SEO

For the average web publisher, free traffic is our lifeblood. Thats why SEO gets a lot more attention in this industry than PPC marketing (advertising-side), e-mail marketing, conversions, etc. Hell, I would say SEO is probably the number one thing on most of our minds.

Last week a sixth grader was suspended from school for giving Jolt gum to another student. The problem? The gum contains caffeine, a stimulant banned by the school (nevermind that they sell soda in the cafeteria.) The response from Jolt — a $1,000 scholarship. That $1,000 has bought Jolt a hell of a lot of publicity for a very small price (and made the school administration look like complete asses, but thats a different story.)

Jump over to Sweden; last week Swedish police raided the servers of a search engine called “The Pirate Bay.” This website was a search engine that allowed people to find BitTorrent files on the internet. Incidently, most of those files are for copyrighted work including movies, software, games, books, etc. Immediately following the raid the MPAA issued a press release detailing, among other things, that The Pirate Bay was raking in $60,000 a month from advertising. Fast forward to yesterday, the site is back up, under a new name The Police Bay. Along with hundreds of people in Stolkholm protesting the raid the owner issued a statement saying the site would be “bigger and better than ever.”

Think back to 1999 to early 2000 and the days of Napster. Simliar events transpired. While Napster ultimately was shut down its owner was able to spin the RIAA’s attacks and make a killing in the process.

This post isn’t about the ethics of piracy or whether kids should be allowed to injest caffeine in school. Thats not the point. The point is that good marketers can not only fend off their attackers but that they can turn them into homeruns.

Right now Shawn Hogan, the founder of Digital point, is doing taking on the MPAA. Whether he wins or not, its going to give digitalpoint some killer backlinks. I don’t think that is his intention or goal, but it will happen regardless.

Lets call this matyrdom SEO.

Many people have stated that you can learn everything you need to know about SEO for free, from forums and blogs.

Backlink building, keyword density, meta tags, all of these different elements are well discussed in public forums. Think thats it? There are many very effective techniques are not publicly discussed.

The best way you will learn advanced SEO techniques is to do your own testing. Google, Yahoo, and MSN change their algorithms all of the time. You just can’t keep up without testing out things yourself.

Here is an example of a test I did last year. I had never registered domains with dashes so I tried it out. I did not expect any great results but I just wanted to find out if it made a difference somewhere. A lot of theories fly back and forth on the boards and some of them are BS. For anyone who has been doing their own testing, you already know that. If not, you might be in for a few suprises.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying — reading about SEO is good: but you should be testing out the theories you read about. (In fact, you should be doing this in nearly all areas of business.)

There is no rule that you only need one site in a niche. Make a few sites for you niches and use different SEO techniques on each. Then, you can take the best techniques and apply them to other sites you run.

Jon from the Super Affiliate Marketing Blog made a post today talking about link building strategies.

“Don’t worry about pagerank either, because it’s fairly useless. Make sure the pages that are linking to you are ones that are visited often by the engines and are RELEVANT to your PAGES.”

If you are doing this part-time you will be anxious for the quick easy links. It is well worth it to spend some time building links from high quality related websites rather than chasing every free directory or spammy link exchange page. Building a quality content site will go a long way here.

One technique I have been using recently is including a backlink request in registration confirmation e-mail sent out to my forum members. In this particular niche many of the users have their own websites.

Be active in the online community surrounding the niche you are targetting. A few contacts will go a long way. The first blog that I started, which was a little over a year ago, is effectively dead. Despite this I get targetted link and advertising requesting regularly. Because this blog is linked to in the right places and already ranking for many keywords, the link requests come to me, not the other way around.

I nearly posted this story last week, but as usual Aaron Wall has said it better than I can.

What happened is that a blogger who was badmouthing an ad agency for misusing government money got sued by that ad agency. The last time I remember a blogger getting sued (which was Aaron Wall by a scam SEO company) that lawsuit resulted in massive publicity and backlinks.

I’m not sure its a secret that sueing someone can result it lots of negative publicity for yourself; what is new is that sueing someone today can give them backlinks that money can not buy. Who would have thought getting sued could be the best day of your life?

Aaron Pratt has interviewed Shoemoney over at his SEO BUZZBOX blog. In the interview Shoemoney reveals that his past jobs have included selling appliances at Sears to getting paid six figures by Wells Fargo for 20 minutes of work a day. The most amazing part of the interview is the dramatic turn around Shoemoney had after he learned search engine optimization in 2005 and was able to rocket his websites to the top of Google.

My user driven sites now totaled about 3 million users and I was told by my premium adsense representative that my sites were the highest grossing Adsense sites for the “mobile niche”

Overture’s keyword research tool is an invaluable part of many independent web publisher’s daily lives. Early on I recognized that Overture had some problems. I would regularly come across high-volume key phrases that clearly originated from one source.

There are two occasions where it is very obvious: streams of irregular characters and very specific phrases getting more searches than they should.

After realising that I had used invalid information to build a site, I started using Wordtracker in addition to Overture. Neither is perfect, but together they work very well. By comparing two lists of results you can usually pick out what should not be there.
Here is where this could become a larger problem, what if someone decided to employ an army of bots to intentionally skew these results? Getting a clear picture of who is searching for what could suddenly become very difficult. Running PPC could give marketers a clue about whats going on, but when researching thousands keywords that is simply unrealistic, or at the very least very costly.

In my new book on blogging (coming out soon!) I discuss both this topic and disinformation on a broader scale. The simple fact is you need to take everything you hear and read with a grain of salt, be it keyword research or forum postings.

Ever notice that obsession with directory listings website development forum users have? (sitepoint, digitalpoint) What is amusing is that, until recently, I’ve heard little to no mention of Wikipedia. Imagine that, a website people actually read, use, and follow links from (An Alexa rank of 31! Oh, and you can enter your link and have it instantly added to the page — no login needed.

Unlike most directories, Wikipedia sends real traffic. There are two reasons for this. First, many of Wikipedia’s entries have been getting high rankings in the search engines. Second, anyone can copy Wikipedia’s content (given that they follow the proper rules.) This means that your link will show up on hundreds of other pages around the internet. It hasn’t made me rich, but I’ve had scraper sites send me valuable traffic thanks to a Wikipedia link or two.

Things aren’t quite as easy as they sound. The novice Wikipedia user may not be aware that all changes are logged — IP included. Wikipedia’s active users and editors are very viligant. In fact, Wikipedia editors recently caught Congressional staffers making over 1,000 edits — including one calling another US Senator a “douche-bag.”

This attention to detail is probably why Wikipedia is nearly as accurate as The Encyclopedia Britannica. Expect your link to go under the microscope.

I’ll admit, even I got in trouble with Wikipedia a while ago. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been and I ended up getting a warning. A suggestion: if you add a link and it gets deleted, don’t re-add it again.

Wikipedia’s open nature at first appears to leave it open to exploitation. While spammy links may go unoticed in the lesser-used of Wikipedia’s 945,000 english entries don’t expect spam to last in popular entries. If you want your link to stick around it better be pretty damn relevent.

Not enough information in all the SEO websites and blogs you read? Well now there is a print magazine for you too — Search Marketing Standard. This certainly has some promise, and may be a good way for search marketing firms to reach out to a broader audience.

The good news is that you can subscribe for free. The bad news is that the debut issue doesn’t come out until June (by then I’ll have completely forgotten the magazine even exists.)

Think I can get a mention somewhere in their first issue?

If you read any search engine optimization blogs you probably have noticed nearly every one of them has said something about “linkbait” within the past few days. So what exactly is this linkbait?

Linkbait is content which attracts links — plain and simple. I’ve talked about it before, but not using those words. A very expensive example: MyHeritage.com’s free face recognition tool. A not-so-expensive example: FamilyMediaGuide.com counting the number of expletives on Stern’s first Sirius broadcast.

I’ve tried my own hand at linkbait on this blog from the Googlegini to interviewing the semi-famous.

So whats the big deal about linkbait anyways? People are just realising that sometimes the most powerful”trick” to have up your sleeve is no trick at all. Publishers, bloggers, and users want to read, hear, and see cool stuff. Linkbait isn’t just novelty eyecandy — it includes real content too.

Businesses have been doing the same thing for years with press releases. Reporters don’t care about press releases that read like a transcript from a late night infomercial — reporters follow up on press releases with real stories behind them.

Bottom line, focus on making a damn good site and the links will follow. It just doesn’t hurt to let other bloggers or site owners know when you publish that “linkbait.”

MarketingSherpa released a study on eye-tracking search engine results. Buried in the article was this:

Mainstream marketers, however, are only now starting to catch on. This partially explains why marketers spent $5.5 billion on paid listings in 2005 compared with just $660 million on optimization for organic listings. MarketingSherpa’s research team expects to see optimization crack $1 billion at long last in 2006.

Its no suprise then that rip-off SEO firms are flourishing, charging customers bargain prices and delivering top results for keywords no one searches for. On the other hand, this also means search engine optimizers can expect even more competition..