Posts Tagged searchengineguide
Written on July 27, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, searchengineguide, seo
by Stone Reuning
Though the likes of Facebook and Twitter have taken the marketing world by storm, many of our online experiences though still start through search. With well-known brands and small businesses alike now using social media marketing in earnest, it’s worth exploring how to get more from your company social pages, namely helping them rank higher in online searches, alongside your corporate website.
After a few tweaks, your social media pages can give you more opportunities to dominate page one of Google and other search engines. Here’s an example. If you look at our properties, SEO Advantage isn’t only our company name - it’s also an important keyword and source of traffic for us. So we want all our web properties to dominate for that term. If you seach on “seo advantage”, you’ll see first our corporate website, then our Facebook page, our Twitter profile, our reviews on Kudzu, our marketing blog, our LinkedIn profile, and also a press release or article we’ve recently written.
The best thing is that most social media platforms allow for some customization that lets you optimize them, even if the standard no-follow tag applies to links. Here are 5 things you can explore across the various social media platforms you’re currently using.
1. Grow your following. Tthis seems to hold true for Facebook and Twitter as it does in the general realm of web sites - the more followers you have, the more authority your social media page carries. (Except when it comes to websites, you’re usually evaluating links, not followers, and the exact number can be a little harder to assess.)
Of course there are great benefits to having a large number of followers even beyond ranking higher. But did you know that the people you follow may also impact the search engines’ assessment of relevancy? That’s right, there may be benefit to following people in your direct line of business most importantly, as this helps strengthen the signal of what your business is all about.
2. Optimize your profile page’s meta tags and URL. Twitter creates your page title from your username and your name. Your bio becomes the description tag. Kudzu is using our company name and address as the title tag, which is great for local searches. Take note of which parts of your page are comprising the meta data and make sure it’s optimized accordingly. You can also nab your own name as part of your Facebook page URL now, too. (It used to be that you had to have a certain number of fans.) And your Twitter URL includes your username, so choose wisely.
3. Post links to your newly produced content to help it get indexed faster. Though social media sites use the no-follow tags, new content seems to be getting indexed faster when posted to Twitter and other social media sites. One reason may be that it gives an opportunity for your followers to link to it from other sites, like their blogs, for example. Since your Tweets and Facebook updates get exposure for pages you reference faster, your linked content can also gain exposure much faster than previously.
4. Optimize your updates. This will depend on the platform, but especially Twitter can offer opportunity here, since tweets themselves can show in search results.
The title tag for a tweet is around 42 characters: the first 30 characters or so of the tweet together with the username of the account tweeting it. So make sure any keywords appear as close as possible to the front end. You may also want to append RT@username at the end of your tweets when retweeting, and keep your tweets to 120 characters or so to avoid truncating.
On Facebook, keep your updates related to your company’s line of work as much as possible. This helps build the theme for the page.
5. Build links to your social media profile pages. As with any web page, inbound links matter. Include links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in your site footer or elsewhere so it can be found from every page of your site easily.
In closing, one word of advice. As with your regular online marketing and SEO efforts, the needs of the users take precedence. The above points are tweaks only. Build up the value of your social media accounts by serving your customers and followers well, and the rest will follow.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
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Optimize Your Social Media Pages for Top Rankings - 5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now
Written on July 23, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide
by Mike Fleming
Now that you’ve chosen your keywords to create ad group themes, you want to have ads that will move targeted users from whatever they’re doing online to being aware and interested in your product or service. Remember, since the Display Network operates by completely different rules and the users are in a completely different state of mind, the ads should be different than Search Network ads.
With Search, users are somewhere in the buying funnel; whereas with Display most of the users are likely not in the buying funnel at all. Therefore, the goal of the ads in the Search Network is to persuade the user that your solution is the best choice out of all of their options to make their life better; whereas the goal of the ads in the Display Network is to make users aware that you have a solution that could make their life better.
Here a some general characteristics of ads that are effective at starting users down the buying funnel:
1. Benefits - It’s not about you or even what you’re offering. It’s about the improvement of the user’s life in a way that’s more valuable than the cost associated with the purchase. Communicate that and then prove it on your landing page.
2. Relevance - You’ve picked keyword themes for your ad groups that will show on sites with those themes. So, is your ad relevant to the users hanging out on those sites? Make sure it is. You may find ads that don’t perform how you hoped because they are being delivered to the wrong kinds of sites. Make sure the ad and sites are a good match.
3. Sneak Peek - Let them know what they will learn about your offer after they click on the ad. This can help in two ways. It may deter some users from clicking because they are not really interested in what would be found. This is good because you are filtering out some users that may have clicked on your ad without being truly interested in what you’re offering. So, you save money on the wasted clicks that you would have received.
Also, it can give insight to the user about what kind of information they will receive once they click through. This is good because you are interrupting their current activity and asking them to go on a detour. So, if you can assure them it will be worth it, they can be more likely to click through and give your landing page a chance.
4. Call to Action - Tell the users what they should do once they get to your landing page. This is similar to #4 except you’re not only telling them what they’ll find, but what they should do on the landing page. And since your primary goal is to get them to enter the buying funnel, you want to….
5. General Offers - Most of these users are not ready to commit to a customer relationship right away. So, a good strategy is to hook them with something that is helpful to them in their pursuit of gaining the benefit you have claimed they would gain by becoming a customer. Therefore, offering free sample, the ability to calculate ROI or savings, a free information download, or whatever is applicable to your business is a logical conversion step for this audience. Your offers can get more specific if you get to the place where you’re writing ads for specific sites and you are targeting those specific users.
I remember a professor of mine always said, “There are no rules, just strong tendencies.” These are good “tendencies” to follow when creating your Display Network ads. But, as you get to know your audiences more and more and test your ads, you will adjust according to what works for them.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Continued here:
Take Your Online Business to New Heights with the Display Network - Part 3
Tags: a-good-match ,a-good-strategy ,a-some-general ,business ,google-display ,online-business ,ppc campaigns ,search engine marketing ,search-marketing ,searchengineguide ,user
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Written on July 23, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide
by Jennifer Laycock
Tags: a-broad-launch ,a-creative-and ,a-little-deeper ,a-social-media ,campaign ,campaigns ,content ,information ,price ,searchengineguide ,social media ,success ,target ,video
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Written on July 20, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, searchengineguide
by Jennifer Laycock
A few weeks ago I wrote a handful of articles on how to develop a proper social media strategy by developing goals, breaking those goals into supportive goals and matching goals to appropriate tactics. Those three articles outline the foundation that needs to be laid for any good social media plan, but your job doesn’t stop there. In fact, if you want to do things properly, your job is just getting started.
First, let’s quickly recap what your process would look like if you were to map it out based solely on those three articles. For each of your primary goals, the process might look a little something like this:
You would have started with your primary goal, broken it down into supportive goals, matched those goals to appropriate tactics and determined which social media outlets best allowed you to implement those tactics. After a few weeks or months, you’d sit down and ask yourself if you’d met your primary goal.
There’s really nothing wrong with going about the process this way, but there is a better way. What you need to do is understand the area between the outlets and success…that grey area where things can go right or wrong and you can be completely oblivious.
Understanding Micro Goals
Within that grey area is where our micro goals are going to live. These goals will sound familiar to most of you, because they’re actually the types of “goals” that get kicked around by people who know very little about social media strategy. Things like number of Facebook followers or number of RSS subscribers. Things that on the surface are almost worthless, but when combined with a solid strategy actually become crucial to the long term success of your campaigns.
Micro-goals are basically the various numbers you can tally up from your involvement in different social media outlets. They can easily be tracked and tallied over time and they give you a concrete gauge of your interactions with consumers and how those interactions are changing over time.
Establishing Micro Goals
You’ll need to have worked your way through your strategy to the point of selecting your social media tools before you’ll be ready to establish your micro goals. For the most part, there are universal micro goals that will need to be tracked across the board for all companies. These will serve as the starting points to help you realize what you should be tracking.
You’ll also need to have a solid understanding of your goals and supportive goals so you can fine tune your micro goals to your specific needs. For example, everyone will want to track the number of RSS and Email subscribers to their blog, but only some companies will need to track the number of PDF downloads or the number of leads generated from the blog.
Here are a few examples of specialized micro goals that might be tied to specific campaign goals:
If you are using Facebook to drive people to events or sales, RSVPs will become an important part of you campaign and an essential micro goal to track. If you’re using Flickr to build up press relations with bloggers and mainstream media, tracking the number of times your Creative Commons licensed photos are used will be important to track.
Sit down with your team, talk through your strategy and examine the list of actions consumers can take on each of the social media platforms you plan to utilize. Then add these to your list. Your finished product should give you quite a hefty list of things to track over the course of your campaign.
The Next Steps
Now that you understand what micro-goals are and how to establish them, you’re ready to learn how to put them to work to improve the performance of your campaigns. In my next post, I’ll talk about how to use these newly defined micro-goals to fine tune your social media efforts as you’re moving forward with your campaigns.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Original post:
Understanding and Establishing Micro Goals for Your Social Media Campaigns
Tags: a-outlets-best ,a-proper-social ,a-tools-before ,campaigns ,flickr ,goals ,number ,primary ,process ,searchengineguide ,social
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Written on July 19, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide
by Stoney deGeyter
Note: Recently I’ve gotten some ribbing from friends and colleagues about my exceedingly numerous multi-part posts. In order to wean myself off my favorite form of not-having-to-think-about-what-I’m-going-to-write-about-next, I’ve combined all 12 parts of this series into a single post. Enjoy! 
Part 1: Guilty of Crimes No One Committed
A lot of people subscribe to the “Guilt by Association” theory in online marketing. This theory suggests that you are who you associate with. I agree there is some definite truth to this mindset, but, like a lot of things, it can also be taken to a paranoid extreme. This fear leads some people into a paralysis that ultimately hinders their online marketing efforts rather than helping them.
“Guilt by Association” extremists work hard to keep themselves squeaky clean. They tread extra carefully with who they associate with in an effort to ensure that they are never found guilty of crimes they haven’t committed. In order to stay “pure”, they avoid having online relationships with some who they believe may have broken some rule at some point that, likely, nobody even cares about.
Part 2: Google’s Guidelines Don’t Rule the Web
With Google controlling so much market share, many business owners and online marketers are scared of doing anything that might seemingly violate Google’s Guidelines. We know Google looks at both positive and negative attributes, including your associations, when developing your overall trust profile. But we often do ourselves a disservice when we let Google’s Guidelines dictate everything we do on the web - even in areas that don’t have any specific connection to Google.
There is nothing wrong with keeping a clean profile and ensuring you don’t do anything that violates the search engine guidelines. There is also nothing wrong with making sure you associate your online profile with people you know will help you and not hurt you. But there comes a point where it borders on paranoia, at best, and counter-productive, at worst.
Part 3: You Have No Control Over Who Associates with You
One of the problems with worrying too much over your online profile is that you have little to no control over who associates themselves with you. Anybody can link to you, anybody can scrape your content, anybody can share your post with their friends, and anybody can retweet you. If you’re unhappy about who’s doing any of these things, your sole recourse is to contact them, ask them to stop, and then cross your fingers.
Google (and the other search engines) know this. They knew it back when they made links a part of their algorithms. They knew it when people started scraping and duplicating your content. And they know it now in an age of RTs, Likes, Mixxes, Stumbles, and whatever else we do with content we like.
Google will not hold you responsible if someone promotes you and then goes off and violates Google’s Guidelines.
Part 4: You are Responsible for Who You Associate With
If there is one constant in the world of online promotion, social media profiles, and search engine rankings, it is that you do have some responsibility for who you choose to associate with. In the real world, it is often said that you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they have. If you’re associating with thieves, liars, spammers, and cheats, you don’t have to be a thief, liar, spammer, or a cheat to get the reputation of one (or as an enabler of one). Either way, your associations affect you.
Part 5: You Are Not Responsible for the Entire History of Who You Associate With
There is some truth, both in real life and on the web, that you can learn a lot about a person by who they associate with. But it is also true that you cannot not be held accountable for the actions of every person you’ve shaken hands with.
In the social sphere of the web, retweeting or liking someone’s single message is not an endorsement of every tweet, post, thought, or blog they ever published. Even the worst offenders do something right! Making note of the positive doesn’t suddenly hang all their negative around your neck as if you’ve endorsed it all.
Parts 6-10: yada yada yada
Part 11: Everyone’s Got Some (Negative) History
No matter how squeaky clean you want to keep your social media profile, the only way to stay squeaky clean is to not associate yourself with anyone. The only person who does not have something negative in their profile is likely the person who has no profile whatsoever.
Or you can check the complete historical profile of every person before you RT, Stumble, Like, or whatever. Of course, even with those who pass the test, what guarantees do you have that they won’t do something shady in the future? Not only do you have to check the historical profile before you connect with them, you have to keep checking back to make sure you still want to be connected with them.
Part 12: We Are All Violators
Sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you’re going to violate some guidelines somewhere, including Google’s. It’s inevitable. Which is why we can’t live and breathe by every guideline that Google puts out.
Keep in mind, those who try hard to stay violation-free are often those that violate guidelines the most. They just hide it better.
And the search engines likely know this too.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Go here to see the original:
Guilt by Association: Do You Really Know Who You Are Linking To, Parts 1-12
Tags: a-clean-profile ,a-lot-about ,associate-with ,control-over ,friends ,marketing ,online ,person ,post ,profile ,search ,search-engine ,searchengineguide ,social ,theory
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Written on July 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide
by Mike Fleming
So, you’ve come to realize that there’s a whole Display Network out there through Google AdWords that, if utilized correctly, will take your online business to new heights. But, you’ve also realized that’s a big “if utilized correctly.” You may have been burned by the Display Network before (formerly called the Content Network). Maybe you just jumped right into AdWords because you knew you wanted more traffic for your site. You heard how easy it was to get it by whipping up a few keywords that were relevant to what you were offering and by writing a few ads to entice the searchers to your site. Then, since you were never taught that the Search and Display networks operate by completely different rules, you went ahead and turned them both on and started getting more traffic.
Man, getting traffic can be so easy…. and dangerous to your bottom line. The truth is, there is an art and science to getting traffic just like any other vocation. It takes skill and knowledge to be successful. So, when it comes to utilizing the Display Network, you need to gather the knowledge that is going to enable you to use the tool correctly to accomplish your goals.
Here we go…
Keywords
Google reads keywords within a Display Network ad group differently than a Search Network ad group. On the Search Network, your chosen keywords are matched to queries that users perform within search engines. On the Display Network, Google determines one theme from all of the keywords added to your ad group. Then, it matches that theme with the themes of specific pages in it’s Display Network and your ad is eligible to appear on that page.
For example, let’s say I’ve added the following keywords to my ad group -
acoustic guitar lessons
easy guitar lessons
free guitar lessons
guitar lessons
guitar solo lesson
online guitar lessons
rock guitar lessons
There really can be no mistake about what the theme of this ad group is…guitar lessons. Well, Google has a bunch of domains and pages in it’s Display Network that it’s determined also has that same theme, like this one….
Therefore, your ad and those pages are matches and you are now eligible to enter the auction for those the specific ad spots available on those pages.
Now, just like you should be testing and optimizing the keywords you use in the Search Network, you should do the same with your keyword themes in the Display Network. Which keyword theme will perform better for my marketing goals, “guitar lessons” or “guitar tabs?” Only one way to find out. Test.
You may even use a group of keywords that describes a keyword theme you’re going for. So, instead of explicitly using your root keyword “guitar lessons” in all of your keyword choices, you could come up with a list of keywords like the following…
strings
capo
acoustic
electric
tune
les paul
gibson
rock
tabs
guitar
So, here we just played some word association with what we’re offering to feed the Google algorithm monster some words to chew on to come up with a theme. They will determine the sites that match and then you will determine if the sites are a good match for you. It’s kind of like you are the giver and Google is the taker in the old game show $25,000 Pyramid…
Just like you keep keywords that perform well and eliminate keywords that don’t perform well in your Search Network campaign, so you do the same with these ad group keyword themes. These themes act like hunters to go out and find sites that will accomplish your marketing goals.
Here are some rules to remember when choosing your ad group keywords:
1. Match types don’t matter (except negative). Google is simply looking for a theme.
2. Up to 50 keywords are analyzed. Even 50 is too many if you ask me. You are looking to communicate a specific theme of the websites you’d like to try your ads on. This should not take many keywords to communicate this theme.
3. Negative keywords matter. If there are words on pages that signal that your desired audience is not reading this page, then you can add them as negatives. So, if you sell guitars but not classical guitars, you may want to add “classical” as a negative keyword.
4. Volume of keywords doesn’t matter.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
More:
Take Your Online Business to New Heights with the Display Network - Part 2
Written on July 15, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide
by Stoney deGeyter
Keyword research is a funny thing. You can gain a lot of knowledge about what words people use when searching on the engines, but it tells very little about what a person wants when they search using a particular keyword or phrase. The intent behind the search is the missing component, and I don’t know of any keyword tools that get far enough inside the searcher’s heads to know what exactly the searcher’s intent is.
Many people, when performing keyword research, look primarily at the search volume of a phrase and whether the phrase appears relevant to what they do or sell. On that analysis alone keywords are chosen or rejected.
Search volume isn’t always the best way to choose keywords.
A targeted phrase isn’t always as it appears
A lot of phrases can change meaning significantly just by changing word order or the addition or removal of a qualifier. Lets say you sell a brand of underwear called Awesome Underwear. Well, if a keyword phrase is “awesome underwear suck,” clearly that is not a phrase you want to target or use on your website. Or perhaps you see searches for “awesome underwear wedgies.” In most cases this would be caused by people searching for information on how Awesome Underwear causes wedgies, a major complaint spreading like diarrhea throughout the internet.
On the other hand, what appears to be a negative phrase for one company can actually be a positive for another. Perhaps there is a company called Bad Ass Undies that’s known for creating underwear that actually prevent wedgies, even in the toughest of boy’s locker rooms. In this case, searches for “bad ass undies wedgies” is performed by people looking for more info on how the undies work and if, alas, they truly can stand the wedgie test. If you’re optimizing the website for Bad Ass Undies, “wedgies” a word you definitely want to target.
As I said earlier, sometimes changing the word order can have a profound effect on whether a keyword phrase is a viable one or not. A good example of this is is “wedding planning” vs. “planning wedding”. Some may be looking for a person to manage their wedding while others may be looking for tips on how to plan a wedding themselves.
Finally, there is always the case where a phrase changes meaning without changing word order but by changing the inflection used in the searchers mind.
This happened to me the other day as I was looking for a headset for my phone. I saw a box on the shelf that read “cordless telephone headset.” My first thought was, “oh, look, a cordless headset.” But alas, it was merely a headset for a cordless phone. Two very different things but both use the same words in the same order.
Before deciding to optimize your site for “cordless telephone headset” you need to determine what it is people are looking for. Get this wrong and your visitors will quickly leave.
The best tool I’ve seen for determining visitor intent is Google. Do a search for your phrase and look at the results. If the majority of the results are cordless headsets then you have to assume this is what people mean when they type in that phrase. When people land on your site using that phrase, these are the products you need to display. If you show corded headsets for cordless phones instead, you’re going to have higher bounce rates.
Understanding your visitors intent with keywords doesn’t always boil down to the obvious. This is a good check for all of your keywords. Sometimes there are other industries you may not be aware of that are using the same terminology. A quick check in the search results can be quite telling as what your keywords actually mean.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
More:
You Keep Using That Keyword. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
Written on July 8, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide, seo
by Mike Moran
I wrote a post in this space over a year ago that advised small businesses on how to attract links to their Web sites. In that article, I offered the somewhat contrarian advice that spending lots of time begging sites to link to you might be time better spent building content that entices them to do the same thing, but without you having to ask.
Recently, someone commented on that post, asking why their link building efforts aren’t working and wondering how to do better. Here is part of what was asked:
I built this site over 60 days ago, spent 45 days linking with search engines, Squidoo sites, my blogs, etc, but now when I do a link search thru webmaster tools, i see 128 links, all mostly from a few sites that i know. I don’t see anything from pages that i purposely linked to mine, and what about the submission to 800 search engines and 45 directoriess a month ago. I get email every day that I have been added, but still only 128 links. If i do this same link search in Yahoo, I get a totally different number and higher.
So, link building, done the old-fashioned tin cup way, can be quite difficult. As the questioner has learned, Google doesn’t like to come clean about how many links you really have. Yahoo! tells you a lot more, but with the move to Bing, it’s hard to know how long Yahoo! Site Explorer will be supported. So, it’s not easy for you to keep track of your links and it might start getting harder.
And why are you keeping track of links anyway? The SEO gurus tell you it is all about link juice, that elusive quality that search engines assess in determining the quality of your page. For Google, that algorithm is called PageRank, and the gurus tell us that the quantity and quality of the links to your pages pass that coveted link juice, which provides Google the information it needs to know which pages shine above the rest. They don’t merely contain the search terms being searched for, but they are good pages because they attract links from other places. The gurus are right about all of this, but they go off the rails when they suggest that you go out of your way to get people to link to your site through begging for links. It can work, but that kind of thinking can quickly get out of control.
I am more and more frequently hearing about companies buying links to improve their link juice—some lament that there is no other way to do it. You should realize that if the search engines get wind of what you are doing, you will be penalized, but what’s more, if buying links actually works, the search engines will start deemphasizing links as part of their ranking algorithm. The engines are already beginning to look at social media activity as part of how they decide a page’s quality, so sites with many links that get few views, comments, tweets, and other measures of quality will begin to look suspect. Old-fashioned link campaigns will also result in links that fit the same low-quality profile that paid links do.
So, what’s a marketer to do? I hate to keep repeating the same old shopworn advice, but you need to focus on your content. If you create content that is truly helpful to your customers, you should expect sites to link to it without being asked. And you’ll get the social media activity around that content that further proves to the search engines that your pages are the ones to favor in the rankings. Instead of figuring out how to manipulate your links, it might be time to break down and actually give searchers and search engines what they want.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Read the original here:
Is it time to reassess your linking strategy?
Tags: a-few-sites ,a-lot-more ,a-month-ago ,above-the-rest ,explorer ,flickr ,information ,link ,links ,search ,search engine marketing ,searchengineguide ,space ,web search engine
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Written on July 8, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, searchengineguide
by Jennifer Laycock
The past few days, I’ve been talking about the need to establish solid goals around which to build you social media efforts. We’ve looked at why you need to have goals, we’ve explored the three categories of goals to help set the foundation for your efforts and we’ve talked about breaking your primary goals into supportive goals.
Now it’s time to dig even deeper and start learning how to attach tactics to our goals. After all, a goal you have no way to reach is useless. It’s when you begin to have a solid enough understanding of the many ways to leverage both social media as a whole and the individual social media outlets that you can begin using those goals to create action plans.
Begin by Reviewing Your Supportive Goals
As you know from my article on supportive goals, it’s important to take broad goals and break them down into smaller ones. This helps you gain more perspective on the various ways you might leverage social media. It can be overwhelming to sit down and figure out how to use social media to “increase sales.” It’s a lot easier to sit down and figure out how to use it to “increase average order size” or “clear excess inventory quickly.”
For this stage of your strategy, you need to start with your primary and supportive goals.
As you can see from the example above, we’re working from a primary goal of “Building a Reputation as Experts.” That’s a fairly tall order, but once we start to break it down into a supportive goals, it begins to make a bit more sense. In this instance, we’ve decided to focus on four key areas.
- Establish a Blog Home Base - We’ll want to have a central clearing house on the social web to share information, allow for comments and conversation and generally build a repository of expert information. The blog is the most natural location for this.
- Approach MSM online
Tags: a-product-site ,book ,california ,copy-writing ,country ,data ,facebook ,foundation ,guide ,process ,searchengineguide ,social ,social media ,supportive
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Written on June 21, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide, seo
by Mike Moran
I am increasingly getting a question from organic search marketers about where the “line” is between sharp SEO tactics and spam. Basically, it’s the SEO equivalent of “how many miles per hour over the speed limit can I go without getting pulled over?” If this sounds like an interesting question to you, I’d like to humbly respond that you don’t get it. You don’t get search marketing in particular or Internet marketing as a whole. And it’s holding you back more than you probably realize.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. Many folks make a living by fooling Google and the other search engines. These “black hat” SEOs are extremely clever and hardworking, and they keep at their craft every day. They stay on top of the trends and they surf the changes each day so that they can stay on top of the results.
There’s just one problem with this description. It’s not you.
I mean, if you are a top black hat SEO, what are you doing reading this column from me? If you’re reading this column, you are not anywhere near the knowledge level of a top black hat SEO. I know that because I am not either. I couldn’t begin to do what they do, even though I have decades of experience in search technology and have forgotten more about SEO than most people will ever know.
So, if you are asking where the lines are, because you want to go right up to those lines and then stop, you are fooling yourself in several ways. First, you think that I know the answer—I don’t. Second, you think that if you knew the answer that you’d then be able to skillfully manipulate your site so that it ranked highly—you probably won’t.
But the biggest problem is that it is entirely the wrong question for you, borne out of the wrong attitude toward search marketing. Your goal for search marketing ought not to be to manipulate the search engines to show your pages and manipulate your customers to buy. No, I am not here to help you get into heaven—if you can live with your conscience after manipulating folks, I am not here to condemn you or absolve you from your sins. No, I am counseling you against the manipulation approach for a more basic reason—it won’t work.
You won’t succeed at manipulating Google. And you likely won’t succeed at manipulating customers, either—at least not for very long. The Internet, and social media in particular, has changed that game. You might be able to fool one person, but you can’t fool everyone and they talk to each other all the time.
So what is the right strategy? It’s simple to understand, but difficult to execute. You need to have what people want (the product or service they want as well as the information they want) and you must promote it and optimize it and draw attention to it. In other words, you must do your marketing.
If you do, people will notice and eventually Google will, too. But if you instead want to see how fast you can go without getting caught, you’ll find out that you made very good time, but you didn’t know where you were going.
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Is Your SEO Strategy to Barely Avoid Spamming?
