Very new ideas for the old internet

All Link Types and SEO

This article covers a much discussed topic in the SEO community. Also, clients and often site owners come up with questions about what links to get, and how to get them. Note that I will not consider reciprocal links here, because of better alternatives, and because their effectiveness only applies to a small number of sites, who use them under 10% of their overall link ratio. I will review the main types you want to get for your site.

The natural one-way links.
This one is solely based in good content and resources. This is the safest method of link building available as far as search engines, which look at the “intent” of links. But it is also the slowest. If your site is new, then as part of its launch, submit it to niche web directories. Start with a few highly trusted directories, but do not have more than 10-15% of your overall links coming from them. Don’t overlook industry-specific directories that may be paid or unpaid. These usually send highly qualified traffic and can be a real bargain. Directories will get you site many natural one-way links, at a natural speed of growth. This combination of type and speed is very beneficial. Look for sites that would benefit from offering users your content.

Linkbaiting, or link bait.
This one is not easy, and involves creativity. But it is worth every effort. Linkbaiting refers to content, videos, images or anything on your site that is created with the intention of increasing links to it. It is highly effective in getting links, probably the cheapest too, based on the cost of the “bait” you use, has no negative effects from the search engines, at least not for the moment, since all links generated look natural. When complemented by social bookmarking, the networks associated with these links will add even more value to them.

Paying for links, or paid links.
These links can have great short-term search benefits. These are good mainly for sites that have tons of pages with content, and have been well established online for years. In addition, these sites also have tons of natural links to them, again because they had been well established online for years. These are not recommended for new sites. Look for sites that are highly on topic with yours, and in complementary niches. A very important factor in the evaluation of these links, like any other, is age. And the latest “Google Slap” effect were sites fall pass the top 30 in the listings, is affecting primarily those which do heavy link buying.

Bad links and their effects.
Outbound links play a big role in the way search engines determine who your “neighborhood” is. Bad neighborhoods will affect your search engine rankings. Things like FFA (Free For All) link pages, links farms, etc, fall in this category. Note that this has nothing to do with your pages going into the supplemental index. That is not the kind of penalty these links cause for your site. And the amount of bad links considered is a big one. A small amount of them would not trigger a penalty, but make sure that your site is not related in any way to those link patterns.

Tags: bad links, link bait, Link Building, link building seo, One way links, paid links, reciprocal links, search engine optimization, seo

Affiliate Programs And SEO

While good SEO skills will get your page noticed by search engines by themselves there other tricks to help increase their effectiveness. Affiliate programs can be a good way to increase your website’s own SEO attributes. There are different types of affiliate programs. An older one would be the old banner concept which predates pay-per-click. Google’s Adwords is a modern incarnation of this where by people can profit from Google’s pay-per-click business. Let’s look at some of these.

Not all affiliate programs have to be for profit. There are many people who are just looking to get traffic to their sites by cooperating with other sites. Just as a strong page on your website can help increase the rankings of your other pages rankings on affiliates’ sites can do the same. Don’t confuse affiliates with guest books or link pages. An affiliate is working with some kind of service or business to make a profit so it is a function of commerce. This will help with the search engines’ rankings. Search engines look for link pages and don’t give them a very high ranking so they wouldn’t help you very much. However since affiliate pages are used for commerce they are going to have a much stronger ranking. Affiliates can act as a team just like the pages on your site.

Another point to consider is that pages that are involved with affiliate programs are going to be set up well in order to profit from them. So this is analogous to strong members of a team making a colossal team effort. Enough strong pages driving traffic to your site is lie diverting a river to a drought stricken town.

Fortunately affiliate programs are easy to find so just keep in mind what kind you would be willing to do for your site. Don’t give yourself more work than you need to.

Tags: Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, seo

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords.  Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

Tags: google, Internet Marketing, marketing, MSN, rankings, seo, serps, Yahoo

Are search engines male or female?

More column inches have been written about how to please the search engines and persuade them to bestow favour on your website than almost any other internet-related topic.  But as far as I know no-one has previously tried to understand their gender: do they behave more like a man, or more like a woman?  Understand their gender can surely help us to gain a better insight into how to appeal to them.

MSN is very clear: MSN is a man.  Everything about MSN is straightforward: do the right thing and you will be recognized.   Follow the advice of the experts and you will surely rank highly on MSN as long as your competitors are less diligent in this respect than you.  Good content, relevant titles, keyword-related metatags, loads of quality inbound links, varied keyword anchor-text, a good smattering of deep links and a #1 ranking will be your reward.  I have gained #1 positions on MSN for moderately competitive keywords within a week of trying.  What you see is what you get with MSN: he is a man.

Is Yahoo a man or a woman?  I find it hard to decide.  Perhaps it is a serial transsexual, or maybe just androgynous. Sometimes Yahoo is as straightforward as a man: do the right thing, pay your dues and join the club, no complications.   This happens to me on some of my keywords: I have followed the rules and gained my reward.  On others, apparently no more competitive, and where I am just as well-optimized, if not better, I am nowhere.  For these words, she is a woman, immune to my blandishments.

On the other hand, Google is surely all woman, with womanly wiles and deeply imbued with womanly mystery.   If you want to penetrate deep into Google you need to learn the art of seduction.  Is there anything on the planet more frustrating than trying to optimize your website to rank highly for a competitive keyword on Google.  Sometimes I think not.   She is like a woman that is always just out of reach.  She will not reveal her secrets for even the largest bunch of flowers.   I know that I have the best content in my category, more quality links, deeper links, more varied anchor text, more articles and more of everything that is supposed to drive positioning than any of my competitors.  By far.  Not a single one of my 5000 odd backlinks is directly reciprocated, and I have at least 10 inbound links for every outbound one.   I have never paid for a text link ad, or joined a link farm.  A decent proportion of my inbound links are voluntary recognition of the value of my site by 3rd parties.   Is this enough?  Well, yes and no. I do have the best positions on all the search engines, measured on average on all the keywords that I target.   But whereas my positions are undisputedly dominant in MSN, they are only excellent in Google.  I am only 2nd or 3rd on my target words.   I do very well, but I don’t blow away the competition like I do on the others.   Google has recognized my worth, somewhat, but she has not opened herself to me entirely.

Like a woman, she has her favourites: sites which appealed to her long ago, but whose luster has long since dimmed in the eyes of the rational observer, can still be favoured with a top position.    She is also fickle.  I have been trying to build position for a single keyword for a couple of years now.   (It’s a fairly competitive category – around 36 million sites feature this word.) When I started my efforts I was at about 25 (by virtue of this single word being part of all the other keywords-phrases that I compete on).  I have steadily built anchor text links with this single word into directories, into articles, into listings on other sites.  Lots of these links are on pages with good PR.  Better than 80% of these links are nicely inserted into the middle of well-written text.

The outcome: every few weeks I find I have moved up to a respectable position: say 10th, sometimes even 6th or 7th.   Then, the next day, or even an hour later, I fall back to 14th or even 18th.   She likes me, she flirts with me occasionally, she tolerates my company and sometimes I even manage to amuse her.   But just when I think I could expect a kiss in return as my lips approach, she turns her cheek away and I am banished to the outer circle of courtiers.  But her appeal is such that I am drawn again into attempting to understand her mysteries.  But I feel that if I ever make it, and my lips touch hers, and she longs for me as I long for her, I will never be sure what it was that I did to merit such bliss.

Black Hat SEO – What Never To Do Or Get Banned

While there are many legitimate skills in SEO there are also those that can work but if you get caught using them the results can be disastrous. When search engine optimization became an issue many techniques were employed because at that point the search engines used a much simpler algorithm. As these tricks were used to exploit the simpler algorithms they were also served to make them more advanced. Let’s look at a few tricks.

Cloaking and redirects are methods whereby you show one page to the search engine but a different one to the visitor. A redirect merely brings visitors to one page and then sends them to another page by refreshing the page with one on their site. Cloaking involves fooling a search engine’s indexer into thinking that it is something else and getting the indexer to send false information back to its boss.

Other techniques involve overloading metatags with keywords or even hiding keywords in plain site on the webpage. A variation on this technique is to shrink the keywords so that are too small to be seen by the naked eye.

Using unrelated keywords is another trick especially when combined with the above mentioned tricks. By using unrelated keywords in this manner you can drive traffic to your site from multiple sources.

Using an overly optimized landing page can also work. This is not the same thing as a legitimate landing page. In this case you use any and all methods to overly optimize a single and use that to lead people to your site. This would involve using all of the above methods for this one page.

The ultimate penalty for using the unscrupulous methods is banishment from the search engines themselves. Be careful when you employ these dark methods for fear of this punishment. Being penalized is one thing but to not even be on a search engine in the first place is your worst case scenario.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, seo

Bad SEOs? What about Bad SEO Clients?

You hear all the time about bad SEOs. Bad SEOs are offering worthless services, failing to deliver on their internet marketing promises, polluting the search engine results—well, a lot of bad things.  But how much ever gets said about bad SEOs’ spiritual counterparts: bad SEO clients?

As an SEO, I can see things from the other side of the table.  You see, despite trying hard to make it clear I’m a good, ethical, results-oriented, smarter marketing, white-hat SEO, I have gotten no end of inquiries from bad prospective SEO clients.  Sure, no one who gets cheated is ever entirely to blame, and some cheated businesses are entirely blameless.  But the bad SEOs would have too small a market to stay in business if it weren’t for almost-as-bad clients.

Shades of Bad SEO Clients

First, let me make clear what I mean by “bad” SEOs. Bad SEOs are bad because they either do unethical things to get e-marketing results, or because they consistently fail to deliver results.  A good SEO delivers results and does it without trampling over other people’s rights (like submitting automated comments to their websites or trying to get good sites de-indexed).

A bad SEO client, in turn, is someone who will only be satisfied (albeit temporarily) with a bad SEO.  Because they refuse to consider ethical web consultants or smarter marketing strategies, they are creating markets for the e-marketing charlatans and black-hats.   There are two basic types of bad SEO clients: crooks and fool–oops, I mean, ethically challenged and judgmentally-challenged.

Ethically-Challenged SEO Clients

I haven’t gotten so many inquiries asking for out-and-out unethical services.  Still, I’ve been asked about blog-sp@mming software and other shady internet marketing tactics a couple times. A colleague shared this gem with me: “Have you thought about just scanning a book from the library and using it for web content? Or is that too high-risk?”  (Seriously, someone asked him this.)

Of course, judging from the amount of comment sp@m and SEO-motivated hacking on the web,  there is plenty of demand for this stuff.

Judgmentally-Challenged SEO Clients

A much larger group of bad SEO clients are simply those who insist on putting themselves in the way of fraud.  Yes, that’s right: I’m blaming the victim.  Someone who goes looking for a $5 gold watch can’t cry too long if the watch turns out to be fake or hot.  With SEO, there are a few more nuances, but it’s the same essential idea.

The overwhelming majority of these judgmentally challenged souls are private individuals whose only business is the business-in-a-kit variety.  Yet they are also sometimes representatives of actual successful companies.  The real businesspeople tend to be quicker to let their misconceptions go (after all, they can afford the real SEO alternatives), but not always.  Let’s look at some representative types of this group, straight out of my own inbox (note: these are inquiries from prospects, not actual clients).

1. Something-for-(Little More than)-Nothing Clients

Really, I tend to think these people should be in the ethically challenged group, but maybe that’s just the remnant of my work ethic making me be mean  There are actually two kinds of these clients:

* The ambitious but cheap client: “I’d like to get to the top of Google for the keyword, ‘mortgage’ so I can turn over $100,000/month in revenue.  I can spend up to $1,000.”
* The Adsense-is-my-business-plan client: you wouldn’t believe the numbers of inquiries I get from people who only plan to make money off Adsense or other on-site advertising—they don’t even have a plan for getting repeat traffic, nor do they have content to synergize with the SEO effort.  By buying promotional services, they would essentially be buying advertising in order to make money off advertising—you see where that could be a problem?

Another way of looking at it: why wouldn’t I just create a site myself and keep all the profit from my efforts?  In fact, most SEOs do have their own project sites, which are often monetized by Adsense. The money we could otherwise get from Adsense is one very low baseline for pricing our services.  Legitimate SEO clients are typically selling goods or services at a profit rate that works out to ten or more times what they could get from Adsense.

In addition to the greedy, I also see a few other kinds of less common, but still problematic prospective SEO clients:

2. SEO-Starry-Eyed Clients: “Search engine traffic is definitely the best way for me to get pet-sitting clients in my tiny Himalayan village.”
3. The Little-Knowledge-Is-a-Dangerous-Thing Client: “Don’t tell me about keyword research, content, anchor text, or natural linking strategy, just get me the PageRank (or links, keyword density, or whatever the fad is).”
4. Gullible-and-Not-Letting-Go Client: “I know of at least two services that will submit my site to thousands of search engines for $29.95.  If you can’t do that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
5. I-Will-Never-Trust-SEO-But-I’ll-Consider-It-Anyway Client: “No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking so this is all pointless—I’ll just go with that $29.95 search engine submission package someone just emailed me about.  At least it’s cheap.”

In short, if you are going to find good SEO web consultants, you need: 1) realistic expectations; 2) a realistic budget; 3) solid information.  Don’t expect something for nothing, do a little reading, and it’s much less likely you’ll fall victim to bad SEOs.

Tags: e-marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO Company, seo firm, smarter marketing, web consultants