Conversion Matters

I just spent £10 on magazines - quite excessive for a poor student! I bought .net as well as a few others because a featured article caught my eye - ‘The hottest SEO trends. Starring: Google’s Matt Cutts, SEO Guru Danny Sullivan…’ (not to mention there was something about ‘Porn 2.0′ - porn and SEO, could you ask for more..?!).

Anyway, what do they think are the hottest SEO trends.? It’s pretty standard stuff really:

• Matt talks about social media being important and therefore content needs to be interesting. He also thinks in the future blackhats are going to become (h/cr)ackers - I assume he means inserting links maliciously via XSS and other exploits.
• Danny says that “having a blog is very important”. He also mentions the importance of social media for increase brand awareness and backlinks.
• Links. Links are also important. And you can help boost your PageRank (who cares?) by submitting to geographic or industry specific directories.
• Glossary pages, forums and YouTube marketing can also help.
• Don’t rely on automated SEO tools.
• ‘Ensure your site is uploaded to Google Sitemaps’.

What not to do

• Don’t cram your text into one page
• Don’t focus on too many keywords
• Don’t be insular

Okay so it really wasn’t that interesting or ground breaking but thanks anyway Mark Buckingham, gave me a break from my assignments.

I guess if you want to read the whole article you better buy this months .net but I wouldn’t suggest going out of your way to find it.

So in my head I’m thinking to myself, sure if you’re a top (I really doing mean top, not just quite good) SEO why on earth would you sell your services to others?

Say, for example, your ranking a few websites top 10 for ‘car insurance’ or ‘credit card’ or any other lucrative term. Why would you do that if it wasn’t your own site?

Even if you’re being paid a shed-load you’re still making less than the company your doing SEO for. Instead of optimising other companies sites for ‘car insurance’ why not make money supermarket 2? Even if you can’t make websites yourself you should be able to team up with others who are capable of making competing websites.

Sure, you might not have the business acumen but with the marketing skills there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to successfully compete.

With a quote aggregation website you don’t even have to provide a service really. Just scrape a few other insurance sites and hey presto.

Aggressively market and your earning a lot already. I can’t really see any reason why a top SEO would provide consultancy services to other companies. Unless they have absolutely no confidence in their own business ideas or they really enjoy the interaction with other business.

If I was skilled enough to compete for ‘personal loans’ I wouldn’t do it for other business - I’d do it for myself!

Does that not make sense? What do you think?

I read something a few days ago that struck a cord with me. It was about a tobacco industry spokesperson who said to his son:

There is no right or wrong. There are just arguments. If you win you are right.

That’s kind of how I view SEO. There is no right or wrong - what is ethical SEO? There’s some kind of argument that it’s bad to spam or engage in blackhat techniques and therefore blackhat is wrong.

Is it ethical to be doing SEO for companies that rip off consumers with limited financial knowledge who don’t realise that 60% APR is not cool?

It’s not clear to me how you could say that is any more or less ethical than say a creating a splog?

I saw a comment on an article vaguely about blackhat SEO. I feel it’s kind of misinformed. He talks about how you can’t be open and honest while using blackhat techniques.

You could, you could say to your client: “Today we’re going to spam your website to no 1. and then after a week or two it will probably get banned”.

That’s open and honest it just might not go down that well. You have to accept that the techniques you use to promote or optimise a website have to be proportional to the risk/reward. Can you afford for the website in question to get banned or penalized? If the answers no then don’t do anything shady. If the answers yes then spam away.

When I was working last year there was a car insurance company we worked for where we did the SEO for some of their sites and they did some inhouse SEO on some of their other smaller doorway type sites.

They did some overly aggressive link buying and managed to manipulate some pretty high rankings for that site for a brief period before it got caught out. Then there was a small uproar: blah blah spam blah blah blackhat blah blah dodgy. Who cares?

If they looked at the risk vs. reward of spamming that website to high rankings for car insurance and decided they were willing to go with it and didn’t mind if it go banned then fair play to them. They still had their main site and their other smaller sites if it did get banned.

If I was trying to be successful in a highly competitive niche I wouldn’t have a problem with performing some dirty SEO to outrank the competition. As long as you were actually providing a useful service and had a reasonable website - I don’t see the customer caring. Obviously you’d have to except that you were likely to get burnt at somepoint and have your main brand/website totally clean and just slowly build that site up organically as best you can. While that sites hanging around in the sandbox you can be ranking these other mini sites.

I’m rambling a bit now, cya..

I was just reading something on Tamar’s SEO blog about copywriting and keyword density and I’m wondering if copywriter’s jobs should be evolving?

Obviously in the past (and probably still true now) a copywriter’s job mostly involves writing articles targeting specific keywords, which hopefully the search engines will index and rank while still being appealing and readable to users.

However, I’d suggest that you’re not going to rank highly just writing targeted articles and that something needs to change. I don’t think this SEO tactic is going to yield many returns especially in competitive markets.

You couldn’t expect to write a keyword dense article about car insurance and then magically rank for the term car insurance!

What should SEO copywriters be doing to add value?

In this day and age of social media, copywriters who can write articles that appeal to the people at digg, stumbleupon, del.iciou.us etc. have a strong competitve advantage over the ‘old-school copywriters’.

Imagine you are a motorbike insurance company. You could start a blog and crack out some articles on the following topics:

• Top 10 superbike wipe-outs (this would have embedded videos)
• 101 great motorbike rides in the UK
• What you need to know about motorbike maintenance and tuning

I couldn’t say whether any of these would actually take off - they’re just quick ideas of the top of my head. Try and be creative and experiment.

It’s more valuable to be able to create content that gains major traction in the social media arena. Content that does this is able to gain natural, ‘editorially-vouched-for’ links, a huge spike in traffic - which may not directly increase the bottom line but can increase mind share in the market and increase your brand awareness (alternatively you can just make a few dollars off CPM ads).

Link-bait and social media marketing seem to be one of the few ways which is left to webmasters and SEOs to promote a website without falling foul of the Google Guidelines.

Paid links are a no-no, unless you’re sneaky, directories are pretty pointless. There’s no better way to get your content out there than through social media (as long as it is quality content and you invest the time to interact and engage with the communities).

Summary

• It’s still important to have quality content on your website related to specific keywords but…
• …Don’t pump out article after article purely for search engines - it’s not going to help much unless you’re targeting an uncompetitive market
• Instead try and create link-worthy content that may gain traction in the social spheres - it all helps with your brand-awareness and organic rankings

Right I’m bored of having two pages out rank me for a search for my name on Google UK.

Also I just saw a couple of posts on the distilled blog about getting your facebook profile ranking.

So I’m going to try and get that to rank as well the Adam Taylor page at Durham University. It’s a bit spammy so I don’t know how well this will work but hopefully I’ll be dominating the SERPs soon!

There appears to be a proper PageRank update happening at last - the front page of this blog is now PR4. Now I can starting selling text links to casino sites… ;)!

How did you do? I only had a brief look around but was some what surprised I ended up with a higher (front page) PageRank than bloggingfingers. Not that it matters or means much; but there’s still the ego factor!

How did your sites/blogs fair?

But just in case you’re interested there is a lot of talk about the PageRank decreases happening. I won’t say what’s already been said over and over but here are a few links if you’re bothered.

Earners’ Blog
Internet Babel
Search Engine Guide
Andy Beard
SEOmoz
Sebastians Pamphlets
And probably the best PageRank post.

There’s definitely more but I have a 9am lecture and should sleep!

Earlier today I received an email asking for advice about starting an SEO business:

“I’ve been reading your blog and website a fair bit recently. In April of this year, I set up my own SEO company as a part-time venture whilst still working as an in-house SEO for a British company. I’m looking for this to become a full-time venture shortly and wondered what advice you could give to a young, enthusiastic person who really wants to do things the right way and make the most of this.”

I can only assume that he is yet to check out my about page, where he would discover I am also just a young, enthusiastic person, with no experience running a company (yet). My only experience is experimenting on my own projects with various different business models/monetization ideas.

Nevertheless, always one to provide as much help as possible, I have tapped into the knowledge of some industry contacts and other entrepreneurs, as well as my own advice to hopefully provide a few key points and tips that may help you succeed - it’s actually more than five but you have to try and write catchy headlines right?

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So I was still unsure what the deal was with relative vs. absolute links from a search perspective so I’ve decided to dig around a little deeper for some answers.

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So, I just took the SEOmoz SEO quiz (see the previous post) and one of the questions I got wrong was to do with absolute/relative links.

I think the question was along the lines of:

Why is it better to use absolute links (http://www.domain.com/page.php) rather than relative links (/page.php) when doing cross site linking?

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