Archive for the ‘Web Marketing’ Category

So Google are trying to weed out the un natural links, paid links call it what you like. What Google are doing now is flying in the face of traditional marketing, and the BIG agencies will slap them down for it (in the Uk anyhow).

WHY does a guy sit in a bath of beans? WHY does someone run the london Marathon in a suit of armour? PUBLICITY that is why. and WHAT is publicity translated into in Web terms? LINK BAIT plain and simple. The traditional marketers from the offline world (Like myself) have promoted link baiting constantly from day 1.  NOW Google think it is wrong

On the one hand they say create content worth linking to. On the other hand they now say, dont try to attract links by link baiting and false linking methods.

So I get 5000 backlinks because I write something that goes viral, and that is ok? but I buy 5000 backlinks and that is wrong. Google can’t tell the difference so assume that it MUST be crap linking.

Tis a sad day for web marketing when this happens.

This is a common question, and one that is asked across forums day and night. My reply would be that SEO is personal to everyone as there is no real carved in stone definition of it, with even the wiki definition of SEO being an opinion. 

I would say that the key is in the last word. OPTIMISATION. Optimisation means simply to reach an optimum. so that means make your site the best it can be. For me SEO goes WAAAAAAAAYYYY beyond the easy bit of getting a site to the top of the search engine reusults pages. For me and many other top practitioners of SEO, we take a hollistic SEO approach, looking at the whole thing, NOT just the rankings (although of course they are very important). Hollistic SEO’s look at everything, including ALL the potential keywords, not just the one or two site owners want to rank for.

Professional SEO for me is hollistic, it is about about conversions, profitability usability visitor retention maximising spend etc REAL WORLD outcomes. The things that matter. So you think that the most important thing is to be at the top of the search engines? NOPE.

If I was to ask you all what your goal is for your site, you would mostly say ‘to get to number one for all my keywords’. This is so sad. A person goes to the hardware store to buy a drill bit. WHY? does he WANT a drill bit? NO he WANTS a HOLE, but you need a drill bit to MAKE the hole, to insert the hanger to hang the picture of thee family on the wall. The drill bit is simply a means to an end, NOT the end goal itself.

So ask yourself again, what do I want from my site? 

let’s say what you want is £30,000 per year. HOW can you achieve this? Say each visitor is worth £0.25, then you need 120,000 visitors right? WRONG. While getting to the top of google might well bring in this volume of traffic, it is NOT what a true SEO would recommend as a sole course of action.

If you can up the visitor value to £0.50 then you can earn £30k with 60k visitors. Assume for the purpose of illustration that your conversion ratio is 1 in 100. Get the conversion ratio down to 1:50 and you can earn £30 with 30,000 visitors. With me so far?

HERE IS THE KICKER THOUGH.

You now have an optimised site and are earning £1 per visitor. Remeber that 120,000 visitors you needed to earn £30,000and how being at the top of Google was going to earn you your £30,000 a year goal?

 NOW it will earn you £120,000

THAT my friends is my take on professional SEO!

Recently I have been getting a lot of emails asking about the merits of so called multilanguage optimisation. These are normally from so called ‘SEO’s’ who offer this service for anything from $200-500 per language.

Is it worth it OWG I get asked. Well the answer is NO… and YES

Is it worth having multilanguage pages on your site? YES if they are done well AND provided you can deal with an enquiry in that language, because f you can’t then you are going to appear like a big ole fraud to that potentially large customer. Large in the meaning of spend, not calling them fat or anything like that.

Another thing to consider is the quality of the translation. Let me tell you a story about that. A while ago someone came up with a script that exploits the translation facility of the Google toolbar and also Yahoo toolbar etc. This script was circulated around, and eventually it, or a script LIKE it was sold for a chunk of money in one of these fantastic ‘use it or lose it , the next big thing on the web’ type broadcasts.

Google has now decided that as it is against the acceptable use terms and conditions to auto-query Google, and as these scripts ARE auto-querying Google, it will block the IP of the site that is using them. So think about the implications of that for a moment if you will.

To put it simply, using these scripts is against the terms and conditions of Google and yahoo etc. While not getting your site banned (apart from for the translation side of things), it might well raise a Google flag above your site, and might gain you unwanted notice.

Most of these SEO’s offering multilanguage promotion use these tools.

So to everyone who has asked me if it is worth it, I say… Draw your own conclusions

Google Move further into offline advertising with a deal for an undisclosed amount with Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio advertising company in the US. (reported by the New York Times today) Now we all know that google are pushing further and further into areas that are seen as … Read the rest of this entry »

At long LONG last, an alternative to Google AdSense has been released for publishers in the UK by Miva. While US publishers have had the Yahoo Publishers Network available for some time, we in the UK have had nothing, nil, Nada, zip, zilch.

NOW that has all changed thanks to. Read the rest of this entry »

I noticed this just yesterday. Where we normally get the ‘ads by Google’ text it was not there, it had besn replaced by ‘Ads by G’ the ‘G’ being a graphic ? OK it is not landmark stuff, but I am curious to see if anyone else noticed this? and, more importantly WHY?

Are google going to re-brand from our colourful Google banners to a simple ‘G’? Well Yahoo! Have, their brand is Yahoo! and Y! (both with the exclamation mark).

 Ah well, my life is so full   

Well it appears as if all the ‘don’t worry about your pages being in the Supplemental index, it will not hurt them’ message that google has been sending out, no longer applies.

Try this test for yourself Read the rest of this entry »

OK much has been made of Google messing up their valentines logo

 Lots of people are saying the green stalk is the L etc, .

Well it saddens me to see that you lot are  so bitter twisted and cold hearted that you don’t pick up on pet name. Snookey bear, choochey, cuddle bum. etc.

 It is a pet name isn’t it. Googe

Although my initial thought was that they had confused it with their Christmas logo? Why is that? well there is No eL

OK this is not exactly new news, but it appears that this MAJOR LEAGUE news slipped below the radar, and it could have a devastating effect on AdSense publishers who are not aware.

Thousands of people will be reading forum threads about using images placed alongside AdSense, many threads will even include emails from Google AdSense team confirming this is OK. But here is the thing.

IT HAS ALL CHANGED!

Read the rest of this entry »

Well folks it sems like DMOZ has gone forever! A post on Rich Skrentas blog (founder of DMOZ) says

Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.

So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it’s not clear if there’s even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.

dmoz doesn’t exactly operate on a model of transparency, to say the least, so they have been keeping the details of what happened private. Perhaps they’re concerned about an exodus of the remaining editors, or gleeful proclamations of death from the SEM industry. The remaining ODP editors will probably be mad at me for discussing this, but they get mad at me whenever I talk about the ODP….ironic! Hey guys, it’s 2006, open up.

read more at his blog…