Archive for April, 2009
I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now
What were the things you know now that you wished someone had told you when you started out?
Personally, I wonder whether I would have actually listened had someone told me. Some things I just had to learn by making dumb mistakes.
Sometimes twice!
But if you are starting out on the web, and you want to skip all that hassle and expense, here is my list.
Old-hands may recognize a few mistakes that they have made, too. Please share your words of wisdom in the comments.
1. Business Case Comes First
Don’t start by building a website. Start by building a business case.
I wasted time on domains and activities that would never be profitable because I didn’t ask and answer some fundamental questions. Web design, SEO, blogging, social media marketing, writing, networking, posting on forums - all these activities can be worthwhile, but if your aim is to make money, they only bear fruit if they support your business case.
Otherwise, they’re a waste of your time.
Ask yourself:
- How will this activity make money?
- What are the unmet needs in the market, and am I able to fill those needs?
- How much time/money do I need to put into this, and will it pay back more that the input cost?
2. Don’t Be Cheap
Competing on price only works if you can do volume.
Competing on price is ultimately a losers game. There will always be someone else who can undercut you. There are waves of third-world SEOs/E-Commerce Operators/Marketers who can survive each day on a lot less than you can. Where do you go when they undercut your price? You follow them down, until one of you goes broke.
If you can’t do enough volume to make small margins worthwhile, then focus on quality and service aspects.
What is that you do that adds more value than the other guy? Do you have something unique to offer? What can you do better than anyone else? Find out if that one thing is in demand and profitable, and do it.
There is another good reason not to compete on price. People tend to value things that are expensive.
It’s a curious aspect of human psychology that if we believe something is valuable, then it is. Conversely, if you put a low price tag on something, people perceive it as being junk.
3. Give People Three Options
Say a retailer wants to sell one particular refrigerator. Does she stock only that refrigerator? No, she doesn’t. What she does is she carries one low priced refrigerator, one mid-priced refrigerator (the one she sells a lot of), and one expensive refrigerator.
Most people will choose the middle refrigerator, even if the features are similar across all three. The customers price expectation has been set by being able to compare low/mid/high. They tend to go for the middle, “sensible” choice. Not too cheap, not too expensive.
Always structure a deal that creates a basis for comparison. And put the choice you want the customer to take in the middle.
There is a danger in giving too many options, however. People get confused by too many choices, and when people feel confused, their perception of risk increases. When their perception of risk increases, they are more likely to back away.
4. It’s Not About You, It’s About Them
People don’t care about you.
They just don’t.
They don’t care if your site runs on Linux. They don’t care how much you’ve invested in usability. They don’t care if you’re the (self-proclaimed) “best”.
They care about solving their own problems.
Your language must be their language. Everything you do must be geared towards identifying and solving their problem.
5. Business Is About Human Relationships
Business isn’t about Lear jets. It isn’t about business cards. It isn’t about conferences, lunches or expense accounts.
Business is about the relationships between people.
Business is all about what you can do for someone, and what someone can do for you. If that relationship creates more value that you can do so by yourself, you’ve got the makings of a business that can grow.
A characteristic common to successful business people is they have large personal networks. They constantly leverage these networks. It really is about who, not what, you know.
Learn to stay in touch with old friends, learn to ask for help, give out before you get back,and understand that everyone you meet is going to know things that you do not.
6. Where Possible, Avoid Intermediaries
When I first used the internet, in 1993, you didn’t need to buy domain names. You could get one just by asking for one!
What if I’d known then what I know now? What if I’d seen domain names for what they really were - undeveloped, directly accessible real estate in a gold mining town.
Learn the lesson of domain names. You should take positions where you don’t rely too much on the whims of others. SEO, in itself, is a risky business model because your income is susceptible to underlying changes in the search engines sort algorithms. There is an entity between you and the customer, over which you have no control.
MLM? Forget it. You need to be the guy at the top of the chain.
PPC/SEO? Find a way to lock in those customers so you don’t re-advertise to the same people.
7. Know The Power Of Compounding Interest
Eh?
What’s this topic doing in a web column?
Well, what are you going to do with your web income once you get it?
This is one of those concepts that is so simple, true and fundamental to “living well” in a capitalist society it should be drummed into people the minute they start school. Money literally makes money.
What are you doing with that money you’re making on the web? Are you buying stuff? What is the true cost of that thing you’re buying? It’s not just the price of the thing itself, it’s also the opportunity cost of that money had you chosen to invest it.
If you’ve buying something on credit, chances are you’re enslaving yourself to your future self, unless that credit is used for something that can generate further income or capital gain.
8. Invest Money Across Investment Classes
The old “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” rule.
The internet can be a difficult place to make money. At times, it can be really easy. But ask anyone who has been in the game a while, and they’ll tell you it is always flaky. It is flaky, in terms of generating income, because it moves and changes very quickly. Most business operations find it difficult to move and adapt very quickly and maintain the same income level.
One way to overcome this risk is to have income coming in from different asset classes.
I do this by taking a percentage of my earnings and putting it into rental property and shares. I’ve done this for many years now. The rental property market, compared to the internet business, is very dull and predictable. But that’s a good thing. The steady rental streams cover any down weeks I have in the flaky internet game. The share market returns above all other asset classes over time.
Being dependent on one source of income can be precarious.
9. Live Within Your Means
My share broker recently gave a seminar in which he asked the question “can you take a 50% drop in house price and a 50% drop in income, and still be happy?”
If the answer is yes, you’ll survive this recession with a smile on your face. Or any recession, for that matter. Boom and bust cycles are inevitable in market-driven, interventionist economies, so expect them and plan for them.
Living within your means creates a buffer zone.
Is there big income to be had by leveraging? Of course, but the current crash is showing the downside problems that can occur if you’re over leveraged. When betting, try not to use your own money, but make sure you can cover that bet if it doesn’t go your way.
10. Those Who Have The Most Time Are Rich
Having stuff is easy. If you can get credit, you can get stuff.
But what do people complain about not having most these days?
Invariably, the answer is time.
One of the best things about running your own internet business is that time is your own. Want to go fishing for a few hours? You don’t need to ask anyone. To me, that’s the most valuable thing in the world. I have stuff, but given a choice between acquiring more stuff, or having more experiences, I choose experiences. And you need to have time for that.
There’s a book called “Avoid Retirement And Stay Alive“. The idea is that retirement has no place in modern society. If you can make work enjoyable by balancing it against the other things you want to do, then you can live like you’ve got all the time in the world.
If you could tell your 18 year old self a few things, what would they be?
Whiteboard Friday - Dangers of Nofollow
Posted by great scott!
We’re big fans of using ‘nofollow’ for linkjuice sculpting around your site. If you know what you’re doing, you’re careful, and you’re considerate, it’s an incredibly powerful strategy that can have a big payoff. But what if you make a mistake? If you don’t pay attention, or you go about it willy-nilly, site-sculpting with ‘nofollow’ can cause some major problems…and that’s what we’re looking at in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Dangers of Nofollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Short URL Services
The canonical list of short URL services. 363 tiny URL services with 892 unique domains. 11 long URL services. 11 paid-to-link services. 12 short URL scripts.
Short URLs
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abbrr.com
abe5.com
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a.nf
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arm.in
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bacn.me
beam.to
bit.ly
bitly.com
bloat.me
budurl.com
burnurl.com
canurl.com
chilp.it
cjb.net
cli.gs
clockurl.com
co.nr
cowurl.com
cozyurl.com
d0g.me
dboost.de
decenturl.com
dfl8.me
digbig.com
digg.com (DiggBar)
diggurl.com
doiop.com
durl.us
dwarfurl.com
earlme.com
easyuri.com
elfurl.com
elurl.com
essi.ws
eweri.com
ewerl.com
extramegalongurl.com
ez6.net
ezlinkto.com
ezurl.eu
faceto.us
fancyurl.com
ff.im (friendfeed.com)
fff.to
fhurl.com
flq.us
fly2.ws
fogz.eu
fon.gs
foxyurl.com
freakinghugeurl.com
fyad.org
gentleurl.net
go2.me
go2.vg
go2cut.com
gol.ly
gowwwgo.com
here.is
hex.io
hop2.com
href.in
hub.tm
hubb.me
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i5.be
icanhaz.com
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idek.net
ikr.me
inturl.com
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knol.me
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kurl.nl
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lanjut.in
lenks.net
lil.in
lin.cr
linkasa.com
linkbun.ch
linkmenow.org
litlurl.net
liurl.cn
ln-s.net
lnk.by
lnk.in
lnk.nu
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longr.us
lopurl.net
lurl.no
m2lb.info
m3mi.com
memurl.com
merky.de
migre.me
minify.me
minilien.com
minilink.me
minilink.org
minurl.fr
minyurl.net
miturl.com
moourl.com
mtny.mobi
my.longurl.net
myfasturl.com
myshortlinks.com
myturl.com
myurl.in
nanoref.com
ne1.net
newurl.name
ninjalink.com/
nipurl.com
nn.nf
notifyurl.com
notlong.com
nsfw.in
o-x.fr
oacf.us
oc.vc
oinkurl.com
/omani.ac
ow.ly
p1.fr
p8g.tw
parv.us
peaurl.com
pendek.in
piturl.com
piurl.com
phaze.me
plurl.me
pnt.me
ponyurl.com
popurls.com
post.ly
profile.to
pt2.me
puke.it
purl.org
qurlyq.com
qwer.org
r.im
rb6.me
re-url.me
reallytinyurl.com
redirx.com
redir.ec
revcanonical.appspot.com
rickroll.it
ripeurl.com
rsmonkey.com
rubyurl.com
runurl.com
rurl.org
s3dl.com
s3nt.com
sh0rt.com
shiturl.com
shorl.com
short.ie
short.la
short.to
shortadress.com
shortar.com
shorten.ws
shortener.net
shorterlink.com
shortify.wikinote.com
shortlinks.co.uk
shortn.me
shoturl.us
shoxt.com
shredurl.com
shrinkify.com
shrinkomatic.com
shrinkster.com
shrt.st
shrunkurl.com
shrvl.com
shurl.net
shuurl.com
shw.me
simpl.es
simurl.com
skocz.pl
skre.us
skroc.pl
slnk.me
smallerlink.com
smallr.com
smallr.net
sogood.net
spydar.com
/sqworl.com
srnk.net
ssurl.info
starturl.com
su.pr (stumbleupon.com)
surls.cc
t1ny.net
takeme.to
thinfi.com
thnlnk.com
thurly.net
tighturl.com
tii.li
tiny.cc
tinylink.com
tinyup.net
tinyurl.com
tnij.org
to.ly
tr.im
trim.li
tra.kz
traceurl.com
trafficgeo
tubeurl.com
turo.us
tw3.it
twi.bz
twirl.at
twisturl.com
twitclicks.com
twitpwr.com
twitt.at
twurl.cc
twurl.nl (tweetburner.com)/a>
u.mavrev.com
u.nu
u2s.nl
ubb.cc
uforgot.me
ulike.info
unhub.com
uris.us
ur.lc
ur.ly
ur1.ca
url.az
url.co.uk
url.ie
url.lotpatrol.com
url2go.info
url360.me
url66.com
urlal.com
urlbee.com
urlborg.com
urlcantik.com
urlcover.com
urlcut.com
urlenco.de
urlhawk.com
urli.ca
urlink.us
urlinn.com
urlms.com
urlmule.com
urlpass.com
urlpire.com
urlsh.com
urlshort.com
urlshort.co.cc
urltea.com
urlvi.be
urlx.org
urlxp.com
urlzen.com
URLZoom.org
useurl.us
uurl.in
viewista.com
vilasta.com
virl.com
vl.am
w3t.org
w3tag.com
wapurl.co.uk
whit.me
wong.to
wurl.ws
x.se
x.vu
xaddr.com
xhref.com
xii.li
xoo.la
xr.com
xs.md
xurl.jp
yatuc.com
yep.it
yiyd.com
yoolink.to
yourl.cc
z0rs.com
zcom.us
zoodl.com
zurl.ws
0rz.tw
0tja.com
1083.cc
1iny.com
1kh.de
1link.in
1linqr.appspot.com
1url.com
2881.com
2big.at
2hop4.com
2tu.us
55c.cc
6url.com
7go.eu
8ez.com
tinyarro.ws
ta.gd
xn--hgi.ws
xn--ogi.ws
xn--vgi.ws
xn--3fi.ws
xn--egi.ws
xn--9gi.ws
xn--5gi.ws
xn--1ci.ws
xn--odi.ws
xn--rei.ws
xn--cwg.ws
xn--bih.ws
xn--fwg.ws
xn--l3h.ws
snipurl.com
sn.im
snipr.com
snurl.com
metamark.net
xrl.us
snugurl.com
locationmap.biz
locationmap.org
mobiletinyurl.com
ad.ag
ne1.net
r8.org
c-o.in
c-o.cc
coz.in
cq.bz
f2b.be
ssr.be
short.be
n0.be
n3t.nl
tweaker.eu
freakz.eu
321.cn
active.ws
here.ws
ouch.ws
true.ws
visit.ws
better.ws
premium.ws
official.ws
4×2.net
such.info
neat.name
mypiece.com
sitelutions.com
passingG.as
redirect.hm
rr.nu
kwik.to
fw.nu
ontheweb.nu
isthebe.st
byinter.net
findhere.org
onthenet.as
ugly.as
assexy.as
pass.as
athissite.com
athersite.com
isgre.at
lookin.at
bestdeals.at
lowestprices.at
sg5.co.uk
sg5.info
sg5.biz
scooby.me.uk
sg2.co.uk
sg3.co.uk
easyurl.net
atu.ca
clickthru.ca
goshrink.com
redirects.ca
readthis.ca
shim.net
shim.net
freegaming.org
freebiefinders.net
op7.net
2cd.net
0kn.com
v9z.com
ulimit.com
be.tf
best.cd
bsd-fan.com
c0m.st
ca.tc
clan.st
com02.com
en.st
euro.st
fr.fm
fr.st
fr.vu
gr.st
ht.st
int.ms
it.st
java-fan.com
linux-fan.com
mac-fan.com
mp3.ms
qc.tc
sp.st
suisse.st
t2u.com
unixlover.com
zik.mu
vdirect.com
inetgames.com
direct.net
webrally.net
snapto.net
getto.net
emailme.net
netbounce.com
netbounce.net
oneaddress.net
omf.gd
wintermut.es
cloakreferer.com
moveto.ws
jmp2.net
2me.tw
webalias.com
sail.to
up.to
way.to
got.to
escape.to
learn.to
browser.to
thrill.to
remember.to
fun.to
stop.to
andmuchmore.com
resourcez.com
latest-info.com
veryweird.com
radpages.com
webdare.com
uncutuncensored.com
imegastores.com
web-freebies.com
tophonors.com
webalias.com
xxx-posed.com
hottestpix.com
mp3-archives.com
moviefever.com
myprivateidaho.com
fornovices.com
sports-reports.com
v3.com
i.am
all.at
drink.to
jump.to
snap.to
back.to
drive.to
kiss.to
start.at
beam.at
drop.to
listen.to
subscribe.to
been.at
easy.to
messages.to
surf.to
begin.at
everything.at
mine.at
switch.to
bite.to
fade.to
more.at
talk.to
board.to
fly.to
move.to
transfer.to
bounce.to
flying.to
mypage.org
travel.to
bowl.to
forward.to
nav.to
turn.to
break.at
fullspeed.to
on.to
vacations.to
browse.to
get.to
page.to
w3.to
change.to
getit.at
pagina.de
walk.to
chill.at
go.to
quickly.to
warp9.to
come.to
hello.to
redirect.to
welcome.to
connect.to
hey.to
run.to
window.to
crash.to
hop.to
scroll.to
yours.at
direct.at
how.to
shortcut.to
zap.to
dive.to
i.am
skip.to
zip.to
kickme.to
lovez.it
needz.it
craves.it
means.it
digs.it
adores.it
chills.it
is-groovin.it
is-chillin.it
drives.it
reads.it
surfs.it
swims.it
playz.it
singz.it
dances.it
has.it
does.it
knows.it
shows.it
rules.it
rocks.it
makes.it
says.it
owns.it
zor.org
1024bit.at
128bit.at
16bit.at
256bit.at
32bit.at
512bit.at
64bit.at
8bit.at
again.at
allday.at
alone.at
altair.at
american.at
amiga500.at
ammo.at
amplifier.at
amstrad.at
anglican.at
angry.at
around.at
arrange.at
australian.at
baptist.at
basque.at
battle.at
bazooka.at
berber.at
blackhole.at
booze.at
bosnian.at
brainiac.at
brazilian.at
bummer.at
burn.at
c-64.at
catholic.at
catalonian.at
chapel.at
christiandemocrats.at
cname.at
colors.at
commodore.at
commodore64.at
communists.at
conservatives.at
conspiracy.at
cooldude.at
croatian.at
cuteboy.at
dancemix.at
danceparty.at
danish.at
dealing.at
deep.at
democrats.at
divxlinks.at
divxmovies.at
divxstuff.at
dizzy.at
dork.at
dutch.at
dvdlinks.at
dvdmovies.at
dvdstuff.at
emulators.at
end.at
english.at
eniac.at
error403.at
error404.at
evangelism.at
exhibitionist.at
faith.at
fight.at
finish.at
finnish.at
forward.at
freebie.at
freemp3.at
french.at
graduatejobs.at
greenparty.at
grunge.at
hacked.at
hang.at
hangup.at
hide.at
hindu.at
htmlpage.at
hungarian.at
icelandic.at
independents.at
invisible.at
japanese.at
jive.at
kickass.at
kickme.to
kindergarden.at
kurd.at
labour.at
leech.at
liberals.at
linuxserver.at
liqour.at
maxed.at
meltdown.at
methodist.at
microcomputers.at
mingle.at
mirror.at
moan.at
mormons.at
musicmix.at
nationalists.at
nerds.at
neuromancer.at
newbie.at
nicepage.at
ninja.at
norwegian.at
ntserver.at
paint.at
palestinian.at
phoneme.at
phreaking.at
polish.at
popmusic.at
portuguese.at
powermac.at
processor.at
prospects.at
protestant.at
rapmusic.at
raveparty.at
reachme.at
reboot.at
relaxed.at
republicans.at
researcher.at
reset.at
resolve.at
retrocomputers.at
rockparty.at
rollover.at
rough.at
rumble.at
russian.at
scared.at
seikh.at
serbian.at
short.as
silence.at
simpler.at
sinclair.at
slowdown.at
socialists.at
spanish.at
split.at
stand.at
stoned.at
stumble.at
supercomputer.at
swedish.at
synagogue.at
syntax.at
syntaxerror.at
techie.at
temple.at
thinkbig.at
thirsty.at
throw.at
toplist.at
trekkie.at
trouble.at
turkish.at
unexplained.at
unixserver.at
vegetarian.at
venture.at
verycool.at
vic-20.at
viewing.at
vintagecomputers.at
virii.at
vodka.at
wannabe.at
webpagedesign.at
wheels.at
whisper.at
whiz.at
wonderful.at
zx80.at
zx81.at
zxspectrum.at
shorturl.com
2Ya.com
vze.com
1stA.com
24ex.com
hitart.com
bigbig.com
2fear.com
2hell.com
2tunes.com
2freedom.com
2truth.com
2savvy.com
2fortune.com
mirrorz.com
echoz.com
ebored.com
antiblog.com
headplug.com
dealtap.com
filetap.com
spyw.com
funurl.com
alturl.com
hereweb.com
mp3update.com
redirect100.com
Key.to
Hit.to
Hot.to
Like.to
Happy.to
18.to
CN.to
HK.to
hotredirect.com
hothere.com
coolhere.com
homepagehere.com
mustbehere.com
onlyhere.net
pagehere.com
surfhere.net
zonehere.com
iscool.net
areCool.net
isFun.net
tux.nu
woosah.net
cjbb.net
everstats.com
x26.biz
Long URLs
dickensurl.com
expandmyurl.com
hugeurl.com
json-longurl.appspot.com
linknark.com
longurl.org
longurlplease.com
therealurl.appspot.com
unshorten.com
untiny.me
untiny.com
untiny.net
untiny.ws
untiny.info
untiny.alzaid.ws
wideurl.com
Paid URLs/Redirects
adjix.com
ad.vu
hyperlinkcash.com
link.gs
linkbee.com
linkbucks.com
linktraff.ru
poprl.com
ucash.in
urlcash.net
usercash.com
Short URL Software
Shorty
KissaBe
ShortenURL
TigURL
URLtea
go2me
BrokenScript
GentleSource
DesiScripts
SourceWorkshop
plusPHP
Intersoft
Catalysts for Earning Natural Links & Link Conversion Rates
Posted by randfish
"Reference worthy content" is a phrase you’ll hear a lot in the SEO realm. The intent behind the statement is simple - build content that people will be likely to cite when they create works on the web. Parsing the motivations that inspire those citations, however, is anything but obvious. Tonight, I thought I’d try to list features that make content "reference worthy" and help to shed some insight on the psychological catalysts that build natural links.
- Non-Commercial
The Internet’s Linkerati love non-commercial content, or material that comes from an indirectly commercial site. It’s the reason Wikipedia is more likely to be cited than your ad-sponsored blog and why your ad-sponsored blog will outperform the blog on your e-commerce/affiliate website. Recognizing this pattern, you can take steps in everything from domain name choices to visual design to ad placement to help bolster your "non-commercial" street cred.
_ - Motivated by "Pure" Intentions
As with "non-commerciality," intent is becoming a bigger part of the link building puzzle. SEO savviness continues to grow, and as it does, greater scrutiny is applied to microsites, linkbait and viral content of all types. Tweet an image on Flickr or Imgur and your intentions must be pure. Point to an image embedded in HTML on your site, and you could just be trawling for links. It’s why we have to tell clients and colleagues to "look natural" - 5 years ago, this was barely an issue, but 5 years from now, it will be even worse.
_ - Aesthetically Pleasing
The visual design of a site and its content is a key part of #1 and #2 above, as well as being its own motivator for linking or leaving. Modern, clean, stunning design works great (see my old post, Yes, Virginia, Design Can Be Linkbait, Too), but so does amateur chrome, so long as the quality is tolerable. The former does so because of its professionalism and credibility, while the latter operates on the psychology of "pure intentions" and "non-commerciality."
_ - Easily Consumable
I recently wrote about Best Practices for Content Optimization, and these principles apply directly. Make easy-to-read text in usable, scannable formats with pretty graphics and compelling writing. Your link popularity metrics will reap the rewards.
_ - Targeted to a Citation-Likely Audience
As we know from The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that’s really no secret at all), the audience of natural linkers on the web is far different from the standard demographics. Appealing to this group with your content is critical to earning their references - and though they’re growing in size and variety, it’s still essential to have some effort to reach the core of this group.
_ - Credible
Material, data, and even opinions that are well-researched and come from a trustworthy, reliable, well-known source are far more likely to be cited than those that can’t fulfill these criteria. It’s why you’ll need to work much harder to get noticed if you’re just starting out, than if you’ve already established your unimpeachable accuracy.
_ - Likely to Trigger an Emotional Hook
I’ve covered this in-depth in the past (see The Emotions That Make Us Link). Essentially, certain emotional responses trigger the desire to write about (and reference) certain kinds of content, data, opinions, etc. One of the most brilliant applicants of this logic is Seth Godin, whose blog not only covers short, broad subjects that frequently create an emotional response, but also doesn’t allow comments, forcing those who want to provide their opinions to reference his work from their own sites & pages.
_ - Easy to Share
Yes, people on the web are lazy. Make it easy for them to spread content with copy+paste HTML, short URLs, and social media sharing links and you’ll find the ratio of those who spread rises.
_ - Appealing to a Non-Competitive Market
Perhaps the least known of these tenets, appealing to non-competitive markets is quite intuitive. Let’s say you’re in the field of real estate, and you write phenomenal content about the real estate market in your city - something every broker and agent will love and want to share. Guess what? They’re not going to. They are your competition, and they’d rather staple their eyeballs together than help you rank better for keywords they’re targeting. Recognize this, and you can start focusing your content on markets who won’t feel threatened to cite your works.
_
If you can improve the reference-worthiness of your content, the returns are easy to calculate (though precise measurement is challenging). For every site on the web, an equation like the following exists:
Natural Links Earned / Month = Monthly Visits*Link Conversion Rate
Any increase in the LCR (Link Conversion Rate) produces a proportional increase in the number of links earned. Websites that have figured this out and built strategies to leverage it are going to win on the web. Links aren’t just ways to get search engine rankings; they build branding, send direct traffic and inspire social media sharing. If your competition has a higher LCR than you, it’s only a matter of time before they lead in market share.
Looking forward to your thoughts and ideas on how to improve LCR.
Fantomaster Interviewed!
Ralph Tegtmeier (aka fantomaster) has been known for many years as having one of the most insightful minds and original voices in the search game. Years ago I wanted to interview him, and only recently did we get to do that.
What did you do before you got into search?
In contrast to the maverick background and achievements my old friend Mike Grehan revealed in his recent interview with SEOBook, my life before search was positively boring. I was born in Egypt and grew up in the Middle East and Asia, where my father served terms in the German diplomatic service. Later, I mastered in Comparative Literature, English Literature and Portuguese philology at Bonn University in Germany. Even before that, I had founded and run (together with two fellow students) an occult bookshop there and went into freelance translation and writing after that.
As a translator, I hooked up with IT almost as soon as it became available, though I did study the subject in some depth before I finally purchased my first PC, a Victor Sirius 286 hybrid that was both IBM and Sirius compatible.
Came the Internet in Fall of 1994, came the “taxBomber” - that was my thentime nom de guerre as an online marketer in the offshore finance, alternate citizenship and privacy protection field.
Before the Web proper was made accessible to all, I’d been on CompuServe and tested the waters there in terms of online marketing, but there were some pretty severe limits to that so it didn’t really scale that well. The WWW really changed all that.
As you may expect, in the mid-to-end 90s, optimizing a web site for the search engines was a lot more simplistic than today: keyword stuffing, multiple title tags, invisible text on page - all these techniques worked like a song.
In 1998, I teamed up with my old school buddy Dirk Brockhausen, who by that time held a doctorate in physics and was a certified SAP consultant, working for companies such as IBM and others.
How did you end up in the search field?
My first online business caught on immediately. Competition wasn’t too fierce though definitely existent. One day, I stumbled across a report on how to game the search engines - quite probably the first of its kind. I purchased it, implemented a lot of the techniques outlined, and bang! - rankings improved even more! There was a lot of deadweight tied to that approach at the time, e.g. signing up for FFA sites which would bring me a ton of spam mails, etc., quite a nuisance, really. So it became essential to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Around the same time I hit upon the late Corey Rudel’s stuff which was an eye opener in terms of efficient marketing, especially the American kind. Lots of impulses from that and still profiting from the impact.
When Dirk an I decided to set up shop, it was a given that we would develop software, the only question was: what kind of application? So we researched the market at some length, caught onto SEO, tested our stuff thoroughly and finally went public with it.
You built the #1 brand in the cloaking space. What were some of the key steps to doing that?
We conducted about a year and half’s intense research, experimenting with all kinds of SEO in a variety of niches. Cloaking beat them all stone cold, so that’s what we went for in the end.
It was quite obvious from the start that efficient, reliable cloaking requires an equally efficient and reliable database of verified search engine spiders to work from, so that’s what we focused on first: the fantomas spiderSpy(TM) service which to this date boasts the world’s most comprehensive list of verified search engine spiders. We’ve been building this list since 1999 and it’s generally considered to be best of breed - and these aren’t my words, mind you, but what out customers say about it.
As for cloaking proper, at first it was single page cloaking only, giving you mixed sites with both cloaked and non-cloaked pages. Later, as the major search engines began to adopt a more adversarial stance, we developed the fantomas shadowMaker(TM) which generates entire stand-alone cloaked sites, what we tagged Shadow Domains(TM) - a term Google initially stole from us in the first versions of their Webmaster guidelines. (They dropped it again later.)
Much of this was due to our being fed up with having to build SDs manually for our SEO clients, so we decided to automate the process. And so, the fantomas shadowMaker(TM) was born. We’re currently working on a new version that will include a ton of additional powerful features to reflect the ever changing search environment.
Is cloaking today as relevant as it was 5 years ago? Do web 2.0 sites and other easy link sources & hosts still make it quite profitable? How has cloaking changed over the years?
Like all things search, cloaking has changed in the course of the years. Initially, it was sufficient to simply cloak single pages on your site, giving you a mix of cloaked and open pages. Then, it was more about foregoing risks for your money sites plus enhanced scalability by deploying self-contained, independent cloaked sites - those Shadow Domains(TM) I mentioned -, effectively restricting your cloaking efforts to these SDs which could be discarded and easily replaced by fresh ones should they be caught out by the search engines.
Today, cloaking has evolved to both include and target RSS feeds, promoting them via the aggregators and feed directories, for example. Our forthcoming new version of the shadowMaker will also include new functionality enhancing page structure variance, inclusion of graphics, CSS, etc. to make the SDs appear even more organic to the spiders. Finally, it will also offer a vastly improved text generation module as well.
Of course, up until now cloaking has generally only addressed on site factors, optimizing webpages for the search engine spiders. What it doesn’t do per se is attend to off site stuff such as link building. So once you’ve started to roll out your SDs, you’ll still have to throw a decent amount of good links at them to make their rankings sticky. However, this isn’t a change in technology so much as in SEO strategy: once links became more all-important, you had to add link building to your arsenal of SEO techniques just like everyone else.
Is it still relevant i.e. effective? Most certainly - provided you know what you’re doing by running a tight ship strategy wise. Essentially, this is nothing new: it simply comes with changing search engine algos, new platforms (such as blogs or social bookmarking sites etc.).
Another, entirely new cloaking technology is still in an experimental stage. It’s what we’ve tagged “Mosaic Cloaking”. Here, only specific parts of an otherwise “normal” web page are cloaked for spider fodder, displaying different content to human visitors. This will effectively lead us back, at least in part, to the mixed sites of yore, featuring both cloaked and non-cloaked content on the same domain. Once we have sufficient empirical data on hand to make this technology viable for general deployment, we hope to integrate it into our software, of course.
As for Web 2.0 sites, we’re mainly leveraging them for both link building and traffic generation. It’s actually quite easy to promote cloaked sites or pages via the social networking platforms these days because people have become so well accustomed to being redirected when browsing the Web that it doesn’t tend to raise any eyebrows anymore.
Some well funded web 2.0 sites do things like list “relevant keywords” and “keywords sending traffic to this page”… what is the difference between cloaking and such an automated approach to keyword rich content generation? Why is one considered bad with the other being considered fine?
Well, cloaking or IP delivery in the technical sense is, of course, about displaying different content to search engine spiders than to human visitors. What these Web 2.0 sites are actually doing is going for the old worn keyword stuffing technique, not cloaking proper. (Well, not as a rule, anyway.)
It’s actually quite funny to see well-trafficked sites like that adopt an amateurish level of purported search engine optimization which we, as professional SEOs, have long demoted as no longer effective enough. There’s many plausible explanations for this, though in the main it’s probably all about fundamental cluelessness. But because these sites are getting tons of traffic from other sources than organic search, and in view of the fact that the search engines are concerned about losing large chunks of their traffic and search market shares (think Facebook and Twitter for two prime examples), they seem to be giving them an unabashed preferential treatment which no ordinary mom-and-pop web site can ever hope to be blessed with.
To the uninformed, this may actually seem to endorse such dated SEO techniques though this is an entirely false conclusions. Because it’s actually not the keyword and link stuffing at all that helps these sites achieve to high rankings, PageRank etc. - rather, it’s all those other factors your run-of-the-mill site cannot easily emulate.
On the client front, we’re experiencing a lot more openness towards “black hat” SEO such as cloaking etc. than e.g. 3-4 years ago. Generally, people aren’t as impressed or as easily conned by the search engines’ (especially Google’s) FUD tactics regarding anything they don’t like. Sure, they’re worried about possibly losing their sites in the search engine indices, but the number of people who’ll simply swallow everything Google feeds them by way of their peculiar gospel of what a “good boy or girl” should do or refrain from in terms of SEO is positively on the decrease.
As Google pushed nofollow and became more liberal with the “black hat” label it seems there is less discussion about black hat vs white hat. Do you agree with that? And if so, why has that conversation died down?
I think it’s because people are getting more pragmatic about things. Maybe it’s the novelty of doing business on the Web which has worn off, maybe it’s the vast variety of divergent opinions and schools of thought of SEO and the unprecedented exposure the importance of organic search engine optimization is enjoying in the media.
Whatever it may actually be, I agree that the debate has become de-emotionalized, less religious even. When we started off with formal SEO services back in the late nineties, the debate was all about “ethical” versus “unethical” SEO. Lots of gut level reactions then to what was, after all, merely a technological, not a theological or moral issue. Add to that the increasingly competitive environment people have to cope with on the Internet and it all figures rather nicely. You might arguably say that Web commerce as a whole has matured, as, of course, has the SEO industry proper.
These days, when you speak with clients they won’t flinch one bit if you ask them whether they want to opt for a “white hat” or a “black hat” approach. Rather, they’ll inquire about efficacy, the relative risks and so on. So it’s a pretty much unexcited, hands-on discussion which is a very good thing.
Matt Cutts often tries to equate search engine manipulators with criminals. And yet the same search results will sell exposure to virtually anyone willing to pay for it. From a linguistic and framing standpoint, what gives Google such dominance over the SEO conversation?
I’ve recently dubbed Matt Cutts as Google’s “FUD Czar” for this very reason, not that I expect it will stop him from pursuing that course in future. Next thing we may find him equating black hat SEOs with kiddie porn peddlers, Columbian drug cartels and white slavery racketeers…
I find this a fairly worrying though certainly not an unexpected development. It’s an established scare tactics we’ve seen deployed ever and again in human history: lump your detractors with anywhich foes everyone is concerned about to make all that muck rub off. It’s how witch hunts and, in the political field, totalitarian propaganda, especially the fascist kind, have always been conducted.
I know I may get quite a bit of flak for this, but the way I view things Google as a corporation has subscribed to an essentially totalitarian mindset. It’s quite clear for anyone to see: in their public statements, in the way they tend to react to criticism, and of course, even more importantly, in the vast array of technologies and data conduits they’re rolling out to dominate all the time.
This being the Information Age, information is equated with power - this is a pervasive meme that’s dominated Western culture for centuries if not millenia. And this is precisely what Google is trying to monopolize - alas, quite successfully.
But not to worry, I won’t set out on a rant with a long winded academic analysis of Google’s crypto fascist ideology and praxis here. Suffice it to say that I’ve studied these matters in some depth for more than 40 years now. This isn’t about some whacko conspiracy theory, it’s about cold, hard nosed and sober analysis and evaluation of verifiable facts. But let’s let it rest there for the time being.
Many ad networks promote fraud because they promote whatever generates the most money (and additional profit margins are often created through fraud). Why is it that the media generally talks about SEO as though it is a black practice shady industry, and pay per click ads are rarely given coverage for promoting things like cookie pushing, adultery, reverse billing fraud, etc.?
For one, advertising is the media’s mainstay, their commercial backbone. So we can’t reasonably expect them to bite the hand that feeds them and hope to survive the exercise. Essentially, this makes them utterly blind on that score by default. At the very least, they’re not given to be unduly reflective about these things.
Second, SEO is still very much a “black art” in the sense that about 99% of all media workers don’t know it from scratch anyway. Let’s face it: while the basic concepts of SEO are fairly straightforward and easy to explain, actually running successful SEO campaigns is quite another ballgame. Also, what with time and attention spans mutating into ever more expensive and rare commodities, most media workers simply won’t (and quite possibly: cannot, even if they would) bother reading your own excellent SEO book or Mike Grehan’s outlines - they’re too long, too technical and effectively too specialized for your average media hack to invest time and dig into.
Third, while there is certainly an entirely real SEO industry out there now, it’s still very much a fledgling operation. Yes, every man and his dog in upper management may know about the importance of SEO for their Web marketing efforts - but which SEO are we actually talking about? Ten experts, eleven opinions, right? To the outsider, it’s confusing, it’s mysterious, it’s dark, and yes: more often than not all this discomfort translates into viewing SEO as being “shady”, like it or not.
Fourth, most SEO agencies I know about are actually focused on PPC management. They may offer organic search optimization alright, but overall PPC is a pretty easy sell whereas organic SEO generally isn’t. PPC is easy to understand, it’s fast and it’s still fairly complex enough to require expert assistance if you don’t want to sink your advertising budget into uneffective campaigns at a breathtaking pace.
All this makes people feel a lot more comfortable with PPC than with organic SEO, I guess.
But what I actually find a lot more worrisome is that click fraud as a media topic seems to have been pushed snugly to the back burner for years. Unfortunately, this applies to the SEO industry as a whole as well: they don’t seem to be too keen on discussing this issue which, in my view at least, is actually doing their clients a great disservice…
Google has a video game patent to exploit video game players based on their mental weaknesses (like a need for security, gambling addictions, or making rush decisons). You had a great post on Sphinn mentioning the hazards of trusting data mining companies too much and the concept of systemic mechanisms of “reality production”. Whenever I mention that sort of stuff people assume I am a cynic and look at me like I am crazy. How can you spread the message about such topics without being seen as crazy?
Well, who says we aren’t? (Laughs) But seriously: if you define “craziness” as implying a generally unacceptable divergence from the ruling norms and prevailing views of mainstream society, I’d actually wonder if I wasn’t into some terrible mistake if people DIDN’T think I was crazy when airing such views. Plus, the original “cynics” in Ancient Greece were the “dog philosophers” which is what the term actually implies: an eminently contrarian crowd in bitter opposition to the fattened, smug establishment of conventional philosophy. So in a way it’s really a badge of honor, don’t you think?
It’s about the violation of comfort levels, I suppose. People are having a very hard time coping with the pace at which current technology is changing the world, both emotionally and intellectually. If all you’re worried about is somehow making ends meet, feeding your family, coughing up money for your mortgage, for medical care and paying for your kids’ schooling, you’ll tend to reduce your outlook to a tunnel vision. It’s called “focus”, I know, but more often than not it’s a type of mental self-amputation resulting in narrow mindedness, simplistic views of the world and, what’s worse, a general refusal do deal with anything unfamiliar if it threatens to shake that less than stable edifice you may mistake for a life.
Once you start putting matters into a larger perspective, they tend to confuse people even more. This, in turn, evokes emtional, gut level reactions - quite irrational, true, but very easy to explain, too: “So what’s Google gotta do with fascism now - is that all you can think of, weirdo?”
Actually, this is nothing new at all. Personally, I and many members of my generation experienced a lot of this in the sixties when more or less all members of the political and economic establishment felt threatened by the hippy movement, the anti Vietnam war protests and a general criticism of capitalist and corporate values. Different contentions, to be sure, but the same mechanisms at work nevertheless.
In a Twitter post you made you mentioned something about the web becoming more narcissistic. What is driving that? How can it be prevented on an individual and group level?
To address your second question first, I don’t think it can be “prevented” in any pro-active way unless you want to pull the plug on it all e.g. by canning the platforms allowing for it - hardly a realistic scenario, I would think. I’m fairly certain that it will abate to some extent once people’s attention starts shifting to other matters, rather than playing voyeurs to some narcissistic exhibitionists. As it stands, it seems to reflect what’s been going on in terms of TV show entertainment for many years now: people exhibiting all kinds of entirely personal quirks and traits, with tons of viewers obviously enjoying it, too.
So what’s actually driving it? In a nutshell: atomization. With large families and tightly knit rural communities losing ground in favor of “individualism” and an ever more disrupted social fabric, overall societal stability can only be achieved by marginalizing the individual, feeding it (and dumbing it down) with lots of vicarious pleasures in lieu of actual participation in political, economic and societal power - call it the ideology of consumism, if you will. It’s one price we’re paying for our physical mobility and mental flexibility: the waning influence of the individual i.e. the very same atomization I’ve mentioned.
What the Web does offer us is a slew of possibilities to at least create some noise and garner a bit of attention - without more immediate social controls being in place to set us stringent limits like we would have experienced them in meatspace. Further, anonymization helps forego even those controls that have actually been implemented: if your forum moderator chucks your account for whatever reason, it’s dead easy to sign up under a different identity to continue creating a stink if that’s what you’re up to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not bashing the Web in any way - it offers everyone an incredible amount of wonderful possibilities we’ve never seen before at such a scale. Think of all the options you have in terms of gathering information on anywhich topic, or of mustering support for a cause you feel strongly about, to name but two examples.
But there’s an obvious downside to it as well: as everything is essentially accessible to everyone, you’re bound to hit upon lots of people you may find obnoxious or boring or outré - certainly more than you did at college or in your rural community where you grew up in pre-Web times.
Why is it that Google thinks highly of public relations (even if founded on lies) but thinks poorly of most other bulk link building strategies?
Well, as Bob Massa never tires of pointing out, a search engine’s primary objective is NOT to “delivery relevance” as so many people are fond of fooling themselves and others, it’s to make a profit, period. Verbatim: “A search engine’s primary purpose is NOT to deliver relevancy. A search engine’s primary purpose is to deliver revenue. That is not the same thing.”
While many SEOs still seem to find it hard to come to terms with that, it’s pretty obvious that the folks over at Google were pretty slow to learn that lesson themselves. Oh, they certainly did so in the end, and with a vengeance, too. But along with this came all the other trimmings that will make or unmake just about any commercial enterprise, an ingrained preference for low pay being compensated with lots of feelgood high talk for the suckers included. See Michael Arrington’s summary “Why Google Employees Quit” for some pretty telling insights.
Of course, hypocrisy plays a major role in this field as well: just like “spam” is always what the other guy is doing, not you yourself, “public relations” is always ok for Google if it helps you ramp up your company to potential client status. At the end of the day you’ll have to conduct a lot of public relations to be able to afford some serious AdWords advertising - simple as that. So it makes no sense killing the cows you actually want to milk further down the road.
By contrast, however, undetected paid links will negatively impact Google’s fundamental business platform because they can’t really deal with them effectively, being so very link biassed as they are (or used to be) - so they’re bound to be slated as a big no-no from their point of view.
None of this is illogical in any way - but of course that doesn’t mean that we as SEOs have got to like or condone it. I know for sure that I don’t…
In many ways (nofollow, nepotism, publishers requiring payment for links) the “organic” link has died a slow and painful death. Do you see Google and other search engines moving away from linking as a core component in their relevancy algorithms?
Personally, I tend to view Google’s ongoing campaign of stressing the “evils” of undisclosed paid linking as a sign of utter desperation. Yahoo! and MSN/Live as well as Ask, while still relying heavily on links themselves, aren’t half as outspoken or, more precisely, as hysterical about it.
I am also on record umpteen times as having pointed out that PageRank and, in fact, all ranking technologies unduly biassed towards inlinks are suffering from a fundamental fallacy. Because links may be lots of different things to many people, but they’re definitely not simple “votes” in the sense of unequivocal acceptance, recommendation or endorsement, i.e. quality. At the very least, that’s only a tiny fraction constituting their overall functionality.
To reiterate, PageRank in its original form was nothing but an overblown and hyped citation index, directly derived from academia’s predilections: in the past 40 years or so it’s become a very popular metrics to grade scholars by the number of citations they can ramp up, very much in line with their overall “publish or perish” career criteria. Allow me to point out, however, that this is essentially a culture thing: on the whole, European academics, to cite a contrarian example, have always staid aloof of this mindset. Plus, competition is just as fierce and cut throat in their world as it is in the “outside world” of regular commerce. I’m not sure there’s actually a lot of “citation buying” going on in the academic universe, but frankly I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were.
Be that as it may, a citation index makes even less sense in a commercial environment than it may possibly do in academia. Why should you want to link to your competitors? Why should they link to you? And if I happen to link to some article of yours I happen to be in violent disagreement with, trying to refute it in all bitterness, and ridiculing you on the same stride - does that link constitute a “vote” even in terms of “relevancy”? Or a “quality” indicator? That’s like arguing that Jewish activist sites rightly pointing out anti-semitic or racist pages they are in disagreement with are actually endorsing them. So what if thousands of Jewish pages are linking out to the same revisionist neo-fascist site until it starts ranking above them all? That’s plain ridiculous.
I mean, is any old “reference” a “vote” or even an indicator of “relevancy”? Sure, pointing to your sources to underpin your arguments will lend them (and you) more credibility, just like in academe. But make no mistake: such questions aren’t as clear cut and easy to answer as one may wish to think - after all, philosophers have been wrestling with such issues for centuries for a slew of good reasons.
So if linking as a signal of relevancy is flawed at the very best, what alternatives do the search engines actually have? And in a more direct response to your question proper: I am seeing a lot of experimentation being conducted these days, ranging from behavioral metrics to personalization of search. SERP hand jobs seem to be hitting it big now, too, certainly as far as extremely competitive niches are concerned, think PPC in the “black hat” sense of “pills, porn and casino” sites.
While it may still be premature to term this the “return of on page factors” as a critical ranking element, we’re actually seeing a lot of this happening again, albeit in a very pussy footed manner.
As more people compete for attention online do you see that increasing or decreasing the quality of the web as a whole?
That’s a bit like asking whether the glass is half full or half empty, I’d say. The Web is expanding, that’s a fact, of course. Obviously, this applies to what you or I may consider the “bad” as much as it does to what we deem to be “good”, whether it’s sources of information or common behavioral traits.
In many ways it’s like a commotion on the rural market place: the more people join in the fray, the louder it tends to get - and the more aggressive you’ll have to be when competing for attention.
But if you shun the crowd to retire to your private club and meet with your peers, things tend to get a lot more quiet and comfy again. This is actually happening at quite a large scale these days: there’s lots of “closed shop” forums and communities online who will strictly vet their members to keep out the riffraff.
Google’s CEO recently stated that “brands are how you sort out the cesspool” and that humans were hardwired for brands. Did it surprise you when he said that?
Frankly, I hope I’ll never live to see the day when the likes of Eric Schmidt actually manage to surprise me. I mean, what to make of a man who is on record for blithely stating that World War I was caused by a “lack of understanding” between nations - something he claims Google will actually help prevent? Sure, this may be the Reader’s Digest naive version of how WW I came about, but it certainly doesn’t reflect reality in any meaningful let alone accurate or verifiable way. What it does reveal, of course, is a picayune, self-serving and utterly petit-bourgeois mindset. (And no, I won’t dig into the question of where the 20th century fascists used to recruit the lion’s share of their followers…)
Ok, so he’s obviouly no qualified historian - but is he an anthropologist, then, making even more asinine claims like this one? “Hardwired” according to Mr Schmidt the neurologist, eh? And what, pray, makes the Web a “cesspool”, anyway?
No, I’m not surprised at all: brands are what Schmidt and his chums are comfortable with, what they flatter themselves to understand well. Well, perhaps they actually do, but really, my only reasonable comment on this one is: “garbage in, garbage out”…
Search penalties are well known to be two tier depending on things like “brand.” How does one know how far to push while staying within their desired risk/reward ratio?
For all the ballyhoo ramped up around “scientific SEO” (and, for that matter, “scientific marketing” - of which SEO is arguably but a minor subset), it’s always been about trial and error and - and this is really important! - educated guesswork. Because the cards have always been stacked from day 1: the search engines won’t allow us to study and review their ranking algorithms (which, from their perspective, is perfectly understandable, of course). Also, they can exploit vast amounts of usage data no single SEO company can ever attain to even remotely - and thus they’re always leaving us with the short end of the stick. Which, in statistical terms, means that we as SEOs can never hope to get the full picture anyway.
But even if it’s a David vs. Goliath kind of scenario, the search engines’ major weakness is their requirement to turn a buck. This makes them just as vulnerable to advertiser pressure tactics as most classic deadwood newspapers are and, in fact, always were.
When all is said and done, you cannot ever really know for sure how much is too much of anything: every niche is different and there’s no such thing as a golden key to them all. So it’s a question of learning, usually the hard way, of trying out different things, both old and new, of testing, testing, testing.
On the upside, if you’re not concerned with branding so much, you can easily skew that risk/reward ratio in your favor by essentially cloning your sites (yes, modify them a bit so their not all-out dupes) and run various SEO strategies for them. That way, you’ll probably get more exposure while minimizing your risks. Should one or several of your sites underperform or even get penalized, you’ll still have others that should perform well enough. So it’s really about scaling done properly.
The reliance on brand and domain authority has lowered result diversity on many fronts. Will the fear of spam cause Google to keep clamping down on diversity, or will mom and pop shops still have a chance online 5 to 10 years from now?
This will probably depend on how the search market will evolve in general. If people should get fed up with getting served more and more brands they’ve known about anyway, this approach may lead to a dramatic loss of market share. If so, Google’s only choice will be to push back brands in favor of lesser sites and more diversity again.
Nor is this entirely unrealistic: brands are one thing, but consumer experience with these brands’ products is quite another. Personally, if I want to know more about some product being offered online, I’ll inquire on Twitter where I’ll typically get a ton of useful responses in a whiffy - no way Google or any other major search engine can match this presently. And I’m certainly not alone: I know lots of people who are doing exactly the same now.
Then, when I’m finally ready to buy, I don’t need Google to compare offers and prices, either. Once I’ve bookmarked my favorite comparison sites, I can merrily fulfill my consumer duties without hitting any major search engine at all in the process.
What I’m not sure about is whether people will actually go to the lengths of explicitly demanding other, better search results from Google etc. It seems more likely that they’ll simply vote with their mice and go elsewhere - that’s a lot easier and faster to do than having to deal with a sluggish, unresponsive behemoth of a corporation.
Generally speaking, I’m afraid I don’t see mom-and-pop shops gaining any leeway within the foreseeable future as there’s nothing to indicate currently that they actually will. But then, 5 to 10 years is a time span I’d be loath to predict for anyway: too many unknown variables at work here. Two to three years seems a more tangible time frame, and I doubt we’ll see any major improvement of small web sites’ clout and standing within that span.
Is search an already won natural monopoly? If not, what do you see hurting Google from a competitive standpoint?
For all its undisputable explosion and evolution in the past 15 years or so, search is still in a very primitive, almost primeval stage in my view. Think “Deep Web” which has hardly been scratched superficially as yet - and yes, think “relevancy”, too: we’re still very much experiencing the Stone Age of search currently. By inference, search is bound to undergo some very fundamental changes pretty soon, and so will searchers’ requirements and expectations.
The way many Web 2.0 sites are starting to impact search as we knew it is a good case in point. I’ve mentioned my own Twitter usage by way of some anecdotal evidence. Sure, Twitter may still turn out to be a mere ephemereal fad in the end, the way MySpace hasn’t managed to live up to its original overblown promise. There’s many people predicting just that, and who knows - maybe they’re right.
But no matter who will evolve to become the biggest boys on the block in the end, and it seems very likely that there’ll be several of them, this is where current crawler based all-purpose search is certainly beginning to hurt. If eyeballs are really everything, I for my part wouldn’t want to bet the farm on Google maintaining its current monopoly of the search space for very much longer. And I don’t see Google being all smug and ignorant about it, either: it’s one of the reasons why they’re expanding into so many different fields ranging from mobile communication technology to trans Pacific data cables, book digitalization and online document storage, to mention but a few.
For all we know, we may possibly witness the return of the vertical fairly soon as well. This would actually dovetail nicely with the prevailing trend towards ever more granular specialization and specificity. Highly specialized information archives, focused on specific fields of expertise and an equally selective user demographics only, be it directories or portals or crowd sourced networks or databases may well be the one big thing to watch out for.
What have you been up to lately? Do you have any new products or services launching soon?
While we’re best known for our cloaking applications, our activities are actual a lot more varied than that. For example, our 100% “white hat” “10 Links A Day” link building service over at http://10LinksADay.net/ is another major focus of ours.
Beyond that, we’re very busy developing proprietary technology in the field of automated content creation: targeted towards clients’ specific requirements in terms of topicality, keywords and links in a scalable manner, this is what I’m most involved in myself currently. Moreover, the content we’re creating is all 100% readable and entirely unique stuff of an unprecedented quality, if I say so myself.
Having presented this to our 10 Links A Day clients as a special, subscribers only offer up until now, we’ll soon roll it out as a stand alone service named “Customized Content Creation” (CCC).
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Thanks a bunch Ralph! To read his latest thoughts on search, check out his blog at http://fantomaster.com/fantomNews/
Want to Get Listed in DMOZ? Become an Editor
Posted by countrystarr
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Getting your website listed in the DMOZ directory in anything less than geologic time frames is next to impossible. Most SEOs submit their sites and then forget about ever getting listed. However, there is a way to guarantee that your site will be included in the DMOZ directory quickly: become a DMOZ editor for the category in which you have applied to have your website listed.
Applying to become a DMOZ editor is easy. Getting accepted is a little bit harder, but definitely doable. The first step is to find the category that best describes your website. At the bottom of that category you will see a link that says "Volunteer to edit this category." This will take you to the next page which gives you tips and advice on applying to become an editor. Read this page! At the bottom of the page click on the button that says "Proceed" to go to the actual application.
DMOZ will only approve you to edit one category at a time. After you become an editor, you can apply to edit other categories. Whether or not you get accepted to edit other categories depends on your body of work up until that time as an editor. That is why it is a good idea, even after you are approved as an editor, to carefully follow the editorial guidelines on websites you approve to be in the directory. If you have multiple websites waiting to be approved by DMOZ editors, I recommend applying to edit in the category for which your most important site is waiting. Do a good job editing in that category and it will be easy for you to be approved to edit other categories.
It is best to start with a smaller category. Usually less than 100 listings in a category will give you an excellent chance of being accepted.
The actual application is where you need to be careful and do a little homework. Here you will be asked to provide the usual (your name, username, password, email address, etc.).
Further down the application page you will find four boxes to input information. Doing a good job filling out these four boxes is critical to your application. As you fill them out, make sure your punctuation, grammar, and spelling are all correct. I’ll list each box one by one and my suggestions for the best way to fill them out.
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What is your internet experience? Enter a laundry list here (CSS, HTML, Drupal, PHP/mySQL, etc.). You don’t need to elaborate much. I would not put that you are an SEO. You want to show DMOZ that you actually care about the integrity of the directory. If whoever reviews your application thinks that you are trying to become an editor just to manipulate search results, they may not approve you.
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Why are you interested in becoming an editor for the ODP? You want to be careful here. You need to be honest in your application; however, there may be such a thing here as too much honesty. For example, you would not want to put something like "I’m applying because I want to get my website www.xyz.com listed in the directory." Instead, talk about how important it is to the internet community that only websites with high quality content be listed in the directory. Even though algorithms are getting better all the time, there is still no substitute for human review by a trusted reviewer to identify quality websites, etc.
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Explain your interest in the subject category. Think of all the relevant experience you have had in the category and then paint that experience in the best light possible. For example, if the category is Kobe Bryant (taxonomy: Sports: Basketball: Professional: NBA: Players: B: Bryant, Kobe) you would explain how you follow Kobe’s statistics and are familiar with his career and then list some relevant details/examples (his drafting from high school to the Lakers, his NBA championships, Olympic appearances, etc.).
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Sties with which you are associated. It is important to be honest here. Some application reviewers can be very thorough and will often find out if you try to mislead them. There is no conflict of interest for you to edit categories in which you may also have eligible sites. You can even approve your own sites, just as long as you follow the editorial guidelines.
The total time to get this far is probably 1 or 2 hours carefully reading the submission and editorial guidelines, and then about 30 minutes to fill out the four boxes. I recommend copying and pasting all of your responses into a Word document. There is a good chance that you will be rejected on your first application. If you are denied the first time, your initial applications is not saved anywhere and you will have to create a new application from scratch. By saving all of your responses it will be easier to re-do a new application later and cut and paste those responses back in the application (provided it wasn’t those responses that kept you from getting accepted in the first place).
The last part of the application is also very important. Here, you need to suggest three sites that are not listed in the directory, but that you would include in the directory if you were an editor for the category for which you are applying to edit. This is where you have to do a little homework. Here are the steps I recommend to finding good sites:
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Do Google/Yahoo searches for relevant sites. Make sure the sites are not affiliate sites or are not duplicate content sites. Also, strictly re-seller sites with little original content will not work. I recommend making a list of 5 or 10 candidate sites and then working down from there. Make sure the sites have original quality content.
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Find the best three and then check the DMOZ directory to make sure they are not already listed. It can be a challenge to find good sites that are not already listed. Always check, because rest assured, your application reviewer will and he/she will deny your application if you have suggested a site that is already listed. Type in the URL without http:// or www prefixes (e.g., google.com) in the DMOZ search box to check if the website is already in the directory.
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After you have found three candidate sites that meet the editorial guidelines and are not already in the directory, write a simple title and description. Do not use words such as "quality" or "best" in the description. The DMOZ editorial guidelines give examples of the best way to write titles and descriptions. Make sure and follow those guidelines carefully or your application will be denied.
This part of the application can take about an hour or more. The hardest part is finding good quality original websites that are not already listed. I would not use your own website as an example of one of the three. While I do not know for sure if this would be cause for denial of your application, I just think it is bad form.
Submit your application and follow the instructions (you have to reply to an email to complete your application).
The DMOZ editors who review applications typically have very fast turnaround times. When I first applied to be an editor (and on subsequent re-applications) and when I have applied for new categories the reviewers usually get back to me within 24 hours with their decision. Plan on your application being denied the first couple of times. Most of the time, the person who reviews your application will give you good feedback as to why your application was denied. It is easy to make the changes and then re-apply.
When I first applied, it took me three times to finally get accepted to edit my first category. Once I became an editor, my eyes were opened! I went into the category and there were 69 submissions waiting to be reviewed, including my previous submission (the category only had 49 listed websites). It was obvious that an editor had not looked at that category in a long time. Especially in commercial product categories, there is little incentive for editors to approve other websites. If an editor is editing a commercial product category and that editor also has a website listed in that category, it is unlikely that he/she will be excited about approving their potential competitors. That is why some categories NEVER get new sites listed and updated in them.
In that list of unreviewed websites you will probably see your past submissions, as well as those you suggested to be included when you made your application.
I recommend that you go through the list of applicants and find some good websites to list in your category, even if they might potentially be your competitors. This will show the DMOZ muckety mucks that you did not abuse your editorial discretion and it will make it easier for you to get approved for other categories in the future. Then, of course, go in and list yours as well. When you do this, the websites becomes listed and immediately active in the directory.
The total time to become a DMOZ editor, from beginning to end, is probably 3 or 4 hours. To apply for new categories is usually 1 hour or less since you already tackled the learning curve.
Is it worth it? Who knows…. I guess it all depends on what a link from DMOZ is worth! That is a question for another post.
Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW
Posted by randfish
Last week I gave the keynote presentation at SMX Munich, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW. In that presentation, I shared a great deal of data from our web index as well as some SEO tips based on our experience replicating many search engine activities (crawling, indexing, building a link graph, de-duplication, canonicalization, etc.). In this blog post, I’d like to first announce that Linkscape’s new index, with crawl data from late March to early April (& upon which these data points are calculated), is now live - check it out here - and second, to share the charts, graphs and tips from my presentation.
The Linkscape Index
First off, some basic points about Linkscape’s index:
- The crawl is intended to imitate what major search engines crawl and keep in their index. Talking to lots of folks from the engines who do this work, we’ve heard that while tens or hundreds of billions of pages are crawled, there are only "~5-10 billion pages worth keeping in a main index."
- Linkscape is a crawler-built index, meaning it uses a seed set and crawls outward via links to discover new URLs.
- The index currently biases towards pages with external links, meaning we don’t crawl as deeply as the major engines do, but we try to crawl. very broadly (to reach as many well-connected pages and unique domains as possible).
- The crawlers and data sources we currently employ all respect robots.txt.
The Web’s Structure
As we crawl, we see some well-known structural pieces making up the web:
Linkscape, as well as numerous academic sources (and, almost certainly, the major search engines), collect and store data about three types of structural components - pages, subdomains and root domains. Link & content metrics, along with crawl parameters and query-independent ranking factors, are stored about each of these.
Linkscape also sees a view of the web that most IR students will be familiar with:
As others have noted in the past, the web’s link structure tends to look a bit like a bowtie, with a large number of tightly linked, well connected pages in the center and outliers on the borders with few incoming/outbound links. Linkscape does a relatively good job with the center and the linked-to edge (with few/no outbounds), but struggles more on pages with no incoming links (as these are difficult to discover and often not worthwhile keeping in an index).
Index Statistics
We’ve found these data points fascinating and I’m excited to be able to share many of them for the first time. While Linkscape is not as comprehensive as Yahoo!/Google, it’s far closer to a representation than a sample size. Our latest index update currently contains:
- 44,410,893,857 (44 Billion) pages
- 230,211,915 (230 Million) subdomains
- 54,712,427 (54 Million) root domains
- 474,779,069,489 (474 Billion) links
For this index, the following data pieces apply:
* Note that for the link distribution chart, this refers to "external, juice-passing links" which excludes links from the same subdomain to itself as well as links on pages with the meta nofollow or those that employ rel=nofollow.
* Note that for the root domains linking chart, this refers only to pages/sites receiving links from unique root domains. For example, with www.seomoz.org, we’d only receive one "linking root domain" from searchengineland.com, even though that site links to ours on many unique pages. Likewise, with links we receive from About.com and their numerous subdomains - in total, it’s only one counted "unique root domain."
* Not surprisingly, most links on the web are incestuous to some degree, and thus come from internal links (those on the same subdomain as the target), same IP address (where multiple sites from the same owner are hosted), same root domain and the same c-block of IP addresses. If we can see these relationships with Linkscape, it follows that the search engines have an easy time of it as well - and these links are almost certainly not passing the same kind of value that external links from unique root domains, IP-addresses and C-blocks would.
Some interesting data points on the above:
- 2.7% of all links on the web are nofollowed
- 73% of those are internal (so nofollow is actually far more popular as a link sculpting tool than a spam prevention device)
- 3 billion out of our 475 billion links (~0.6%) were found in noscript tags - while the engines recommend against this and talk about it as a spam tactic, we suspect that many of these are, in fact, legitimate uses and probably do get counted (due to their value in content discovery).
- 165,638,731 links (0.034%) aren’t visible on the page (they’re hidden off screen using CSS or other tactics). Again, given the numbers, we wonder whether all of these are spam and whether they’re all discounted by the engines.
- This is our first index supporting the canonical URL tag, and so far we’ve seen just north of 16 million pages employing the parameter. While this is still a drop in the bucket on a global web scale, we’ll be watching closely for how much support it generates over the months to come.
Search Engine & Linkscape Metrics
Like the search engines, we calculate a number of metrics on the pages, subdomains and root domains in our index to help uncover spam and sort by popularity & trustworthiness. The following are distributions of the metrics we currently employ:
* mozRank is our calculation of raw link popularity. Like Google’s PageRank, Yahoo!’s WebRank and Live’s StaticRank, it’s a recursive algorithm that counts links as votes and treats links from more popular pages as more important. We’ve found that while it’s useful for discovering which pages to crawl and index, it’s a poor measure of true importance and has significant noise.
* Domain mozRank is calculated in the same fashion as page-level mozRank, but on the domain-level link graph. Thus, it only takes into account unique links that exist from one root domain to another and is agnostic as to whether a site has 1, 100 or 1,000 links to another. We’ve found this metric exceptionally valuable for identifying the popularity and importance of a root domain - on the subdomain link graph, it’s more susceptible to manipulation and spam.
* mozTrust, which we also calculate on both the domain and page level link graphs, has proven highly effective as a spam identifier (particularly in combination with mozRank - the difference between the two is an excellent predictor of manipulative linking). mozTrust relies on the same intuition as Yahoo!’s TrustRank, running a recursive algorithm that passes juice down from trusted seed URLs/domains.
Measuring Correlation
Possibly the most interesting data I shared from an SEO application standpoint was around our research into the correlation of individual metrics to search engine rankings. Our own Ben Hendrickson has been doing significant data gathering and analysis, trying to answer the question,
How well does any single metric predict higher rankings?
His early results are enlightening:
In this chart, Ben’s showing that no metric is particularly good at predicting rankings by itself, but if you had to use something, the number of root domains linking to a URL and that URL’s mozRank are both just above the 95% confidence interval. Note that such classic SEO metrics as Yahoo! link counts and Alexa.com counts (which are included in many toolbars and appear in many SEO reports) are very nearly worthless.
The results are much better (though still not excellent) when we instead ask what metrics correlate with ranking 10 positions higher (essentially, what’s the difference between page 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, etc). Here, Ben shows that while only a single metric is above the 95% confidence interval (domains linking to a URL), there are several that are 20%+ better than random guessing.
Perhaps the most surprising result of this (for me, at least) was the data showing that Google’s link counts actually do have a correlation with rankings, suggesting that they’re not completely random (even though they might feel that way given their small sample size).
Out of all the metrics, it’s little surprise that # of linking root domains is a favorite (we use it, for example, to sort our Top 500 list). It’s one of the most difficult metrics to manipulate effectively and has high correlation with trust, importance and search engine rankings.
Top Tips for SEOs
Based on the work we do crawling and building an index, and the struggles we’ve encountered (and seen the engines similarly encounter), we’ve crafted a few short tips. While some of these are obvious and well known, they still pay to keep in mind as high-level recommendations we feel confident the search engines would support:
- Don’t rely on the search engine to canonicalize anything for you.
- Focus on link acquisition from a diverse number of root domains, not necessarily high PageRank pages, or those with high link counts.
- Make smart, usable, short URLs. They’re far easier to process and have a much better correlation with useful, unique content an engine would want to keep in its index.
- If you want to earn lots of links, building a distributed content widget/badge/link that users embed in their sites/pages is an incredibly effective strategy. Just look at how many of the top pages on the web achieved that position employing this strategy.
- Don’t rely on PageRank or raw link counts as accurate assessments of ranking potential. According to our data, they’re not high signal or high rankings correlation metrics.
- The social web is rising, as are those employing it effectively (again, check out the top sites list for evidence).
- Don’t be afraid to use nofollow internally as it’s clearly not an outlier on the web. However, do be cautious with its use - you can seriously screw things up if you make mistakes on that front.
- Keep content on a single subdomain and root domain wherever possible. The metrics of that domain will go a long way to make that content visible and ranking-worthy.
- Avoid doing "strange" things from a technical and link acquisition perspective. The former makes you harder to crawl, process and index while the latter makes you stand out as possible spam/manipulation.
We hope you enjoy this data - please feel free to share - and enjoy using the new Linkscape index. Again, I’d like to give my congratulations and thanks to both Ben & Nick, who’ve done a tremendous job with Linkscape. If you have questions, please leave them in the comments and they should be able to provide answers and direction.
p.s. For those keeping track, this index update was almost exactly a month from our last one, and our goal is to maintain approximately 3-4 week intervals between updates for the foreseeable future. We’re also doing a lot to improve the quality and focus of our index to capture more good stuff and deep stuff on mid-size and large domains (and less spam). We’d appreciate it if those of you who are producing lots of spam would help us out by ceasing to earn links from trustworthy, respectable sites and pages - thanks! 
Brand Considerations When Choosing Domain Names
Choosing a domain name for a new project can be a little daunting.
All the good names are gone. Once you find something acceptable, you’ll have to be sure you can live with it for a long time. And what about the implications for SEO?
So many considerations.
Do You Want A Disposable Domain Name?
Some domains are throw-away, so the domain name doesn’t matter so much. buy-viagra-online-cheapest.com might be just fine for someones 100th pharma site. We all know it’s going to be blitzed eventually, anyhow 
For such domains, brand is never going to be a major consideration. But for most other projects, I’d recommend devoting time to brand considerations and credibility factors.
Why?
Traffic Comes From Everywhere
Obviously, traffic doesn’t just originate at search engines. The way things are going, the webmasters who used to frequently link to sites will just Twitter about you instead!
Word of mouth is becoming more and more important on the web. The most popular websites today facilitate personal publishing.
In order to capitalize on this, it is helpful to have a brand name that is easy for people to remember. It should be distinctive. It should be credible. It should be something people feel comfortable passing on.
When people mention you in the context of a social network, are they going to talk about cheap-mp3-online-buy-cheapest.com? Would they feel comfortable recommending it to their friends and networks of contacts? Does it make them look good? Will they remember your domain name five minutes later? Would it be something they’ll pass on?
Even those webmasters who do link out tend to be cagey about where they link. The last place they’ll link to is the trashy looking domain name.
The credibility of a domain name in such an environment counts for a lot.
Brand Naming Strategy
Brand is a is a collection of experiences and associations connected with a service, a person or any other entity
What does “Google.com” mean to you? An incorrectly spelled mathematical term meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros?
I’m guessing Google means finding things, making money, technology, the future, and various other experiences. That’s the power of brand. Made-up, memorable “meaningless” words become incredibly valuable and significant.
That’s ok for big companies who spend a lot of money on building these associations, but what about the site owned by the little guy?
One idea is to use soft branding. Leverage off a concept that is already known, and twist it a little.
For example, an xml feed product that acts like a mail client might use the term “mail” in the brand name, because people are already familiar with the concept of mail. “Hotmail” is an example of soft branding. AfterMail is a service that retains copies of emails sent by employees and holds them in a central database. The brand name is partly unique and memorable, and partly describes the function.
Good Domain Names Appreciate
Once you have a good, brand-able domain name, it will very likely appreciate.
As time goes on, good domain names become more scarce. Add to this the associations you’re building, and the domain name can become a valuable asset in it’s own right. This is seldom, if ever, the case with disposable domain names.
How much is SEOBook.com worth? Would it have been near as valuable now if Aaron had called it learn-seo-online.com? Possibly, but I suspect the latter is always going to have credibility issues, not to mention the dreaded hyphens.
Exact Match
There is a lot of debate about exact match domain names. There is evidence to suggest Google weights this factor highly, but ask different SEOs and you’ll likely get different answers.
SEO considerations aside, exact match has a bonus when it comes to PPC. Check out this article by Frank Schilling:
What do you suppose would happen if I advertised my URL under the key-phrase that matches the name? Well, I tried it and I found that because my URL matched the key-phrase people were searching for, I had to bid less for traffic. People were more apt to click on a link when it matched the URL.. and the power of .com just reaffirmed to Jane Public that she had found the market leader.
What has this got to do with brand? If you build a brand to the point where it becomes a searchable phrase i.e “seo book” you’ll enjoy the same benefit as the guys who own the exact match names. You’ll find it easier, and cheaper, to dominate both organic and PPC listings.
It’s harder to do that with a watered-down generic name.
Linking Factors
If people do link to you, it’s desirable to have a keyword in url. However, sometimes this conflicts with brand imperatives i.e. being memorable and distinctive.
So what do you do?
Try using a byline.
For example, if your domain name is Acme.com, you could add a byline that describes what you do i.e “Acme.com - SEO Services”. People may well link the full description, or use that phrase when talking about you. The by-line becomes an integral part of your brand. This approach is especially important when trying to convince directory owners to link to you with addition keywords.
For a lot more information on domain naming strategies, check out Aaron’s domain naming lesson in the members section.
The Link Economy is Ruthless
Jeff Jarvis explained why our current media machinery does not fit the web:
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
Part of making sure that what you create counts is creating something great, but another (often overlooked piece) is to content for the right markets. Links alone won’t make you money. Some websites want to limit exposure.
Geocities, which was bought for $2.87 billion (in cash) will close before the year is out, as Yahoo! looks to cut costs and focus on their core business. Many new sites are blocking exposure in low earning markets:
Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.
It is far easier to program something like Chartly than it is to create something that generates millions of needed daily page-views to become profitable. Even if you pick the right markets (and are building off a big network) there is no guarantee you will be profitable, which is part of the reason why many media companies will start building more interactive sites with more tools on them. The media needs to shift from being a spot you read the news to a spot where you interact with and discuss the news. Perhaps even a spot where you help share and create the news.
Don’t get me wrong, I love amazing content like this, but it just doesn’t make money.
How To Make Your Offline Presence Work For You Online
Posted by Lucy Langdon
I was recently working on a social media strategy for a popular city newspaper and it got me thinking about the benefits a business can get from a well-thought out crossover between its offline and online presence. I’ve tried to write this post so that it’s useful for any sized business that has some kind of offline presence, from a shop, through a publication to any kind of offline advertising or PR. If you’re spending money offline, you should consider how that investment can be taken advantage of online.
When I say ‘make the most of your offline presence’, I’m talking about a wide range of potential online benefits: increasing traffic, improving your link profile and/or increasing conversion rates. Optimising this crossover proves the old adage, ‘the sum of the parts is greater than the whole’ (oh, that old adage).
First off, let’s talk about why it’s a good idea to make the most of this crossover.
- If someone likes your brand offline, they’re probably going to like it online. Make sure your website is a pleasant user experience and has lots of opportunities for your customers to tell their friends about you.
- Unless you live just down the road from all your customers, it’s easier to communicate online that it is offline. It’s also often a lot more time-efficient.
- An online customer is much more likely to give valuable feedback on your brand than an offline one, particularly if you make it easy for them. This kind of interaction can take any number of guises: a form to fill in, commenting, voting, linking.
- Converting offline customers to online customers can, depending on your business, significantly lower the overhead on any conversions you make.
- At the risk of sounding obviously biased, online is where it’s at. These days, customers almost expect a comprehensive web presence from whoever they spend money with. Don’t fluff it up.
How to send people to your site
I remember the first time a friend of mine put his website on his business card. It was pretty exciting. These days, you’d attract more attention not having a readily-available web address for your company. You have to do something more engaging, more… (you guessed it), 2.0. So here are three tips on how to direct customers, potential or otherwise, to your site:
- Incentivise. Give your offline customers a proper good reason to visit your site. A competition for ‘best feedback’ is a good idea. Or, for some great buzz, organise a giveaway at a certain time on a certain day (but make sure your site lives up to expectations under the sudden influx of open-minded visitors or they might not be so open-minded next time).
- Be provocative. If you’ve got the space in which you can be provocative, then ask a question that demands an answer from your user. This has to be done carefully; you don’t want to be the target of any passionate arguments, but it would be perfect if you could provide the space in which that argument took place.
- Offer exclusivity. The oldest trick in the book: ‘Visit our website for a special, one time only, exclusive deal!’. You don’t have to be that blatant, but spreading the word that you might get a better deal or service if you come via the web will convert well. Again, a little tricky to implement: you don’t want to ostracise any customers you do have that don’t like or use the Internet much.
- Community. If your customers like buying cars, they probably like talking about them. Building online communities is a whole other ball game, but there’s lot of merit in driving genuine, interesting customers to your website.
Offline Advertising
Google Call to Action
There have been a few companies that have used Google call-to-actions in their advertising campaigns. Here’s a successful example from way back in 2006. As Paul Mead writes, a Google campaign is “better in terms of recall and it fits in with the way we react to advertising these days.” The danger of course is that your campaign can be hijacked spectacularly.
Or, like with this Samsung ad in the Metro today, you can just fail. If you’re going to get customers to search for you, at least have something they can find! (Sorry the quality’s not that great- if you can’t read it, the Samsung ad tells me to ‘Search on Google for LED’).
Brand
If you’re starting a new business or thinking about changing the name of your existing one, it’s really worth thinking about what people will be googling when they want to find you. Either a memorable and unique brand name or, depending on your online clout, a keyphrase-laden name are much better than, for example, ‘Trixy’s MEGA Supersaver Store’; who’s going to remember that?
How to boost your online efforts offline.
Say you’re doing some linkbait or have just launched a new feature on your site- why not promote it offline as well? If you can get a TV, radio or print mention, you could drive a whole load of unique traffic to your site. Just be careful of making a social media fluff, like Radio 4 did recently with their self-proclaimed ‘viral video‘. The content was great, but there was some dispute over whether you can call a video viral while giving it a boost on the show.
When The Hoards Start Arriving
Golden Rule: make sure you’re ready for them. Nothing is going to put a customer off a brand more quickly than being urged to visit a site only to find it’s not up to scratch.
If you’ve been smart and used a custom URL shortener like Tom suggested last week, then you can track your customer and drive them to exactly the right page. If you haven’t got around to that yet, think about how you’ll get the right message to the right customers when they arrive at your site.
One tip is to make sure your offline prompt aligns with the online equivalent. You could use the same language or the same imagery- anything that will reassure the user that they’re in the right place. Stick a big call-to-action in there and you’re away.
You want your customers to arrive at the page you’re directing them to and feel like they’ve turned up half way through a whoop-ass party. If possible, make sure there’s already some buzzing comments and interaction going on. If you’re a well known name, consider making a regular appearance in the comments. The personal touch is another nice way to overlap your offline and online efforts; create an avatar that people will recognise and want to connect with.
How else do you use your offline presence to benefit your online presence?