as well as many niche websites. You can contact him at kpaul.mallasch@gmail.com

A disclaimer from Aaron: I thought it was fun, but I loath rap music (especially that from asshats like Kanye West), and I realize that being a publisher in the SEO space is way more profitable than being labeled as an SEO guru. I also didn’t put the last picture in because he used me…and I felt that would have been a wee bit egotistical for me to publish a guest post highlighting me like that.

But the post is still a lot of fun & I am sure you can associate with at least 1 or more of the above profiles. If not then you haven’t been in the SEO space very long yet!

Original post:
Portrait of an SEO

Not Marketing to Baby Boomers? You Should Be!

Written on July 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing

There are 78 million Baby Boomers in the US today but they’re largely ignored when it comes to marketing. Why? Conventional wisdom says that these consumers, born between 1946-1964, already have brand loyalty and no interest in technology or trying new “trendy” products.

According to a report by The Nielsen Company, conventional thinking is all wrong.

“Boomers are an affluent group who adopt technology with enthusiasm (think about the number of parents or grandparents who regularly send e-mails or upload photos to Facebook and other sites). They have also shown a willingness to try new brands and products.”

The report goes on to say that Boomers spend 38.5% of the money spent on consumer packaged goods but less than 5% of ad dollars are being spent to market to this group.

Much of the problem comes from the fact that our advertising models are based on demographics that simply aren’t the norm anymore. Doug Anderson, Nielsen’s senior VP-research and thought leadership was quoted as saying:

“There will be a huge number of people over the age of 65, 75, and 85 over the coming decade. We’ve never had a population this big this old before. This is not something that demographers and anthropologists have tons of models sitting around that they can talk about. We as a species have never had this many older people before. It’s new ground.”

This needed shift in ad dollars isn’t just about print and TV, online marketing needs to catch up, too. The Nielsen report says that Baby Boomers watch the most video (9:34 hours per day), they make up 1/3 of all online users, social media users and Twitter users and they’re more likely to have broadband access than their younger counterparts.

It’s even more interesting to note that Boomers visit the same websites as the coveted 18-34’s, with only a slight shift in ranking when it comes to Facebook and YouTube.

What this all means is that you, as a marketer, need to start including Baby Boomers in your campaigns. They’ll buy a new Blu-ray player if you pitch it right. They’ll subscribe to your online photo sharing service and they’ll drop $200 on Twilight merchandise for the grandkids this holiday season. It appears that the only thing Baby Boomers won’t spend their money on is a savings account for their own retirement.

Original post:
Not Marketing to Baby Boomers? You Should Be!

Excessive Worry About Competition

Written on July 6, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities

Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more “move on please” rather than “let’s go!” types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign.

Competition is usually a good thing, it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to “Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47.”

Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable.

It isn’t so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics.

Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there!

However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low.

Certainly I’m not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them.

There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists:

• Business
• Sports
• Personal Relationships

Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind:

• The best team is not unbeatable
• The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords
• The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable

Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they’re good. However, it doesn’t mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor’s site.

You can’t win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose :-). Look at is as a learning lesson.

• What could you have done better?
• Where could you have pushed harder?
• Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities?

The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don’t torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it’s a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data - not a bad deal.

Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull.

So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently.

Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox, you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you’ll want to consider are:

• Number of backlinks from unique domains (don’t be *wowed* by the total link count)
• Anchor text distribution of external links
• Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links)
• Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com
• .Edu Links
• .Gov Links
• Is the exact match ranking?
• Is it all big brands?
• Are there lots of interior pages ranking?
• The on-page optimization of the site/page
• PageRank
• and so on…

There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools
:

• SEM Rush
• Compete
• Keyword Spy
• SpyFu
• iSpionage
• Alexa

We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums.

So while you shouldn’t ignore the competition completely you shouldn’t be consumed by it, particularly if it’s just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing.

Studying a competitor’s on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for “The Fountain of No Competition” promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from :-).

And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

Original post:
Excessive Worry About Competition

Woot! The Associated Press Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine!

Written on July 6, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

You may already be aware that The Associated Press (AP) has gone down a ludicrous path of insisting you owe them money, if you quote one of their stories.

Now it appears the news organization has been caught indulging in some double-standards, by quoting from Woot’s announcement that it had been acquired by Amazon.com. In light of this, the good-humored folks over at Woot have decided to point out the hypocrisy to AP.

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

LMAO!

The post continues with an offer to waive the money owed, in exchange for the AP buying today’s Woot deal–a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones.

Anyway, The AP, please send that proof of receipt to service@woot.com before the end of the day. We’re major digital players now. Don’t force us to pass this matter to a collection agency.

I don’t know about you, but coming back from a long weekend off is always hard. But boy, it’s so much easier when you get to enjoy someone sticking-it to the AP.

(Hat-tip)

Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Read the rest here:
Woot! The Associated Press Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine!

SMB’s Learning to Tie Social Media to E-Mail Campaigns

Written on June 23, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

From time to time I address the current situation of the SMB (small and medium business) as it relates to Internet marketing as a whole. It’s an interesting study because while the vast majority of the companies in the US fall into this category (some estimates place it as high as 95%) they are the least understood of all businesses as it relates to Internet marketing.

An article from eMarketer (hat tip to Mike Moran) takes a look at just how this group is trying to catch up with big business tactics as it relates to their use of e-mail and social media to help their businesses grow. From the looks of things there may be some traction this year but it has been slow in coming.

A survey of small businesses by e-mail marketing company AWeber found the most common tactics implemented last year were tweeting e-mail newsletters and sending out blog entries to e-mail lists. Fewer than four in 10 small businesses were engaging in those activities, and only about one-quarter had e-mail sign-up forms on their social profiles or links within e-mail messages to follow them on social sites.

The findings for 2009 can be seen below.

Moving forward however there appears to be a much greater interest in seeing these two marketing efforts be utilized more, especially together.

Many more small businesses have plans for the coming year, and more than three-quarters consider integration of e-mail and social at least somewhat important. A majority plan to allow users to sign up for e-mails directly from social media sites like Facebook. This tactic allows e-mail marketers to grow their lists—cited as the top benefit of integrating social and e-mail by one-third of respondents—by allowing consumers to use their channel of choice and sign up on their own terms.

Here’s the chart showing the rest of the findings.

Considering how most SMB’s approach search marketing, especially paid search, this combination makes sense. You don’t have to be in competition with the bigger brands with the deepest pockets in the e-mail / social media arena. As a result, your money and your resources can go a lot further. In this economy, this is critical for sure.

Also, most SMB’s real strength is cultivating existing customers who can then spread information about that business via word of mouth. The referral coming from a trusted source is the SMB’s best friend for sure. E-mail and social media are the best avenues for these types of businesses to do this. This has come after years of trying to get new customers through paid search and seeing conversion rates that just couldn’t support the expense.

So what works best with SMB’s in your opinion? Have you found the same success when combining e-mail and social media?

Read more here:
SMB’s Learning to Tie Social Media to E-Mail Campaigns

An Interview with Johns Wu

Written on June 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Internet success stories rarely get any sexier than the story of Johns Wu.