Archive for September, 2009

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Where in the World is SEOmoz?

Posted by jennita
September 30, 2009

Posted by jennita

SEOmoz scheduleWe’re getting close to the end of the year, which means halloween, holiday parties and spending time with the family… That is unless you’re a mozzer! The fall season has hit us full swing and we’re out and about speaking and attending conferences, providing training and traveling from Sweden to Mexico to Vegas baby! Check out where we’ll be over the next few months and hopefully we’ll see you there! 

SMX East - NYC - October 5-7

New York City in the Fall… it’s the perfect setting for SMX East. The air is getting crisper, the leaves are falling and search marketers from around the globe take this city by storm. Rand will be speaking the first day on the Revisiting PageRank Sculpting & Siloing panel as well on the 3rd day on Dealing with Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All that Jazz. You can find me speaking on the last day on the panel Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues. Nick and Adam will also be around, so come find us!

Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit – Google offices NYC - October 8

I really love the Jane and Robot Search Developer Summits. Being a techie at heart, these technical SEO conferences are right up my alley. This particular one is going to be exceptionally great, not only for all the talented speakers but that we get to go to the Google offices in NYC. Woot! Also, it’s by invitation only which makes you feel really special (even if it is free). If you’re interested in going you can request an invitation. As for us, Nick will be speaking about "Why it is Hard to Crawl your website (and how to fix it!)," plus I will be leading the Round table discussion for the Microsoft stack. Oh! I’ll also be helping with registration, so if you see me, please say hi… I’m shy ;). 

London & Stockholm

ECMOD London - October 7-9
SMX Stockholm - October 10-13
A4Uexpo London - October 14
Gillian continues her world speaking tour (by this point she’s spoken at 2 conferences in Canada, 1 in Los Angeles and attended the Social Media Summit in San Francisco!) by taking on Europe. At ECMOD, Gillian speaks about The State of Search Marketing: Where We Are, Where We’re Headed & Why It Matters. Then she jumps over to SMX Stockholm where she’ll be speaking on the panel  Landing Page Testing and Optimization as well as the SEO Check Up session. From there she heads back to London for the A4Uexpo. WHEW! And the tour is only halfway over, check out where she’s headed next!

ExactTarget Connections 09 - Indianapolis, IN - October 13-15

If you love email (and who doesn’t?) then you should check out ExactTarget Connections ‘09, one of the biggest email marketing-focused events out there. You’ll not only learn tons of great tactics for improving your email marketing, you’ll get to see a keynote by Malcolm Gladwell, and a concert by They Might Be Giants! Who knew Indianapolis could sound so appealing? Scott will be our lone mozzer attending, so find him and say hello!

SEOmoz/Distilled Pro Training Series - London - October 19-20

The Pro Training in Seattle this year was honestly the best conference I’ve personally ever attended! The speakers were knowledgeable and approachable, the food was great (always a bonus) and the entire event was a hit. I can only imagine that the Pro Training in London is going to be just as great, if not better (I mean, have you seen the venue?!) Rand and Ben will be speaking plus Danny will also be attending, equipped with a tazer to take down Ben if he starts rambling (or so I hear). :)

We have just a few tickets left to this event and it’s about to sell out. If you’re the type to wait around until the last minute, you better get on it before it’s too late. This is a can’t miss event, Sign up now.

SearchMeetups and World Brand Congress

SearchMeetup New Delhi - October 20-22
SearchMeetup Bangalore - October 24-26
SearchMeetup Mumbai - October 30-Nov 1
World Brand Congress Mumbai - November 2-4
This is the next round of Gillian’s worldwind tour as she heads from London to New Delhi to begin her next round of speaking gigs at various SearchMeetups. She ends in Mumbai for a few days before heading south for the winter.

Mexico

Existes/Mexican Govt Internet Standards Session, Mexico City - November 9-10
SMX Mexico, Mexico City - November 11

Viva Mexico! Gillian rounds out her international tour with a few days in Mexico City speaking at Existes and SMX Mexico.

PubCon  - Las Vegas - November 10-13

Hooray! PubCon Vegas! This is one of the most talked about events of year. Speakers submit their pitches during the summer and everyone has their hotel and airfare booked months in advanced. With up to 7 different tracks each day, PubCon covers everything from SEO to Affiliates. I particularly enjoy the Interactive Site Reviews because inevitably someone asks to have their site reviewed, and the poor soul has no idea they’ve purchased links all across the web and the reviewers reveal it.

If you’re looking for the mozzers, you can find us all over the place! Rand will be speaking on the SEO/SEM Tools session on day 2 and on How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk on the 3rd day (This was my favorite presentation last year). Gillian ends her tour here at PubCon and will be moderating Real World Winning Tactics for Content Creation on the 3rd day also. Plus Adam, Arden, Scott and I will be around and we’ll have our annual Search Spam party with a whole new deck of cards! (Ooooh I wonder who’s on them!! Could it be YOU?)

We still have 20 tickets left for our PubCon Promo - Buy a year’s subscription to SEOmoz PRO and get a FREE PubCon 2009 Full Access Pass! The ticket prices for PubCon are about to go up, which will make this deal even better. Better hop to it!

SES Chicago - December 7-11

For the last event of the year, Rand heads off to speak at SES Chicago. Are you tired yet? I’m pretty sure we all are!

Tired Rand
Sooooo Sleeeeeeepy

We look forward to the busy few months and seeing everyone! Remember to say hello if you see any of us, whether we look tired like Rand does above, or not. :) Ciao!

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How to Create a Link Building Strategy

Posted by Ben Norman
September 30, 2009

Marketing yourself online is by no means an easy process. If you haven’t had too much experience developing successful sites, then the idea of gaining links and the importance of doing so is probably slightly lost on you. But don’t be fooled, link building is absolutely essential to your website’s future success.
Most search engine algorithms, [...]

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Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines

Posted by randfish
September 29, 2009

Posted by randfish

If you’ve been around the SEO world a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard the old adage:

Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings

Along with its peer:

SEO tactics that focus on engines, rather than users, are manipulative (black/gray hat) and will eventually be discounted or penalized

In my opinion, both of these statements are utterly false and tragically misleading. In my view, SEO starts with the user (of course), but cannot ignore the incredible importance of search-engine targeted (and specific) tactics. When I first considered the issue, I thought that perhaps, years ago, these opinions were more accurate than they are today. However, after visualizing the issue, I discovered even that isn’t true:

Relative Importance of User-Focused SEO Tactics Over Time

Relative Importance of Search Engine-Focused SEO Tactics Over Time

(please note: graphs like this are, as always, just my personal opinion)

The value of tactics from each set has risen/fallen over time, leading me to the conclusion that this was never good advice. And yet, thinking back, I’m almost sure that at some point, at a conference and during interactions with clients, I personally repeated this misnomer. I want to issue an apology for that now and set the record straight - SEO is a task that requires paying close attention to the needs of both users and engines. You can’t be an effective SEO without it.

Just think of all the specific tasks we perform that we’d never do if it weren’t for search engines:

I think the problem with the classic "build for users" advice is that it sounds so compelling and, on a surface level, makes a lot of sense. Maybe this is a good warning not to adhere to any advice just because it seems logical on its face - knowledge and expertise may not make for simple messaging, but, outside of politics, accuracy is far more valuable than fitting into a sound byte.

UPDATE: A lot of folks in the comments are under the impression that I’m recommending against building for users - nothing could be further from the truth. Websites are made for people, and users should absolutely be the focus of your efforts. My argument in this post centers specifically around the practice of search engine optimization and the idea that tactics which are engine-focused (like XML sitemaps, anchor text, link architecture, webmaster tools usage, etc.) can be ignored because they’re not "for the user." The charts and points above are intended to illustrate that if you only focus on "user-targeted SEO" you’re missing a huge chunk of the potential SEO opportunity pie.

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Employing Market Leverage + Subsidies

Posted by Aaron Wall
September 29, 2009

Are You Employing Leverage?

A few months back I had a chat with ShoeMoney and we talked about a lot of marketing stuff. He always speaks of the importance of being able to leverage success to build other related projects. It is typically worth far more money to be a lead player with projects that build off of each other than it is to be a #10 player in many different markets trying to build disconnected brands that can’t feed off each other. Even traditional slow moving publishing organizations like newspapers are aggressively leveraging network effects in their SEO strategy.

Networks Allow You to Come From Behind

When you look at Theme Forest they came late to the market, and yet are many times as large as competing businesses that are twice as old. Envato was launched in 2006, and in spite of coming late to market they were nearly instantly successful. Owning popular blogs helped them create thriving marketplaces, and the marketplaces help them make the blogs more popular. The promotion is circular.

Most Leading Web Companies Use Networks

Larger web networks like IAC, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Internet Brands, Quinstreet, Expedia, Classified Ventures, BankRate, Monster.com, and Demand Media employ the same tactics. At $170 million Mint was a cheap buy for Intuit just to block out competition. Any additional distribution and cost savings are a bonus. Once you have distribution you have free inventory to promote a new site into a related vertical. And this strategy works with smaller niche sites as well. Publishing this site made it easy for us to get a lot of exposure for my wife’s PPC strategy flowchart.

Subsidizing New Channels

Everything that is free is subsidized. And rather than trying to squeeze the maximum returns out of any given project it is often better to look for ways to add more value. The best businesses that are sustainable create more value than they capture. Once you have multiple monetization models and multiple income streams you can be flexible with your approach to growth.

Keep Bolting On Pieces

We originally gave away free SEO tools mainly with the ideas of building links and promotion in mind. But now they also help establish a customer funnel while commoditizing the value of some similar business models. And because many of the tools are decentralized (as Firefox extensions) maintenance costs are much lower than someone who centralizes everything. Our customers on average tend to be toward the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, so giving away useful and extensible tools helps us meet that market. But a lot of our business strategy has been made up as we went along, rather than having an aggressive master plan in place.

Watching Big Companies Develop Strategy

Some companies are driven by big goals and 5 (and 10) year plans. Adobe bought Omniture and plans on offering deep analytics into user interactions with flash widget ads. Out of nowhere Adobe entered the ad market.

Renting vs Building

As Seth Godin highlighted, marketing has moved from renting an audience to building one:

This might be the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media. Marketers aren’t renters, now they own.

For generations, marketers were trained to buy (actually rent) eyeballs.
…
Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You’re not renting an audience, you’re building one.

Google is GOD of the Web

One of the best companies to study from the perspective of using market leverage to enter new markets is Google. Recently they struck a deal with Warner to bring their music back to Youtube. But even while their music was not on Youtube I was still able to listen to it - on Youtube ;)

Want to try Google’s newest software in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? Continue at your own Peril!

Google is constantly trying to extend search. And their 4 step process to entering a new market usually consists of…

One of the more cynical, but perhaps accurate, in depth research reports on Google’s use of market leverage is Scott Cleland’s Googleopoly [PDF]. You might not be able to apply every idea in there to your projects, but it should help you understand where Google intends to intersect with your market and how you can leverage some of those touch-points to your advantage.

One last tip, from Larry Ellison, “Pick your competitors carefully for you will quickly come to resemble the companies you compete with.”

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Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage

Posted by randfish
September 28, 2009

Posted by randfish

It’s been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it’s time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) - the single-purpose homepage.

First, a brief example:

Spokeo.com's Homepage

In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal - get your email address so they can show you how their product works. There may be a few secondary links for registered users to login, access to the blog and about pages, and some logos to help improve credibility, but basically, we’re looking at remarkably driven intent behind the design.

Five Reasons I Like the Single-Purpose Homepage:

  1. It Gets the Message Across Quickly
    With only a single headline and call to action, visitors quickly parse the critical message you’re attempting to push. In longer, more complex pages, designers and marketers constantly have to worry about the percentage of people who are actually exposed (in any meaningful way) to the intended triggers.
    _
  2. It Forces Simplicity in Communication
    This singularity of messaging also means that the language, words and images chosen have to communicate simply or risk failure. Simplicity in web design has proven itself over and over again as a driver of success, and simple messages are the easiest to understand and to transmit virally - a marketer’s dream.
    _
  3. It Reveals What Matters (and Obscures What Doesn’t)
    When external forces compel us, we tend to find our greatest strength is all that remains. That principle is in clear effect with these designs, as the unecessary is completely stripped away, leaving only  those items (graphics, font, layout, links and messaging) that serve the singular purpose of the page. If you’ve ever fought over which ten things to put on the homepage, get ready to trade that in for which ten words can express the entirity of your business (not necessarily an enviable trade, but it can be a net positive).
    _
  4. It Sorts the Visitor Wheat from the Chaff
    Visitors who reach this page will instantly know whether the product is for them or not. The uninterested are immediately disengaged, leaving only true potential candidates for marketing and targeting. This means every piece of data you can collect and refine about your remaining audience is precious — but it does remove the "noise" that’s often mixed in with an unfocused audience.
    _
  5. It Makes it Easy to Optimize the Funnel
    If you’re doing lots of A/B and multivariate testing (and if this doesn’t convince you that you should, abandon all hope), the simplicity of having only a few input boxes, links and headlines is a miracle. Tests run faster, produce more compelling results and give you the focus you need to improve click-through and conversion rates efficiently. Tiny changes in these percents are frequently responsible for millions of dollars of revenue (which is generally a good thing).

Is It Good for SEO?

It depends… If you have the type of site that’s very product focused and single-purpose in nature, this can be an ideal page type. Even if you run a blog, promote articles, or have other types of secondary content, you can always embed links to them in smaller, more background-style fonts and retain crawlability and good information architecture.

The only real trouble may come from the homepage’s loss in ability to send traffic to more viral, less product-specific parts of the site (which will then cost links, which will in turn cost SEO opportunity). If this is a danger, it may be a viable reason not to implement this style of design. You also definitely shouldn’t be using this style if it doesn’t fit with your strategic goals - publishers, blogs, newspapers and most retailers probably don’t want to go this direction (though taking cues from it in deeper, more focused pages is probably very wise).

Eight Examples of Single-Purpose Homepages in Action:

J.mp Homepage

The URL shortening service j.mp (run by Bit.ly) is remarkably focused on helping provide their product with little surrounding clutter. I particularly like the approach of stretching the URL bar so it’s always the dominant focus - and once you use j.mp, you’ll never go to any other service (part of the reason they can focus so heavily on getting the product used in the first 5 seconds of the first visit).

Tumblr Homepage

Tumblr’s message "the easiest way to blog" is made credible by the fantastically simple signup process. They’ve also smartly broken the "single purpose" literal interpretation by having a callout in the green box of "21 Reasons Why You’ll Love Tumblr." Just for the record - even though I’m an advocate of this style for the right type of site, I do strongly encourage testing often and early. The beautiful part is how easy pages like this are to test (in comparison to their portal-entry-like peers)

Shopify Homepage 

Shopify employs simplicity and text-based callouts to highlight its messaging. I like the layout visually, but I wonder if they’ve done extensive testing about the impact of the three text boxes.

Umbrella Today Homepage

If you’ve seen the dozens of popular weather sites around the web, you know how horrifyingly cluttered they can be. UmbrellaToday breaks with tradition and provides possibly the dead-simplest method for getting solid weather reports. I’m a fan of the clever name and branding, too - I love personality in startups :-)

Silverback Homepage

Although Silverback’s homepage is a bit long-form vertically, the message is singular - convey what the app does and why you need it, then get a click on that download link. I’m not sure if they have tested it, but I’d love to see a version that puts the "What does Silverback do?" graphic in the text bubble spoken by the Gorilla. 

Kayak Homepage

Popular travel site Kayak technically has multiple foci, but the strength of the homepage’s conviction that you want to find airline pricing and their ability to stick with it for so many years (and probably through hundreds of rounds of testing) illustrates the single-purpose homepage brilliantly. It’s also in sharp contrast to their competitors in the travel market, who insist on promoting specials, deals, partnerships, news, reviews and a thousand other disparate items that distract from the intended goal of both website and visitor.

The Resumator Homepage

When I first visited Resumator, I wasn’t sure it belonged on this list. However, after spending ~9 seconds actually reading the copy on the page, I was impressed. I instantly knew what they did and actually considered sending it over to some folks inside SEOmoz for consideration (since we’re going to be on the hunt for new hires soon). Single message - check. Delivered quickly - check. Focused direction to one action - check. All that, and it looks pretty useful :-)

Gist Homepage

Gist plugs your email in with the web’s social features to help give context and content around your inbox and contacts. It’s a pretty spiffy piece of software, particularly for those in sales, and the homepage does a good job of conveying the value proposition quickly and simply.

Google Homepage

You’ve probably never heard of this tiny, Mountain View, CA company, but apparently, they do pretty well :-)

Your thoughts?

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Consulting Compromises

Posted by Aaron Wall
September 28, 2009

Top Intersection: Most of these people are not available for traditional client consulting projects because they simply lack the time needed to do them and run many successful projects of their own.

Right Intersection: The person who is available and under-priced quickly gets overworked. I have experienced this with multiple contractors in other fields where they would offer killer services and be surprisingly affordable and fast…and then on the next project they would disappear.

The guy who made the logo for SEO Book back in early 2004 was probably the most talented and most unreliable logo designer I have ever worked with. Sometimes he would be fast, sometimes he would be slow, and sometimes I would pay him and get no response. I wanted the guy to become more successful and reliable so much so that I offered him tons of free marketing so long as he would be available for the boatload of work I was going to send him. He said sure. Before beginning that marketing campaign I asked him if he was ready and got no response. ;)

And last year there was a designer/developer that had amazing skills. We hired him full time and it took him 2 months to make a website design. There are a lot of people in the world who are talented at what they do, but just are not skilled at business and/or do not approach their business like a business.

Left Intersection: There are lots of people who are good at sales who have no substance. If an SEO firm contacts you out of the blue (via tele-spamming or email spam) that is a good hint that they have more salesmen on staff than they have practitioners. If SEO is bolted on as a package for cheap then it is usually a scam.

It is nearly impossible to have enough time to study a fast changing craft, brand yourself as an expert in the space, and yet still find time available for doing consulting. It is not hard to do any 2 of the 3…but all 3 is brutally tough. In consulting so long as you have popularity you do not need much knowledge, as some well known SEOs have proved. But knowledge without popularity can be hard to monetize effectively.

Even if you are pretty decent at sales and have a strong brand it is hard to make an SEO services business model scale without watering it down. And watering down is rarely a solution because it leads to churn.

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Who Sets Your Prices?

Posted by Aaron Wall
September 28, 2009

Underpricing

In the past I historically set my prices too low. Some of that was due to starting out with a low self-esteem, but just as much of it was due to not appreciating the actual value of what I was delivering. Because I could do something cheap I had no problem doing so, even if my pricing was well below the value delivered. Another thing that caused me to charge too little was a distaste for traditional salesmanship techniques (a difficult hang-up if you are a marketer!)

Where I learned how off my pricing was is when I reviewed work done by some competing firms for 5 figure sums. Some of which was of far less value than what I was offering in my $79 ebook. Well that made me feel a bit like an idiot.

When Low Prices Make Sense

I think when a person is new to a field it makes sense to set prices somewhat low so you can…

Setting prices a bit too low helps subsidize creating other pieces of your sales strategy…whereas if you set prices way above market expectations you won’t get sales or market feedback.

The Problems With Discounting

But typically discounting should be done for a short period of time, only as something that is given as a reward for being fast acting. If you frequently discount you just lower the perceived quality and value of your product. And while you think you might be giving someone a good deal by discounting you have to look at it in the broader perspective. Offer a lower price and the customer…

all the while you…

Really the whole set up to discounting is quite stupid.

What About Free?

In a world where traditional advertising is losing efficacy, offering something free that helps gain mindshare and establish a relationship is smart. But free does have limitations. One of the biggest limitations is a sense of entitlement. If a person is a non-paying customer they are not a customer. You have to assume their complaints are worth $0. You owe them nothing and they should be thankful for whatever valuable tools and services you offer for free.

Overcoming Entitlement

After you get enough momentum it makes sense to erect barriers to entry so you can gain value while giving it away. Rarely do one way exchanges build lasting value. If 1,000’s of non-paying users are sending you emails asking questions then they are noise that must be filtered through … a non-trivial cost.

The hard part is that it feeds the ego when you give stuff away and help people out. You think that you help so many people and that lots of people care for you. Put any barrier in their path and you will see how selfish and worthless many of those people are though. Every barrier brings about some level of hate from the most ignorant, greediest, and least appreciate members of the crowd. But if you get something like this you can’t respect the sender:

This is crap. Every download link goes back to the same page. Like how are you suppose to download the tool if there’s a download link which say #.

Instead of spending time collecting peoples emails and spamming them you should try more in giving better product and easier way to access them.

I like your tools, but it was easy last year to use them, now it’s a waste of time. If this system keeps on getting more slower and I’ve to go through more registering then using I’m better off using something which is less good but instantaneous, which was your product, but it’s not anymore.

So I hope you start easying out the process of installing your tools or you’ll start loosing your customers.

So that person…

As far as my business interests go, that person is worth less than nothing. If they are still breathing, it is no doubt a waste of oxygen.

Would I rather spend my time helping out that ungrateful USER, or would that time be better spent spending it with someone who loves me and cares for me?

Resourcefulness

Now some people have a tough break and sometimes it is worth helping them out. But in most cases a lack of resources is simply caused by a lack of resourcefulness. And, since change comes from within, if you try to help those kinds of people out they are far more likely to pull you down than you are to lift them up.

Recently a person asked me via a blog comment what they should do if they are smart but can’t afford a conference ticket and know nobody. The frame of that question is one which is lacking in resourcefulness. When I was new to the SEO industry part of why I got known was because I syndicated content to other sites, participated in some online forums, moderated some online forums, and blogged day in and day out. I further spent tons of money giving away free software, which some people appreciate ;)

And even when I was less known, had no money, knew nobody, etc. I did not see those as obstacles. They were opportunities. Since I lacked capital I could leverage my time as an undervalued resource until the market started to value it more. I got a job to create cashflow, spent everything I could on learning + networking, helped organize a conference in exchange for a free pass to go to it, and out of the process the only thing I regret is that I didn’t savor obscurity as much as I should have. :D

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Increasing Traffic and Reducing Bounce Rate

Posted by Ben Norman
September 28, 2009

This is, or at least should be, the fundamental aim of any website. Whilst of course you want visitors to use your services or buy your products, first you need to attract them to your pages and ensure that they don’t leave instantaneously.
It’s often a fine balancing act and one that can take time to [...]

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Online Reputation Tips - My Ad:Tech London 2009 Presentation

Posted by willcritchlow
September 28, 2009

Posted by willcritchlow

I am in the middle of a crazy couple of months of seminars, conferences and other assorted presentations. If you’re interested in seeing any of them, my speaking schedule is online.

Last week I spent Wednesday at ad:tech in London where I spoke about advanced analytics and online reputation management. In my analytics presentation, I was refining ideas for what I’m going to talk about at our own advanced SEO seminar so I’m not putting that one online just yet, but I thought the online reputation stuff would make a good Monday morning post. The audience was mainly brand and advertising people so I didn’t assume too much knowledge of SEO or ORM, but instead ran through why you would want to monitor for your brand, how to determine if something is going to be a problem and some tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way.

For those of you who haven’t seen me speak, my slides are not always the most self-explanatory things so although I have included them here, I am also going to run through the key themes and tips:

Ad:Tech 2009 Online Reputation - Will Critchlow, Distilled

Who’s talking about your brand?

  1. London Fashion Week: I wanted to start with something topical so I used some examples from London Fashion Week (including brands and models) to demonstrate the impact of news events (interestingly, I found no significant correlation between spikes in search volume for the brands or models during fashion week). Out of this came two kinds of worked example, however:
    • The power of news stories and official websites such as londonfashionweek.co.uk - both of which were ranking for big brand names throughout the week
    • A look at an example set of negative search results - for a model who has no official website ranking, has wikipedia at #1 for her name and has a story about a sex tape on the first page
  2. How to tell if something’s a problem: although most of this will be obvious to anyone with an SEO background, I presented some ways to tell whether a new story you find while monitoring for your name or brand is likely to end up ranking for your name. The factors I encouraged people to look out for were:
    • Is the keyword in the title / URL
    • Is the keyword in the headline and copy
    • How powerful is the domain (noting that most new stories won’t have gathered many links of their own yet so we have to make assumptions based on the power of the domain)
    • Of course I recommended people install the mozbar to get easy access to all these factors
  3. The pyramid of pain: the stories you are looking out for especially hard are the negative ones which include the keyword prominently and which reside on a powerful domain. Not only are people very likely to be reading and sharing the story, but it’s highly likely to end up ranking
  4. Tips and tricks: through our work for a variety of clients, we have been lucky(?) enough to have encountered at least our fair share of gotchas. I thought the least I could do was share a few tips:
    • Have a plan in advance of bad stuff happening - mid-crisis is not the time to be wondering whose job it is to check the wheelnuts
    • We have found the most valuable part of our daily / weekly reports to be the forecast - trying to "write tomorrow’s executive summary today"
    • When emailing busy executives with critical reputation information make sure your subject line gives them the first thing they need to know, and by the time they’ve read the first sentence on the preview pane of their iphone they are fully up to speed
    • Know who to speak to out of hours. What happens if you discover something critical during monitoring and you can’t reach your normal contact? Make sure you have a plan. I illustrated this with a true story about some monitoring we were doing for a client (not Tesco) and discovered a credible threat against Tesco employees and property. I had to cold-call them and try to get through to the right person without sounding like a bomb-threat nutter. To their credit, I got a quick call back from the head of security, but whenever it’s your client, you shouldn’t have to take that risk

I hope there’s some tips in there for everyone. If it raises any questions, feel free to drop me a line or leave them in the comments.

My next presentations

There are a few tickets left for the PRO SEO seminar but we are expecting it to sell out this week.

On Wednesday, at 4.30pm UK time (8.30am PST / 11.30am EST) I am hosting a free conference call entitled How to be an Excel Ninja (and how it helps your SEO) where I will be slicing and dicing Linkscape data among other things. If you’d like to join the call or get the recording afterwards, you can sign up here.

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SEO: Where Is It Going?

Posted by PeterD
September 27, 2009

SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious - where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.

Still is, of course.

Throughout the history of search and SEO, the predominant metaphor of the web has been one borrowed partly from publishing - the page - and partly from computer science - the domain. A domain contains pages. A domain is a silo. A domain has clear borders.

The Search Metaphor

Search forces quite a different metaphor on the web.

Search is a connector between a person and a page. Search subverts the domain structure because the visitor can dive in at the page level. In this respect, all pages become a part of the much bigger silo. In 2009, that silo is Google.

Search also strives to be the ultimate answer engine - the mind of God. Got a question? Google it. Google will provide the answers.

But search is not quite there yet. Search still returns pages - the user still digs through the page to find the answer.

But for how long?

The Slow Unraveling Of The Page Unit

Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it’s the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.

Consider the semantic web:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “monkey”, reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, acomputer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web

What happens when the machine “understands” the query enough to provide a direct answer to a question, as opposed to returning a list of pages?

Black Clouds On The Content Producer Horizon, Or Opportunity?

In a recent Techcrunch interview, Eric Schmidt said something rather telling:

So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time.

Perhaps he was quoted out of context, but that strikes me as an absurd thing to say. As if there is ever one “right” answer. Well, I guess there is if you live in some Orwellian nightmare.

More importantly, if this is where Google intend to be in ten years time, then where does this leave content producers? If Google provides “the answer”, why would anyone click-thru and visit a page? Conversely, why would anyone let Google crawl their content if Google’s aim is to disintermediate the producer from their content? Johnon had an excellent post on this topic.

Recently, Google released rich snippets, a feature whereby you markup you data to suit Google’s display criteria.

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.

If the answer is “rich” enough, I guess the user doesn’t even need to visit your page. Perhaps the user will get distracted by the Adwords listings, instead ;)

If Google aims to extract information and keep the visitor on Google, rather than just acting as a conduit between visitor and page, then this does not bode well for content producers.

This brings up the burning “Newspaper vs Google” argument. “How”, the newspapers argue, “can we make money if Google undermines our revenue model? Ultimately, this is a question all content producers must face. Just ask those in the music industry.

Seemingly in response, Google is planning to roll out micropayments in the next year:

Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year and hopes that newspapers will use it as they look for new ways to charge users for their content.

The question is, will micropayments and web advertising be enough to pay the bills, especially when it comes to expensive, high-risk media production, such as television and movies:

Grade’s criticisms were echoed in October by C4 chief executive Andy Duncan, who said Google had failed to invest in UK content creation. “Google takes more ad revenue out of the UK than ITV makes and it isn’t regulated. It isn’t fair [that] it’s not reinvesting that back into content and independent film production companies in the UK,” said Duncan.

Content producers are posting losses, whilst Google continues to post massive profits. What happens if content isn’t worth producing anymore? What happens when revenue falls below the cost of production? Or perhaps content will still be economic, but only if production quality is sacrificed? Is it really just a case of fat media producers cutting bloated production costs?

What is Google’s long term strategy as far as content producers are concerned? Besides PR fluffery, they never really say.

It’s Not All Bleak

Of course, if content producers really did get disintermediated to the point where content production wasn’t worth doing, Google may well collapse soon after. What would there be left to search? Wikipedia?

Where would the “answers” come from? Who would fund “answer provision”? Sufficient income must flow to the content producers, but the question still remains “how”?

And I don’t really think the page is going away. The page has served humans well for thousands of years as a container of information. But if the information on pages can be aggregated in such a way that users don’t need to visit the source page, where does this leave content producers? Where does this leave SEOs?

In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.

The last model is, I’m guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now.

Check this out:

Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. So yes, brute force - quantity of content + money/power - works more often than we’d like to think on the Web.

The aggregator wields most of the power in this relationship, unless the publisher can lock in an audience who will by-pass the aggregator.

Is Dis-intermediation Over-Rated?

On the flip-side, John Battelle argued a few years back that search dis-intermediation is overrated.

Those who fear disintermediation should in fact be afraid of irrelevance — disintermediation is just another way of saying that you’ve become irrelevant to your customers. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a customer, or middlemen of some sort who service that customer, or that the core proposition of your business has disappeared. It just means you’re in a bit of a rut, and as much as you might pine for the past, it’s probably time to rethink things before it’s too late.

He reasons that writers can go outside the traditional silos:

And what of the role of publisher or content creator? Increasingly, those who have the ability to create great media can get pretty far without attaching themselves to the traditional indentured servitude of a publisher, label or network. Writers, for example, are finding their own voices outside the strictures of magazines and newspaper publishers. Blogs like Boing Boing, Daily Kos and Cool Tools are drawing millions of readers each month, and their overhead is the cost of a high-speed Internet line.

However, what they’re actually doing is jumping out of one silo and into another. Google is the master silo in this scenario.

So, what do you think? what is the role of SEO in the future? Will it be more about making connections, and a less about making pages? Will the page itself be subverted? Have Google gone moved beyond the idea of “organizing the world’s information”?

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