Seo for your living

seo

Network Solutions, a leader in providing online services to small businesses, is partnering with ECMTA and PeSA to present a Search Engine Optimization Seminar on October 3, 2007 in San Francisco, California. This seminar will educate small business owners on the importance of SEO and how it benefits their online business.

3 Ways to Get Screwed by Social Media Marketing

Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.

The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful

Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.

It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn’t pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.

Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.

It doesn’t matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer

Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don’t Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well

Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.

Linkbait can do a great job of helping you build high authority citations, but it still needs to be offset with directory links, community links, media links, and any other type of quality link you can get.

AltaVista is a Leading SEO Site, According to Google

As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].

Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.

Re: ranking in Live/MSN
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International Search Engine Marketing and Arbitrage

Limited Competition in Secondary Markets

I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can’t appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.

In The Slums of Search, Gord Hotchkiss wrote:

At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn’t trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search.

If Google can’t attract the right advertisers that also means that the organic search results in that geographic market are likely easy to manipulate. In many underdeveloped markets around the world, PPC offers greater opportunity than SEO because their is virtually no competition, but as the markets mature and margins get squeezed, doing SEO and owning a brand becomes more profitable than PPC. Either way you approach it, if you can compete on Google.com you should be able to dominate foreign markets. The only issue is scale.

Estimating Market Scale

Google offers an ad preview tool to show you what ads look like in various markets, and you can take advantage of their traffic estimator tool to estimate the size of a market.

If you are in a market dominated by engines other than Google (like China and Russia) then of course you have to use tools other than Google to estimate the size of the market.

How to View US Google Search Results

If you are international and do not want to get redirected to your local version of Google you can view Google.com’s results by going to Google.us. While on Google.com you can append &gl=us to see the related US targeted ads. Another option to view international Google search results by using this Google global Firefox Extension or use Joost’s plugins that turn off personalization.

How Google Makes Lazy US Only Advertisers Buy Foreign Traffic

While in the Philippines I have noticed that some $20 keywords (in the US) have few advertisers here, and many of the ads are for garbitrage websites. For example, one page advertising on student loans went to a page with stolen content, and had a page title about mesothelioma. If an advertiser choses US only search distribution but opts into the content network they are probably paying for exposure on that page.

When I switched Google to only search local pages the number 1 ranked page for online degrees was an off topic forum thread. Limited competition means great opportunity for those who understand the local culture and are able to gain international recognition.

Re: Free URL submition and Easy link exchange!
there's a SHYTload of directorie…

Understanding the Value of High Quality Editorial Blog Content

With an ever increasing number of ways for people to share content and an ever increasing number of competing channels the easiest way to estimate the value of a blog post is to look at the people citing it. Citations lead to new readers and subscribers…and more citations. If your posts are well cited it does not take many posts to get thousands of subscribers.

With 12 days left to go in an auction the NorthxEast blog is up to $5,500. Their blog only has 33 posts, and is a blog about blogging, which is a topic that is notoriously hard to monetize. Typically freelance bloggers get paid anywhere from $5 to $50 a post. If this site goes for $10,000 then it will be a valuation of $300 a post. Where was that extra value created? It is in the number of inbound links and number of subscribers. Over 700 bloggers link at that site and it has a couple thousand subscribers.

If you paid a freelance writer $100 or $200 per page think of the type of quality content you could create. If you value your time at $20 an hour and take 8 hours to write a post and 2 hours marketing it think of the potential return from a link perspective. You can rent average quality links for $10 to $20 a month, increase your risk profile, and get links saying nothing about your company, or you could pour that same money into getting people talking about you. If you know your topic well writing is an easy and cheap form of marketing.

If a site can go from nothing to being worth ~ $10,000 on 33 blog posts, imagine what that link equity and subscriber base would do to your brand and search rankings. If that same effort was used to market a #12 ranking site, suddenly that site might be in the top 2 or 3 and see a 10x increase in traffic.