| LED Digest 1998: An Alternative to SEO |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. July 21, 2005 Issue #1998 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> --== An Alternative to SEO ==-- ~ Shaun Johnston "...my goal is to change how people search for getaways in my marketplace..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Contracts and SEO / SEM ==-- ~ Tom Anson "Even the best of the best can't control what the search engines will do." ~ Barb Sybal "Just like any product or service, due diligence is always the best practice..." --== Links, Links, Links ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "...recent studies have shown the rich keep getting richer where linkage is concerned." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== A Little Humor ==-- ~ John Quinlan ======== NEW ===================================== <Moderator Comment> LEDer's, For Friday I've compiled a special issue with all of your comments and feedback concerning the state of our LED. I hope you enjoy the reading. It's been a real jolt for me -- I think it's just what I've needed to get back into the discussions. Thank you. Adam ------------------------- From: Shaun Johnston Subject: An alternative to SEO I sense a trend in postings in line with my own drift. I operate in a deliberately narrow niche of weekend getaways from NYC to lodgings a couple of hours to the north, where I live. I operate a family of four online getaway guides, and I provide SEO, online booking engines, and design and hosting, as well as PPC service to getaway-lodgings in my territory. So I offer an unusually wide range of services to my clients. The ones I focus on change as my estimate of my best value changes. For about a year I have been focused on SEO. But recently I have refocused my service around sales more than marketing. I suspect, though, that the same people will do it as are now doing SEO. You have to be hosting people's sites, I think, to provide this service. My realizations may be unique to my market. But maybe not, hence I report my change of heart here. Maybe it accounts for some of the unease evident on this list recently. First, in a regional or small market, there's only a limited number of people searching for the product, so the cost of SEO work can be way out of proportion to the small increases in visits we're likely to bring people. And for my market, anyway, there's an inherent contradiction in SEO -- you can't cram dozens of lodgings onto a single page of results. There's a built-in zero-sum limitation to search in such a market -- as we help companies compete for top positions, we end up driving prices higher in a spiral that doesn't do anyone any good. Also, it turned out that the proportion of traffic that was coming from sources open to SEO was small, maybe only 20% of the traffic to the site, already well SEO'd (I did it). So even though lodgings are reporting that around 70% of their bookings involve the Web, only about 20% of that may be coming from sources open to SEO, perhaps 15% of the whole. More shocking was how tiny the fulfillment ratio was. It was taking one lodging with a good site (I designed it) 170 visits to the site to get one booking, no matter what the source. At that ratio, very few sources prove to be economic. (I get these figures from my own web analysis tools.) I ran out of logic to justify providing SEO service. Instead I realized that it makes more sense to work at raising the rate of fulfillment. But I couldn't turn simply to improving site design and navigation because I was already using all the skills I had on this site. I need new ways to increase fulfillment. I'm still early in thinking about this. But here's what I've come up with so far. 1. More pictures. From hating Flash I've fallen in love with large-photo, slow-motion, gradual dissolving slide shows, with no bells and whistles. Just show things, from several different points of view, in detail. I think there's no use of visitors' time that repays them with so much useful information so enjoyably. 2. Main lines through sites. I plan to rebuild my clients' sites around a main-line sequence of maybe four pages, that offers visitors a guided detailed tour through the product or whatever, ending up on an action page. I offer them also the alternative of a full menu so they can make their own choices. But I believe making people find their own way through unfamiliar sites has become dysfunctional. 3. Serve clients through the marketplace, not through their sites alone. That may be easier for me, since I operate web guides for my marketplace. I have just used PHP / MySQL to create a specials page for my clients, with a backend where they can enter their own specials and a button that posts their specials immediately onto my specials page. They can advertise their specials through my site, getting around 15,000 visits a month, rather than just through theirs. 4. Watch out for RSS. Experts say favorites and bookmarks are finished. No one uses them anymore. Some are predicting that RSS will take over from search engines as the main online medium driving markets next year. This is most likely to happen, perhaps, in online travel. So my backend for entering specials updates not only a set of specials pages, but also RSS feeds synced to them, in the hopes that NYC people will want to see new getaway specials as soon as they become available. Overall, my goal is to change how people search for getaways in my marketplace: I aim to to make better use of visitors' time; reduce their searching failure rate (the number of sites and pages they have to visit), making searching more satisfying, and mine existing traffic more intensively for business. Both our clients and their customers should benefit. But will we? What will we charge for? Running PPC directories to make marketplaces more efficient, as I try to do with my getaway guides? Turning web sites from a directory-model to a blog-model? Shaun Johnston My travel guides can be seen at www.nycgetaways.com. A recent web design with slide show is www.emersonplace.com. ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Tom Anson Subject: SEO pricing > Are there any high-minded essential SEO's who > offer a written contract to the client guaranteeing > a greater fixed return on investment, or is SEO > just another one of those "trust me" hyperboles? - Bill Davison, LED 1996 Well Bill, it's been my experience that *only* the "trust me" (wink! wink!) guys offer any guarantees. The problem is: there are a lot of elements of SEO. Even the best of the best can't control what the search engines will do. But there *are* standards for ethics and a range of practices that are recognized as being generally effective. Not *guaranteed*, but the most likely to give you a good ROI. If I had the money to spend on SEO, I'd get a copy of Jill Whalen's The Nitty Gritty of Writing for the Search Engines and/or Shari Thurow's Search Engine Visability to acquaint myself with the basics of SEO, and then, get a fairly detailed idea of what my potential SEO firm thought should be done, test that out against that backdrop, and go from there. Of course, SEO will have limited benefits unless the site is designed and written well, but that's another story. Tom Anson Anson Digital Concerns -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Barb Sybal Subject: SEO pricing I don't work in SEO so have nothing to gain by my comments regarding Bill's question on guaranteed ROI. You could have the best and the brightest in SEO working for you and spend thousands a month on various campaigns, but ultimately it's your product / service and web site that will sell. It would be impossible for someone to guarantee results (in any service field) if the web site or its offerings fall short. Would you ask your accountant to guarantee that you'll get money back before you file your tax return? Would you ask your lawyer to guarantee that you'll win your case before providing them details or a retainer? Even web designers would likely have a difficult time guaranteeing that a new web site would bring traffic. With a written contract in place, you would still have to sue the person / company in their jurisdiction if they fall short on their claims of guaranteed results. Raise your hand if you bought something recently based on a commercial or advertisement and it didn't do what it claimed? I get so many phone calls a week from companies claiming to get me in the top 10 positions that I know are bogus, I don't even give them the time of day. Just like any product or service, due diligence is always the best practice, i.e. ask questions, get referrals and check their work to ensure that their ethics and beliefs are in line with yours. Then you won't need a guarantee. Barb Sybal GFX Printing Services http://www.gfxinc.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Inbound links > Some of the SEO "gurus" who are, by their own admitted choice, > on the outside looking in at reciprocal linking, plead with us all > to focus only on the acts of the spammers. This leads them to > make some very inaccurate assumptions... about the whole > realm of reciprocal linking... - Dirk Johnson, LED 1997 I was one of the first public advocates of the practice and maintained an active reciprocal link program for several years. My reciprocal linkage credentials remain intact. But the point that so many people who continue to advocate this practice miss is that it is simply no longer a necessary means of getting to the top. It hasn't been for a very long time because Google has long since adjusted its algorithms to compensate for the practice. The power of inbound linkage is very misunderstood in the SEO community. I am not surprised because every successful mythology takes on a life of its own. While I and a few other people continue to do active research in Google ranking analysis, most people just look at the sites that get to the top in selected search results and conclude, "Well, it's happening because of links". A lot of so-called SEO research is conducted for the sake of validating the inbound linkage point of view. The research is limited and flawed because it doesn't take into consideration what Google is actually doing. No, in fact, it's happening IN SPITE of links. Google hasn't abandoned the core idea of link popularity. Google has just added more ideas about how to determine relevance. They are looking at factors that don't have anything to do with links. So, we'll continue to disagree because Google has left you guys in the dust. It becomes more and more difficult to achieve top rankings through link campaigns for two reasons: as specific categories become more hyperoptimzed, they require more linkage, and Google is moving in new directions. > Google is not as sensitive to inbound linkage as Yahoo! > anyway. Most Google rankings can be optimized through > other factors. Only a relatively few search expressions have > been so hyperoptimized that you MUST obtain large > numbers of inbound links to rank well on Google. - Michael Martinez, LED 1996 > ... LED readers need to be aware that the great majority of > the SEO community... and most anyone who's had any degree > of success obtaining high rankings on Google for keywords > that are remotely competitive, believe the exact opposite to be > true. - Steve Pronger, LED 1997 That is because they have hyperoptimized their sites. Hyperoptimization is the practice of over optimizing a site. There are some keyword expressions where you MUST build inbound links because everyone else is doing it. The SEO community has become its own worst enemy in this respect by blindly advocating the construction of inbound links without regard for the need to do so. The search engines claim that 80% of all searches are non-commercial in nature. Even so, the majority of the 20% commercial searches are being run against a broad selection of business sites that don't hyperoptimize. Hence, most sites don't need more than 20-40 good inbound links. Contrary to popular misbelief, Google search results are NOT determined solely by link popularity. Google ascertains RELEVANCE first and attempts to order results according to relevance factors. Link popularity is applied on a secondary level. Relevance CAN be established through off-page factors (a lot of people like to use the "miserable failure" link bombing campaigns for the Michael Moore and White House Web sites as examples), but Google looks at on-page factors, including title tags, header tags, bolded text, ALT= text, anchor text in outbound links, and so forth. Other off-page factors include DMOZ listings (which can be devastating to your rankings if they don't agree with your site's content, and DMOZ has implemented an unpublished policy of inserting domain names in front of titles for deep content), anchor text from inbound links, and surrounding text associated with inbound links. Google is looking at inbound links in a broader pattern these days. RSS feeds have become problematic, most likely due to the spamad sites (sites which pretend to be directories for the sake of displaying Google Ads or other ads). An increasing number of people are complaining that these spamad sites have superseded their own sites in search results. I have confirmed the phenomenon for several dozen sites. Apparently, Google will accept RSS summaries or screen-scraped summaries in these pseudo-directories as comparable content to whole Web sites. That is, your site is treated as a duplicate to the summary. Google now seems to take the "fresher" site as the most important one, and the spamad sites are "fresher". The bottom line is that inbound linkage is being abused, on the one hand unnecessarily so by the SEO community, who have not paid sufficient attention to on-page factors (and I note that even Danny Sullivan has unsuccessfully admonished the SEO community to tone it down on the inbound linkage), and on the other hand by spammers who know that people are so desperate for inbound links they'll take any that they can get. I probably bear some responsibility for the spamad abuse. I was a staunch advocate of using RSS feeds for a couple of years to build inbound linkage. I can now watch certain of my own sites drop in the search results as I promote them through RSS feeds. I have not devised an effective counter measure (except to remove those links from the feeds). Clearly, the spammers liked my ideas. So, people need to understand that there are risks involved when building link campaigns. DMOZ can send your listings careening off the radar screen by changing your title tags (they won't tell you they have done this and they are following one or more unpublished guidelines). RSS feeds can supersede your own sites in the search results. And you can link-bomb yourself to the top but some people feel that such campaigns have resulted in bannings. Google wants to see natural linkage. They don't really describe natural linkage, but in general they indicate that they don't want to see link exchanges, pseudo-sites constructed for the sake of expanding links, or anything which is not a natural, honest endorsement of a site's content. So, just because the SEO community believes the only way to the top is by pounding up thousands of links doesn't mean that is really the case. Most of you do NOT need hundreds or thousands of links to get good search results. But if you all follow that pattern of abuse, then you will trap yourselves in a never-ending cycle of having to acquire more links. Stop and evaluate your results every few dozen links. Remember that recent studies have shown the rich keep getting richer (http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Oct04/RichLinking.html) where linkage is concerned. You will eventually hit a critical threshold where people will start linking to you naturally. At that point, you should not need to continue your link-building campaign. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: John Quinlan Subject: A little humor On Sunday I received the usual bunch of junkmail including several Nigerians in various parts of the world who need my help to get millions of dollars out of their country, I had won several lotteries both here in the UK and abroad, there was a group of people who were concerned with my sexual performance who kindly offered me drugs to combat the failing without prescription, and oh yes an email from an old school friend. I was in quite a good mood so rather than get angry I decide to get even and so have registered a domain name http://www.spam-scam.co.uk and have put up a web site on it. Now I will be the first to admit that I have a strange sense of humour, so I would welcome any feedback regarding the site. Thanks John Quinlan ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." - Sir Winston Churchill |
