Today while walking through a mall to buy a penguin suit I noticed a guy wearing a backpack that had a pole above it with a LCD making weird noises pitching some marketing junk at me. In a world that saturated with marketing, offering value and speaking openly is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to gain authority.
Blogs are not good for every site, and they are not good for every person, but writing one opens you up to a wide array of links and that would otherwise likely remain unavailable. Blogging also helps you visualize what ideas are spreading, why they are spreading, who is important to know to help spread ideas, and how they were marketed to spread. If you know what ideas are spreading, why they are spreading, and who is spreading them then it gets much easier to create ideas that spread and ensure they spread. I recently had another site designed and wanted to add a blog to the site. I went over to Themespress, spent $10 and 10 minutes and got a Wordpress theme design that matched my original site. If you are in a market with lots of conversation and find your site lacking in the authority needed to compete it might be worth trying out blogging. If you decide it doesn't work for you then you really are not out that much for giving it a try.
In an SES panel yesterday Matt Cutts claims paid links pollute the web ,while he advocates off topic link bait as a useful search marketing strategy. Michael Gray and Greg Boser are a bit more honest:
Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting†than relevant paid links.
Linkbaiting is Expensive, Time Consuming, and Unpredictable
The reasons search engineers advocate link baiting are:
it is expensive
it is time consuming
the results are hard to predict
it requires social connections
it provides off topic low value traffic
it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for)
the valuable results can take a while to show
it often undermines the credibility of the source doing it (by allowing people to think of information from certain sources as link bait, which is a derogatory classification term)
many companies have restrictions that prevent them from doing it
Because of the above reasons, the technique of link baiting is outside the reach of most webmasters. Since few people can do it, it is highly unpredictable, time consuming, and expensive OF COURSE that is the only way search engineers recommend you build links. They might even like you to believe that almost all links are acquired that way. The more brutally tough it is to build your SEO strategy the more appealing AdWords ads look.
Shopping Search? Try AdWords!!!
If you can't buy links to rank, then some irrelevant old sites and marginably relevant articles on authoritative domains (that typically gained their link based authority before Google polluted the link graph with AdSense and NoFollow) gets to clog up the organic search results, and the only way people can find commercially relevant results is if they look at Google's AdWords ads.
A mainstream media magazine did a spread on one of my friend's websites, where my friend gave them virtually all the content for the article, and they refused to link to my friend's site in the article because they felt it would be too promotional. Sorry, you already sent out 100,000 magazines with the article in it. You already were too promotional. Sadly, that is just one more example of the death of organic links caused by Google's fearmongering.
If I have a blind bid that is too high would it tell me to lower that bid? Nope. A search marketing campaign is only properly optimized if it sends more money to Google, which is the problem with the field of SEO. Google doesn't get a cut of the action. The organic results have yet to be properly optimized.
Why Waste a Breathe Scaring People Unless the Intent is to Lie or Deceive?
Matt also says that it's very difficult to buy paid links effectively as a business or as a search marketer because Google does such a good job detecting and eliminating the value of those links.
How often do you hear Matt Cutts droning on about duplicate page titles or stuffing your meta keywords tag? You don't, because they are no longer effective.
Google would not be trying to brainwash webmasters about links so often if paid links didn't work. The problem with paid links is they work too well.
Who is Getting Paid?
To properly understand search marketing you have to understand that the fight over search spam has NOTHING to do with result relevancy. The label of spam is only applied if the wrong company gets paid.
If it is Google getting paid, feel free to sell high yield investment scams, or preteen sex ads. They have no problem syndicating those messages all over the web, as long as they are getting paid.
Many of the large web players offer or will soon offer analytics products for free. If you use them they may eventually charge you for the service, or they may keep them free but look for other ways to charge you, and use your own statistics against your best interests, by doing one or more of the following
using your site to help categorize keywords that competitors should bid on (and do SEO for)
compare your direct traffic to search traffic and flag your site for review to potentially reduce your search traffic if it is outside the normal range for your given industry
compare your traffic from their engine to traffic streams from other known clean sources (such as competing engines) and flag your site for review if it falls outside of a certain range
compare your keyword cost and conversion rate relative to other words and reprice accordingly
The General Competitive Trend:
One day you are the top ranked lyrics site making good money pitching ringtones. A few months later the search results are cluttered with YouTube videos, show a Google music vertical result at the top, and sites like Yahoo Music start offering lyrics. Income is down 60% and the trend has just begun.
Are Your Stats a Commodity?
As more of the ad networks become automated and leverage CPA based targeting, advertisers are going to have a better idea of where there is value. Google and your large competitors have access to enough data to capture the large trends, but what happens on the micro-level is what is most relevant to you, and, if your site is not as strong as competing sites, keeping that data private (or, at least as best you can given new affordable competitive analysis services) is required if you want to maintain and grow your business.
Even free services like StatCounter and SiteMeter are not free due to one or more of the following reasons
they usually require a sitewide outbound link
sharing some of your stats with everyone
selling your stats to a third party
limiting your feature set or account size and then charging you to keep all the data they built up about your site over months or years
Think of how much you spent building your brand, your link equity, and your traffic stream. Is it worth giving someone all that data and a sitewide link for something you can get for a one time $30 fee?
Mint is Soooooooo Much Better...
Shawn Inman's Mint (available at HaveaMint.com for $30) is a server based web analytics tool that you can buy licenses to for $30 per site. It tracks traffic trends, referrals, and search trends. In addition it has many extensible peppers which allow you to track things such as
browser type
country origin
internal searches
outbound clicks
watching specific pages
hottest and coldest page trends
How to Leverage Your Stats
Look for the pages that rank for a wide array of keywords and use the format from those to model your other pages against
Point more link equity at your best performing pages.
If you have a deep section that has little link equity and little to no traffic try promoting it in the site's navigational scheme. If traffic picks up and conversions increase keep promoting that section.
What if I Want to Share My Stats?
If you have an authoritative site and make your money from selling ads you may want to make your stats public, which Mint allows you to do with one click. Doing so does not require you to hassle with logging into multiple Google accounts or having to worry about compromising your other features at sites like Google.
Outside of hand edits, most search engine relevancy and trust scores come from looking at third party votes. You don't even have to be a subject matter expert to get tons of traffic if you can just come up with ideas that get authoritative channels talking about you. If you are good at public relations that will be reflected in the search results, both directly and indirectly. Trusted sites that link to you flow trust your way. Even if Google decides to manually edit your site out of the search results, you still have a defensible stream of traffic if you obtained coverage on high authority websites.
Those visitors are going to be hard to monetize unless the other site was reviewing your products or services, but many of those visitors may still link to your site or help push your brand in front of other people. If you have a strong affiliate program or a large set of legitimate organic mentions you don't need search engines.
A site of mine that got hand edited was mentioned in LifeHacker about a year ago. So far today that mention sent 22 visitors. Those visitors are highly qualified since they likely searched on a search engine or via LifeHacker's internal search, found that page on LifeHacker, read that page, then clicked through to my site.
The key with building up a strong link profile on trusted sites is to think about your idea from the perspective of creating something that is useful, wrapped in a story that has a self spreading mechanism, and biasing it to the target audience which is going to spread your message.
Conversation is the #1 signal of quality to search engines. That may change at some point, but for it to do so search engines have to try to change human behavior that has been built, marketed, and reinforced for thousands of years.
If you want to learn about domaining, Jay recently posted Frank Schilling's keynote speech video, which is a great overview of the domain market and where it is headed. Worth watching twice if you are new to domaining.
You can see me in the video if you look for the fat kid sitting next to the pretty girl in the back, listening on while eating a dozen cookies. ;)
As high authority sites attract brand advertisers many of their owners look for ways to create additional pageviews to further scale their businesses. I offered a few tips on how to do that here, but an annoying trend that has recently swept across the web is turning external links into internal links.
If you look at blog mentions on Technorati it is hard to get to the page actually linking to you. Technorati mixes in outbound links and Technorati profile pages without differentiating between the two. Some people are also creating thin sister sites, using bait and switch linking. The Wikipedia practice of link hoarding is just starting to spread. How long until the mainstream media companies create thin review sections and start publishing pages or stubs about everything?
Google Maps shows local rentals, homes for sale, and foreclosures. The real estate data is one of their featured content categories, searchable by location, and sortable by price. How long until Google starts charging for featured real estate listings or pushes this offer more aggressively to the end homeowner?
Google is aggressively encouraging syndication to become the default maps play, which will yield more leverage and a more efficient marketplace.
Wikipedia can cross link just about everything and look legitimate with it because they are non profit. Independent webmasters have to be more focused if they are trying to create profitable websites. Navigation can be nearly useless and spammy looking, or with a few minor tweaks it can look legitimate and well categorized. Compare the following two examples:
navigation 1
Seen On a Farm
cows
milk
pickup trucks
etc
etc
etc
vs
navigation 2
farm animals
cows
chickens
pigs
etc
dairy products
milk
cheese
yogurt
etc
farm equipment
tractors
pickup trucks
etc
The first navigational scheme is something you might see on the common AdSense website. Each page is not connected to any of the others by any trait other than carrying AdSense ads.
The second navigational structure looks less spammy and more useful. In addition to looking more credible and being easier to use, it also has headings focused on relevant keywords, which can link to related category pages. This allows the site to focus link weight on core topical phrases and pick up on mid tier keywords not covered by a more haphazard navigational scheme that uses generic words unrelated to the way searchers search.
If you think ahead when planning out your navigation it also makes site expansion a breeze. For example, if you later add turkeys to the farm animals category it can be grouped with chicken under a poultry category.
Good internal navigation should be logical, easy to follow, and reflect your keyword theme.
Helium announced the launch of their article marketplace. Arbitrage giant Geosign is on the client list, scooping up automotive articles. Some of the article descriptions show that the goal is to get just enough content to wrap ads around it, in true arbitrage style:
Collect the latest news about Honda (or another car manufacturer of your choosing). Summarize the news. How does this news affect the average Honda owner? Before you write, make sure that you do some research. Take a look at the latest articles on Google News, the latest automotive blogs on Technorati, and any other online sources you feel are relevant. Max 350 word count.
Some of the other publishers are looking for a bit more meat, but all are likely sharing their marketing strategies with anyone willing to take a look.
How They Should Have Launched
If they were trying to make a big splash at launch time they sent the wrong message. They should have done some co-branded marketing allowing writers to publish for traditional media sites, and/or partnered with trusted charities on important issues.
Why You Should Try Helium
The pitch at Helium is:
Real advice from real people-more than 300,000 articles. Why should you waste your time wading through search results when what you really want is the knowledge that comes with first-hand experience?
Do a bunch of underpaid freelance writers on a generalist site about writing filter through the world's information better than Google or other sites that crawl and index the web? Not likely. For example, I just went to Technorati, and discovered this video is currently popular, with 44 people linking to it
How can a closed off network compete with the web as a whole? It is slower and of lower quality, and will always be that way. Plus it has a spamming incentive baked into the pay structure.
Will the marketplace be a vibrant one, or will the site be a noise filled AdSense honeypot that results in watered down content clogging up the search results? With about a half million pages already indexed in Google you would think Hellium should have more than 14 advertisers signed up. Once writers start tracking their AdSense profit-share results and the site starts ranking for more competitive phrases how many erectile dysfunction articles do you think will get published? The same thing will happen to it that happened to Squidoo.
Human Focused Near Markov Chain Content Websites
Content for everyone about everything by everyone websites are going to make search engines more aggressive in filtering how deep they are willing to crawl these types of sites. If they are not, it won't be long until AssociatedContent, Helium, eHow, WeHow, WikiHow, Yahoo! Answers, UK.Answers.Yahoo.com, Wordpress.com (I have seen PR6 automated splogs on Wordpress based on aggressive tagging) and a few other similar sites join Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, subdomain.ebay.com, and Amazon as Google's top 10 results for everything. And then the newspapers will respond by getting more aggressive with pumping out garbage content. Some deep pocketed domainers may also look at the success or failure of sites like WeHow to help determine their longterm strategy.
What signal does Google want to send? Will Google ever try to regulate how you acquire content? Will any of the content sources eventually be deemed bad in a similar light to how Google tries to manipulate public perception about buying link based advertisements?
Hiring Great Writers
With more people trying to solve the content problem it is getting easier to scale and look large even if you are solo. If you have an arbitrage website or authoritative website and just need backfill content then sites like Helium might fit your needs, but if you are looking for higher quality writers search around for stories about how Gawker got built, search for thought topical leaders in the blogosphere and offer them similar salaries, and perhaps post an ad on Craigslist or the Problogger Job Boards.
If you value your time in the longrun it is cheaper to hire a great employee rather than filter through the noise hoping to find a star.
Discovering the Hellium Experience
I am off to go read about contacting aliens, the truth about Kennedy, debt consolidation mortgage loan, what you need to know to apply for a credit card, how to get an instant approval credit card, uses of Viagra, hypoactive sexual desire disorder, and best places to bet online. All the best bits of the web in one spot. They even have what is spam, but it's not comprehensive enough. There is no mention of Helium. ;)
Any independent webmaster who has been making good money on the web for a few years has realized that blending ads in content, or distributing ads as content, is much more profitable than a clean separation of church and state. Jakob Nielson recently wrote about usability research showing that people ignore ads unless they look like content and are in the content area of the page. Once a publisher has enough distribution they claim it is unethical to blend content and ads, but if you look close enough at the publisher and advertiser relationships there are overlaps in virtually every category and on every site. There are numerous well known sites in the search space that would never give me any exposure until AFTER I bought ads at their site, which mentioned me regularly after my ad buy.
Here are a few examples of how ads influence editorial:
Google gives large corporations free SEO tips and hand edits smaller competitors out of the search results. If a large corporation and an independent webmaster have the same infraction Google engineers are much more likely to try to kill the smaller of the two.
Some advertisers get mentioned just because they advertise a lot, while many publishers create content around high profit niches, and others organize their editorial content based on votes and usage data that can be bought (indirectly) through their ad network (think StumbleUpon and Google AdWords).
If your solution to the issue of low profit margins in publishing is to aggressively blend low value ads then you are eventually going to fail. As a publisher then there are at least 7 major ways to compete against others who are practicing and profiting from the blend, without being labeled as unethical, or undermining your own growth potential:
branding & positioning: create a brand or service that sounds informational and content-like even though it is an ad (think Bankrate, which likely pays virtually nothing to syndicate their ads as content to many major newspapers)
free samples: much like Bankrate syndicates information to newspapers you can also allow people to access a lot of value for free, then charge for a deeper access (think Compete.com profiles and their Search Analytics product)
segregate: keep your main content stream free of ads, build authority, and create an offers section on your site
be pure: don't publish any ads, wait until you have a strong brand, and then launch a better business model than competing channels
indirect revenues: use your site to build mindshare, brand awareness, status, and expertise. then cash in on that via indirect revenue streams
move yourself up the value chain: instead of selling AdSense or similar related ads, sell one of your own products and services. you can typically place these ads in-line without as much scrutiny or brand damage as blending someone else's ads in your content (see below)
free user content: if you can create a platform and rule-set that allows others to build value on your idea while drawing enough of an audience to sort signal from noise you can profit heavily from that (think forums, Technorati tags, Yahoo! Answers, Digg, or Google)
Do you have any additional ideas for profiting from integration without being labeled as unethical?
