The US (and global) economies are in sharp decline after a period of growth that was largely fueled by speculative (and fraudulent) loans that increased money supply way too quickly. While carnage is wide reaching offline, it is simply a phenomena that has not really touched our publishing business.

The Illusion of Safety

There is an illusion that if something is physical that it has a sense of permanence to it, but this year the US government has had to bail out banks, automakers, insurance companies, and credit cards. Residential real estate has dropped hard and commercial real estate is also in the hurt locker (if retail is off 10% in some areas then many businesses operating on a 5% margin will go bankrupt - leading to vacancies and lower prices).

Much of the residential real estate decline is simply due to excessive capacity and various flavors of mortgage fraud (appraisal fraud, loan application fraud, principal-agent problems, malfeasant regulation, etc.), but the commercial real estate slowdown is due to the residential slowdown, global economic slowdown, and the existence of better and cheaper alternatives - namely online retail.

Investing in Growth

The Tribune Company recently filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times is reporting dropping ad revenues. Amongst the carnage Amazon.com reported record numbers. In a lot of ways some of the offline decay is just a shift toward more efficient online business models.

Fred Wilson highlighted how many publishing, finance, and retail business models are all being destroyed by the web

I had breakfast last week with a person who has been in retailing for more than 30 years and has been operating at the highest levels of the industry. He said that he expects every category to be winnowed down to one dominant retailer with all the others going by the wayside. This too has the internet as an underlying cause. comScore says that online holiday shopping this year has been flat with the year before and I've seen reports that offline retail is down 6-10pcnt. The fact is that consumers have finally come to the realization that shopping online is easier, cheaper, and often a better experience. Physical retail will survive, but it will be a smaller industry in the next decade and those that do survive will need to give consumers a very strong rationale to get in the car and come to their store.

The information age is killing many traditional arbitrage based business models (or thicker business models that are heavily reliant on local monopolies as a big part of their business). Companies that thrived when there was no competition are simply folding like Origami.

Search is the Primary Growth Engine of the Web

Most future economic growth will occur online or have online touch points. The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Not only is the web growing during the downturn, but much of the online growth is driven by marketing and search. SEO exist as the intersection of those two points, and SEOs that approach the topic from a holistic marketing standpoint have a significant advantage at building distribution and growing capital. Give me an average passionate player, add SEO, and I can help them rank #1 in most markets.

When you back out inflation and opportunity cost, professional investors are lucky to gain 5% a year. With smart market research and effective SEO implementation many businesses can outpace that by a factor of over 400! Being in SEO today would be like being in coal, oil, or railroads in years past...you help connect supply and demand.

Trimming Profit Margins

Outperforming the market by hundreds or thousands of percent presents an opportunity that will draw lots of competition - and one that will not last long if not evolved. Scraping raw data is getting easier. Why should people chose to work with you (and vote for you)?

If you get a #1 ranking which provides amazing profit margins it is best to look for ways to thicken out the site even if those strategies lower short-term profit margins. Search algorithms will change, and the thicker and more interactive your site is the more sustainable your rankings will be.

Thickening up may require giving away tools and software, public relations strategies, becoming the media, providing a platform for others to use, compiling data in a useful format and/or creating the community water cooler.

Additional expenses can be offset by refining conversion process to increase visitor value and lifetime customer value, and lower forward marketing costs as you leverage the additional earned exposure.

Another thing to consider is the use of advertising to build other quality signals. Awareness leads to conversion. And if you can get advertising to pay for itself and gain other signals of quality as a side effect of user interaction with your site then you will end out ahead in the long run. I love recycling dollars because it costs nothing, builds free credit card points, and builds up a website's online footprint in a Google friendly way.

Making Online Businesses More Sustainable than Offline Businesses

If you are an online marketer and publisher then you become a market researcher, learn how to track trends, test what works, and change with the market.

If much of your online revenues revolve around a thin SEO centric approach then it helps to create at least 1 or 2 aggressively branded sites that hedge against the risks algorithm shifts present. The net effect of building a brand is that you are not overly-reliant on any search engine or any physical market. If people talk about you and recommend you then you win. This site has members from dozens of countries all over the world, so even if the US Dollar collapsed we would still have a diverse income stream.

Helping Others

Once you are doing really well you can give back in a variety of ways - donate money to charities, donate services to charities, and/or give income-producing websites to family members. You can give away featured content and tools that help others knowing that in the end it will also come back to help build your business. You can also pour thousands of dollars into building non-profit sites that may also be able to pay you back in exposure, credibility, and link equity.

While at Pubcon I did an interview with Ralph Wilson about link building. I have got wayyyyy too chubby, but I think the video turned out ok outside of that. And there is even a guest appearance of Abraham Lincoln in the video!!! :)

Invesp referenced me on a top marketers list. Classic ego-bait that worked great. I got so many Twitter followers this past week that I thought someone released a Twitter spam software program or something...and then I remembered the top 100 marketers list and knew it went well. ;) It was popular enough that even follow-up post about it got lots of exposure. If you don't understand egobait, then this is a great resource to study and emulate. People love awards and anything that strokes their ego or gives them a sense of purpose or sense of community and belonging.

Simplicity as a marketing strategy...it works! I am trying to create a few new features on this site (and off it) that should support simplicity and make SEO more accessible to the average webmaster.

Debra Mastaler offers a funny post about link building with elephants and link building tips for 2009.

The RIAA is now trying to go after ISP level filtering rather than suing their customers.

According to comScore, Youtube represents 25% of Google's US search volume. They may be losing money, but renegotiation with partners on payouts and improved ad technologies will eventually turn Youtube into a huge revenue stream. Youtube holds a lot of contests and could easily turn revenues up if they can figure out a way to make Youtube ads more social and interactive. Google has always been great at public relations...if they advance their ad network to offer such services they could make their unprofitable media highly profitable.

Digg is burning through cash, but may be working to create a social ad unit:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback. So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

That takes public relations and social media to the next level...allowing Digg to make revenue from their attention stream, and allowing advertisers to promote content that is well aligned with user interest...rather than having advertisers set up fake accounts to do guerilla marketing.

The WSJ shared social media marketing tips and Michael Gray shared examples of how social media links turn into rankings.

While the web might have some issues here and there, online commerce is still growing like a weed, with coupon sites and Amazon.com seeing sharp year on year rises in traffic.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman explains click volume vs profitability "to generate more total profit dollars by moving higher on the page, clicks have to rise faster than per-click profit falls." He also shared this 2004 Atlas image on Google click potential by rank:

Frank Watson highlights a start up gone bankrupt due to a botched deal with Google, and presumes that the Google/Yahoo! search deal was simply to stop Microsoft's advances in the search space. Most market makers actively manipulate the markets they manage...doing so is too profitable to ignore.

Do you search visitors bounce?

As we approach the end of the year, and people start to wind down, it might be a good time to take stock of our web strategy beyond SEO. How can we make more of that traffic we're already getting?

Here are some things you can do to optimize your sites credibility.

1. Reduce Wait Time

Streamline your visitors experience.

We all know server response time is important, but so is any wait time you impose on the user. Do you make visitors fill out forms? Do your competitors? If you do, but your competitors don't, you might find your visitors go elsewhere.

Are your processes more cumbersome than they need to be? Is it difficult for a visitor to find things on your site? Could you organize your structure in a better way? Can you think of sites that were a pleasure to use? Compare these sites with your own.

• Web Page Analyzer
• 7 Steps To Useable Forms
• Site Architecture & Internal Linking

2. Unique Brand

Brand is more than a logo or identity.

Brand is the entire experience, from the moment someone sees your listing in the search engine, until the time they recall your site from memory a few weeks later. If you had one message you wanted to leave your visitors with, what would it be? Do all your pages reinforce this message? Does your design? Your copy? Your layout? Look at ways in which you can empathize with people and the problems they are having. People need to believe you feel and understand their problems in order to read and take your advice.

In the good old days, brand wasn't much of a consideration in SEO. Relevance to the keyword query was all that mattered. However, Google has pretty much solved the relevance problem.

These days, Google wants to find the one right answer.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said:

"Brands are the solution, not the problem... Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

Google's challenge is to weed out false information. Schmidt sees brands as a way to do this.

Brand is going to become increasingly important in terms of rank. What do brands have that unbranded sites do not have?

For starters, brand names are typed into search boxes as a keyword term in their own right. Brand names are readily associated with a product or service. When Aaron started SEOBook.com, nobody searched on "SEO Book". Now, plenty of people do, and Aaron "owns" that keyword term in organic search.

Think about ways you can own a keyword term so the association between it and your brand becomes synonymous.

• Brand Building Tips (On A Budget)
• Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands
• Brand Experience And The Web

3. Copy Writing

Aim for clarity.

Are there opportunities to edit your copy writing in order to make the purpose of your site clearer? Are the benefits you provide crystal clear? Sometimes, when we spend a lot of our time focusing on search engines and incorporating keyword terms, we can lose sight of the people who actually read the copy.

On-page SEO and writing for search engines has never been less important. It's mostly about links and, going forward, the level of visitor engagement.

For each page on your site, ask yourself what you want the visitor to do next. Does your copy make this next action clear? Provide external citations and recommendations from third parties.

• The Structure of Persuasive Copy
• Writing For The Web
• Five Ways to Improve Your Web Copy Immediately

4. Site Design And Usability

Keep it simple.

Can you reduce complexity and clutter? It's not that your visitors are stupid, it's that people won't invest time learning your interface unless there is clear benefit in doing so.

What is the message conveyed by your site? Does you design support that message? If your site is difficult to use, what does that say to your visitor? People quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. Your visual design should match the sites purpose.

• 2008 Design Trends
• Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users
• The Principles Of Web Design

5. Human-ness

One of the reasons social sites are popular because information is linked to a personality. The same goes for blogs. People like to get a sense of the people who produced the information.

It helps build trust.

Do you include signals of human involvement? It can be as subtle as the way your write e.g personal viewpoint, or as overt as using a photo. People like to see contact details, personal details and other markers of the human presence. Highlight your expertise. Update your content often.

• Human Computer Interface Design
• Ugliness, Social Design, and the MySpace Lesson
• Stanford Web Credibility Project

It's easy for the big guys.

They have big advertising budgets. They have brand awareness. Every time they twitch, some business journalist will be writing up a story.

But what if you operate a small business? You have a limited budget, you've got a pile of other things that need doing, and very little time to devote to any one aspect of your marketing strategy. How do you build links without breaking the bank?

Let's take a look at how the small business can generate quality links, and do so without a great deal of time and money.

1. Use Your Agility

The small business has one huge advantage over the big business when it comes to SEO: agility.

For a big business to change, it takes time. There is layer upon layer of sign offs. There are meetings. There are lawyers, managers and shareholders. This is a difficult environment in which to undertake SEO.

The small business, on the other hand, can move very quickly.

Chances are, there are only one or two people making decisions, so use this to your advantage. Are there aspects of your industry where speed is essential? Can you react to fast breaking news before the big guys can? Can you spot fast emerging consumer trends, and publish information on them before anyone else does? To help you monitor breaking news and trends in your area of interest, sign up to trend sites, such as Google Trends, and monitor news feeds using Google Alerts.

Big business finds it very difficult to be controversial, yet controversy can be a great marketing tool. The Sex Pistols built a career, not by copying the establishment, but by butting heads with it. Everyone knows about "Will it blend?". That viral campaign was edgy, risky and out-there. If Blendtech hadn't taken that risk, they wouldn't have been worth remarking on. A blender is not a new invention, and there are a lot of big competitors making blenders, but Blentech made their name by being a bit wild and crazy.

Are there opportunities for you to go against the grain and stand out? If you do, you'll be link worthy. Can you borrow controversial ideas form other market sectors and apply them to your own?

2. Publishing Strategy

It is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to voluntarily link to purely commercial sites.

Consider adopting a publishing strategy that has a non-commercial angle. If need be, create a second site. It is much easier to get links for sites that have utility beyond selling a product or service. Create glossaries, unbiased buyer information, review sites, blogs, wikis, or industry news sites. Once the site has built up some link equity, and is ranking well, you can add your own advertising, or link it to your commercial site.

Try to create niche information sites that cover areas no one else is covering. Think small. If you're one of the few sources for a particular type of information, you stand to get more links than sites that compete in saturated areas. Try not to compete directly with the bigger operators. Redefine your niche until you can make your offering unique.

Take a step back from your site. Is it remarkable? Would you link to it? Be honest. Think about what it takes for you to link out. Why would someone link to you? Can you make the people linking to you look good? Consider writing favorable reviews about indirect competitors. Does your site provide genuine utility when compared to your competitors? Think about what problems you can solve for people that no-one else is solving. PlentyOfFish.com made millions by providing a free dating service when every other dating site was using a paid subscriber model. Provide information that solves a problem.

Links should follow.

3. Nail The Basics

Cover the basics of link building.

Get listed in relevant directories, local business organizations, and industry verticals. To find these sites, search on industry name + add url

Issue press releases whenever you have relevant information to share. Make a list of the top sites in your industry sector, and try to get a link from them. Can you offer to do something for them, like writing an article, in return for a link? Look at who links to your competitors. Use tools, such as Yahoo Site Explorer, to find these links

Make a list of those sites and see what your competitors did to get these links. Copy what they did. Put most of your efforts into getting quality links, rather than getting low quantity junk. It's surprising how few links you need in order to rank well, especially in niche areas.

4. Give Something Valuable Away

Web designers often give away templates. They create a template, and place their link in the footer.

Think about what you can create and give away. Compare the cost of developing these widgets and freebies with the cost of buying or chasing links. If you're providing something genuinely valuable for nothing, people are certain to remark on it, especially if your competitors charge for the same thing. You can also submit your offering to sites that feature freebies, such as TheFreeSite.com. While every other guy is "giving" the opportunity for a link trade - which isn't of much value - you're going one step further.

Offer coupons. Simply by offering coupons, you can get included in coupon and bargain hunting sites.

5. Local News Interest

Local newspapers and news sites are always on the lookout for local content. Unlike major newspapers, the barrier to entry is often low, but the link equity can be just as valuable.

Is there a local aspect to your business? Are there ways you can get involved in the community that would lead to reporters writing a story about you? Issue press releases with a local angle, and try and build up a relationship with local reporters. Offer to be a spokesperson for your topic of interest if they have future stories for which they need an expert opinion.

6. Sponsor Charities

Charity sites are often amenable to linking out to those who support them. The cost of the donation might be nothing compared to the value of a lifetime link from a well-placed charities.

Offer to do work of genuine value for the charity. Could you help them market their website? Design a new website for them? Can you write an article for them, or find a way of featuring in their news stories? These links are pure gold,and because it takes some effort, it is difficult for your lazy competitors to follow.

Search on terms such as donor, sponsors, and donations to find these sites.

7. Request A Link In All Communications

Whenever you mail someone, include a link request in the footer. The communication could be an order confirmation, an email newsletter, or an invoice. Here's an example on SEOmoz.

Highlight featured content in your email footer. Update the links in your email footer regularly, so people are more likely to look at them. Think of your communications as a call to action. How can you get people to engage further with you?

Start a Twitter account and post your articles. Do the same with Facebook and any other social media channels you use.

8. Participate

Go where your audience are.

It's not just about getting links that pass PR. It's about creating meaningful relationships. If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then post to those forums. Become a trusted member and advisor. People link to SEOBook.com not just because of the great information ;) but because of the quality of the relationship has been established in the past.

This approach will serve you well for the future. Google will be placing more and more emphasis on engagement metrics in order to determine rank. Why?

The problem Google was created to solve - finding relevant information - is morphing into a problem of locating quality information. There might be a lot of crawlable information on a given topic, so finding it isn't an issue any more. Finding the information people find most useful is the new challenge.

How people engage with your site is going to become increasingly important.Look to establish meaningful relationships, wherever possible.

Further Reading:

• Donating To Charities As A Link Building Technique
• Link Building Training (Members Area)
• 7 Offline Local Search Link Building Tips for Small Businesses
• Guilty In A Good Way By Link Association
• Link Building Is Relationship Building

Falko Luedtke has been a member of our online training program and community forums since the day we opened up nearly a year ago. He has done in house SEO for some fortune 500 clients and recently branched out to start his own consultancy. As a Search Engine Strategies media partner I figured it would be more beneficial to many readers of the blog to see what Falko thought of going to his first SEO related conference, rather than hearing my take on it. Without further ado, here is his review...

My First SEO Conference

My first SES, way to cold and bad coffee but the greatest working week I ever had.

6 days in Chicago, the first time for me being in the windy city, the first time that I went to a big SEO conference, the first time that I freeze my butt off anywhere I go.

I love to go to conversions and conferences, when I was younger I spend almost every second weekend on the road to attended eSport events. So even so it was my first time to go to a SES it was nothing new for me.

Overall I need to say that I enjoyed the week in Chicago a lot and I can’t wait to go to the next conference. Everybody interested in SEO should at least attend to one in his life. It is the second best way to meet other SEO experts and exchange knowledge with them, best way is signing up for the SEO Book Community. I don’t know who came up with the idea to put the December SES to Chicago but I guess it is the same person who decided to put it into the Chicago Hilton Hotel. I talked to so many people on this conference and everybody was saying the same 5 things:

• I’m freezing my B’s off.
• Godverdomme my phone is not working.
• Does anybody have a steady internet connection? I don’t.
• Where is the coffee? No I’m not talking about that weird black water over there.
• The music is so loud I can’t hear what you say. What did you say?

When I arrived on Sunday evening from Vancouver I already had meet one other SEO and as soon we said down in the shuttle bus we realized we are not alone. 7 out 10 people in the shuttle where on their way to the conference. I thought, good start as more people around as more possibilities to talk. After settling down in my room and get myself organized I went to Kitty O'Sheas in the Hilton. I didn’t stay in the Hilton by the way, I said right next door in the Essex Inn, paid a third of the price and had less to complain about my room than anybody else I meet on the conference. Kitty is an Irish bar not a bad one but they really need to learn to turn down the music. I meet more people in the first night then I could have expected. And at 5 am I went happily to bed thinking about what to attend to on Monday.

Monday Summary

Monday morning the black water that the Hilton called Coffee didn’t really help, the breakfast was average low and way to overpriced so I could really enjoy me being hang over on this morning :) That didn’t stop me to go to the panels. I could spend a 100 blog posts talking about the panels and all the great things that I learned but I don’t want to make this post to long. I think there are some panels I would like to urge you to try to get your hands on the presentations, if you can.

Orion Panel: The State of Integration – Yes we are SEO’s, yes we are great but yes there are others. Use traditional marketing to funnel your branding efforts into high converting search. Instead of fighting your traditional marketing colleges work with them.

Search & Packaged Goods Moderated by Mark Jackson – One of the best panels I attended on the conference. You could have really learnt something about were large consumer-packaged-goods companies work and think. More and more Shopper Moms are going online to research their products online or looking for coupons. Also how a crisis in a industry can a good way to created brand trust. I just say large number of searches, big marketing budgets but old companies with no sense for new technology. Huge opportunities for every marketer who stops and thinks for a moment about it.

Why Does Search get all the Credit? – Pretty simple, search converts better and is much easier to click then to walk somewhere. But how do you get people to search for your brand terms? There is a life beyond the internet and we all living in it.

Take away from the first day was clearly, look outside the search box, with the prices for traditional marketing down there are huge opportunities to drive more searches. Don’t forget to optimize your site for conversions first :) A very good book to read about this topic is “Landing Page Optimization” from Tim Ash.

Tuesday Summary

Tuesday morning the breakfast was not much better in the Hilton and coffee in the press area was the same as the day before. I spend quite a bit of time at the Expo and talk to a lot of Marketers and Product Managers. Some of the products are just amazing. Everybody who works with content should take a look at the new version of WordVision, very cool.

The panel for Tuesday that I thought was most interesting, since most people don’t get it right, was Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues moderated by Eric Enge. Even so I didn’t agree with all the presentation the insides that Sharad Verma from Y! Search provided were gold worth. Hint different language can’t be duplicated content. Use Aarons Duplicated Content Checker to make sure you don’t have any problems with it on your site.

The evening was even better then the day before. A little tip for you, just stick around till the Gurus are drunk and then ask all your questions you will get the best answers.

Wednesday Summary

This time I left the Breakfast out in Hilton, just not worth it. For this day I would like you to look at Social Media Optimization as a panel. Even so Web 2.0 was yesterday and we are not quite at Web 3.0 yet Social Media is a constant in the internet that you can’t forget about anymore if you want to run a successful online business. A lot of old school companies are still hesitant to invest in such a market but they could find solutions for their biggest problems here. Interacting with a community can created not only brand awareness but it can also help you to created new content for your company. If you have a great product and created value for your clients it will help your online efforts even more. Pauline Ores at IBM mention that if they get a bad feedback in the community it takes sometimes too long for them to react on it but the community on its own does it instantly. And often more human then IBM could.

At this point I need to thank Mike Grehan and all the great people for the great dinner this evening. And after talking to Mike about his new book I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I hope after reading the book people stop riding the “Rank matters most” trip.

Thursday Summary

Since I went to bed at 6.30 am on Thursday morning it took me a bit longer to come back on track. At least I can say I enjoyed the most awesome Jazz club in Chicago and I now know what company I would invest money in if I would have any :) You want to know? Send me a mail.

There are two panels I want to mention for this day, first is “How to speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with your IT department to get stuff done” Chris Boggs is a great guy and he is so right, we are living in the 21th century, nerds rule the world and they will do that more and more, Management language does not help you anymore. The world changed people want to cut the BS and come to the point. So start speaking Geek it will help you at work, with your friends and maybe even you can finally connect to your kids again.

The highlight of the conference was “Black Hat, Whit Hat & the Best kept secrets to Search” With Todd Friesen, Eric Enge, Doug Heil and David Naylor in the panel. Some people expected that somebody would start a bar fight but David Naylor just stole the show. If somebody did a video of the D..k head parody please send me the link over. We didn’t have the changes to see a bar fight but it was almost an hour long discussion about all the nice things what you can do to make yourself disappear in the search results.

Not only was this the funniest panel of the conference, but it also had a ton of information in it like how Google will not allow tons of results in there SERP that are leading all to the same upstream end point. You can mask a lot of things but you can’t mask the upstream end point. If all the search results send their traffic to the same end point Google will eliminate the ranking of your affiliates to created more diversity in their results. With creating multiple end points for your affiliates you are able to create this diversity.

But I need to repeat the warning from Todd and Doug from last night, be aware of the risks and only do things that are relevant. To quote David Naylor on this "If a user clicks on a link that says 'Buy Viagra', they're going to land on a page that's selling Viagra." If the user clicks on ‘Buy Viagra’ and lands on the page of Al Gore the user is properly not very happy. With staying relevant you can’t do much wrong. I really hope somebody did a video of this panel. If not too bad you were not here.

Conference Summery

Before I bore you guys to death, I guess I already did here are some recommendations if you ever plan to attend a SEO conference.

• If you come for just one day, save the money for the conference get a Expo only ticked, take the money that you saved and go to the bar.
• Look for the Geek with the most people around him and by him drinks till he can’t stand anymore. You learn more in the bar and with being social then you could ever learn from the panels.

To summarise the conference, it was a great week, thank you so much for the opportunity Aaron. I had so much fun and even so that I would say SES should move this event ether to a different city for December or to a different hotel all the complains are gone as soon you get in the Bar and be social. I can’t wait to attend the next conference even if it is in the cold again, the information and knowledge you gain in one night is worth a lot more than the cost of coming to the conference. I almost wish that the conference would have not ended but my lever hurts, I’m tiered and I had the most fun week working ever. I hope to see you around on the next events maybe the SEO Community conference?