Older Marketing Techniques

When the Google Florida update happened in 2003 I read about 5,000 forum posts, tested a few of my sites, and wrote an article based on what I saw. That article got to be quite popular, but that popularity faded over a month or so, but I wanted my 15 seconds of fame to last.

When that article started spreading I went around asking high authority sites which linked to competing sites if they would be willing to link to my site. Some of the most effective techniques used were

• using hub finder to find sites linking at multiple competing websites, and suggesting listing a few more sites (in a list including my site)
• contacting people who were still linking at a competing site that was moved, letting them know that the site had moved

Site's like the HTML Writer's Guild would generally say no to a link request from a guy like me back then, but because of that surge in popularity they were like "oh you are that Aaron...we will get you link up today". As soon as that happened once I decided to go on a link request binge. The great links rolled in and I was like SWEET.

Image from southpark-world.net

While some SEO sites never recovered, mine grew in authority due to the flood of high quality links, and within a few months my rankings were better than ever, and I had high authority recommendations from trusted organizations.

Ageless Marketing Techniques

If you are featured on Oprah or have the chance to interview Oprah make sure that is featured on your site. The same is true if you are featured in the mainstream media.

Newer Marketing Techniques

When I recently published the Blogger's Guide to SEO I launched a multi-pronged marketing campaign.

• The idea was tailored to a specific audience.
• I created a custom logo for it so it was easier for people to have something to share and to make dedicated posts about it.
• I blogged about it on SEO Book and asked about a half dozen friends if they could mention it on their blogs.
• I linked out to Lee Odden's list of blogs. Without even asking him for a link, he decided to reference it on his blog and spread it to his network of over 400 Facebook users.
• I had a ready made AdWords campaign set to target blog related stuff. The same day the article was released someone searched Google for blog, clicked on my ad, read the article, then bought SEO Book. And that ad campaign is also seen on many blogs.
• I guest blogged on Compete.com about making money from blogs.
• A great friend of mine submitted the story to StumbleUpon. Social media is no longer an every man for himself game.

What you really want to do when launching a good idea is to saturate the market with your idea as fast and hard as you possibly can such that it looks organic, yet gains the benefits of push marketing from years past. The story got to #1 on the Del.icio.us popular list, made the Sphinn homepage, and had Digg not deleted it the story would have made the Digg homepage. Hundreds of links are still rolling in.

Marketing Deficiencies

What could I have done better?

• I did not make the idea community oriented enough by asking x bloggers to give their top tip for doing SEO for blogs. Asking for data from a bunch of people to help them feel affinity toward and ownership of the idea to make them more likely to help market it.
• I could have done a few more guest posts on other sites.
• I could have built up the launch by writing relevant related entries on SEO Book asking for what people wanted.
• I could have embedded a bit of controversy in it.
• I forgot to email people subscribed to my old newsletter. Sending those thousands of people that update could have helped get it a bit more of a bump in traffic.
• I could have participated on some well known forums to have them help market the site.

Google, already has a near infinite number of data points to compute relevancy for the active parts of the web, and is looking to gather even more user data information. The WSJ has background on the story:

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends.

They also mentioned the C word:

Google will likely have to address copyright issues. Allowing consumers to share different types of files such as music with other users could trigger the sort of copyright complaints the company already faces over videos on its YouTube video sharing site. One person familiar with the matter says Google is discussing with copyright holders how to approach the issue and has some preliminary solutions.

This is going to move Google up the value system by

• giving them a unique data source
• giving them unique relevancy signals
• keeping users locked into their services and using their services longer
• shift power from copyright holders to Google
• eventually allow Google to sell content (if they want to - the Google Video trial did not work too well)

But there will also be a big upside, especially to marketers and content creators who are willing to give away high value content to gain mindshare and marketshare. By creating content that people would want to store and share on Google, you get cheap or free exposure for your business interests.

As DaveN said, Google eventually has to move away from links because links are too polluted. What better relevancy signals can they come up with than attention data and how often people cite and share data ON THEIR NETWORK? Feedburner, Google Reader, iGoogle, Gmail, and Youtube are already part of the Google network. Soon your hard drive will be too.

I have been giving Compete.com a lot of coverage, but that is because they offer a great service. Today they are offering credits for half price.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

When I published the SEO glossary I made it creative commons licensed. I wanted to do that with all the blog posts on SEO Book too, but just got around to doing so. If you like any of the blog posts here feel free to do what you like with them.

I also made the how search engines work article CC licensed too.

The Wikipedia ranks for a lot of competitive keywords because they are cited everywhere while acquiring the back links to be envious of. They also keep most of their link juice by linking to their internal pages and placing no-follows on external links.

I found out recently that they rank for competitive key phrases on Google such as:

• Loan - #1 and 2
• Mortgage - #3
• Insurance - #4 and #5

The chart below is from the RankPulse list of top websites ranking in the top ten results for their 1,000 keywords sample database.

But when I added high traffic classifiers to the phrases above, Wikipedia’s rankings dropped significantly.

• Insurance Quotes – Not found in top 1000 Google results
• Mortgage Rates – Not found in top 1000 Google results
• Loan Consolidation - #36

1. Although Wikipedia ranks well for competitive phrases, they don’t belong to the associated topical communities. They rank primarily on site authority.
2. While they have enough content to rank for said terms, they don't have pages targeting those terms. In many cases the relevant content for the phrase is compressed as part of a broader related page.
3. Their title tags target core keywords and lacks modifiers needed to rank well for popular terms that Wikipedia did not dedicate unique pages to.

By fixing the above issues, they may very well rank for the remaining 11 keywords.