| LED Digest 2037: SEO by Telekinesis |
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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 .............................................. October 14, 2005 Issue #2037 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= <Moderator Comment> ~ Special Friday Issue & Message --== SEO for Unoptimizable Sites? ==-- ~ Chris Nielsen ~ Renee Kennedy --== SEO is Dead ==-- ~ Ken Evoy ~ Dan Ho --== The Google Sandbox Effect ==-- ~ Donald Nelson ~ Dirk Johnson ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Views on PayPal ==-- ~ Philip Scriver ~ Roy Williams ===== CONTINUING ================================= <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, A special issue today, on Friday, because it would be a shame to quell discussions like these until Tuesday. One note: as topics get heated and issues come to a head, it's natural to come out with guns blazing. Now, I'm not the "courtesy watchdog" here, but I am the moderator, the mediator and the keeper of the peace. I'll I'm saying is this: let your post "rest" before you hit the send button, give it a second read, and ensure you're addressing the issue at hand and not the speaker. As my philosophy professor used to say, don't be lazy and pull an ad hominem! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem) There is an open, uncensored and unbiased climate to the LED which we all appreciate. It's part of what makes it a great read. The slight downside of that openness is that posts run unedited and raw, just the way you send them. :-) The moral to this story is, be careful what you write, because it just might get published! Have a great weekend, Adam --------------------- From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Unoptimizable sites > Any thoughts on how to optimize for a client who won't > let you touch their web site would be greatly appreciated. - Beth Earle, LED Digest 2036 We sometimes have clients like this. Our solution is to prepare a quote for "Telekinesis SEO". This is where trained technicians sit in a quiet room with printed copy from the client's web site, screen shots of the target pages, and lists of scored keyword phrases. The techs spend time (at our standard billing rate) concentrating to change the non-targeted phrases into targeted phrases. Of course, we do not offer guarantees on the results, only that we will do our best with what we have to work with. How does an auto mechanic repair a car when they cannot remove and replace the bad parts? They can't. If the IT people are running the company, it's time to walk away or be helpful and refer them to another company that provides the same service as you and let them tell them the same thing. We often refer clients that have unrealistic expectations to www.seopros.org or www.topseos.com. They can use their RFP systems to get quotes on their projects, and maybe after the client hears the reality enough, they will get the message. Now, without knowing the details, you could recommend that the copy in the CMS be optimized. But for the best results you will also want to recommend that the title, description, and keywords tags also be modified for all of the pages of the site. Depending on the CMS that is used, this may or may not be easy. If they have a good CMS the ability will already be there, if not, it may take some programming to add it. The optimization can be drawn from existing fields that are used to display partial page content (good), or fields can be added to the database (best option) and the CMS UI to allow editing of the tags along with the page content. The long URLs may or may not be hurting things, but should also be looked at. I would not consider a B2B site to be a problem per say, but they do tend to not take SEO into consideration. Also, you mention that they are looking to "perform better on the search engines" but is this to appear well for certain search phrases, or to increase traffic/sales? Some analysis of the existing traffic should be done so harm is not done to anything that may be currently working on the site. Sorry if this is getting somewhat technical. The point is that optimization is possible, but needs some analysis. But if you have IT staff members "protecting" their turf, you are encountering a client that frankly, we generally wish "good luck", and pass them along. Thank you, Chris Nielsen Nielsen Technical Services ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Renee Kennedy Subject: Unoptimizable sites Beth, You have to work with the programmers to find workarounds to their long query strings. That is the only way that you will be able to optimize a site like this. You can provide the programmer with your exact needs and have them offer solutions to your problems. For instance, one big issue in PHP sites is that each page may not have a unique title. Unique titles are imperative for SEO. There are ways to put a title into a PHP page without using the query string. You can put the titles in a database and pull them when each page is called up. As an SEO, I knew what the site needed, but I didn't know how to accomplish it. After long conversations with our programmers we determined how to solve these SEO dilemmas. They have the knowledge of the workarounds, you have the knowledge of what the search engines need, you have to come together to find common ground. Also, programmers love writing new programs! Hit them where they live and tell them you need their programming expertise to make the site better. In other words, don't tell them they have to work outside the bounds of their programs, tell them you need their help to make their programs work better. Here is a primer for these issues: http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php (Not sure the programming language you're dealing with, but this one is for PHP. But it also talks about query strings.) Renee Kennedy http://www.e-healthlinks.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Ken Evoy Subject: SEO is dead Quick replies to Aaron Wall regarding his statement... > I can't agree that he can personally control the spider visits, > re-visits, indexing, and ranking for over 10,000 sites. I never meant to claim that we control spiders. Sorry about that, sloppy paragraph. When I said... "No other company in the world has a database like SiteSell's. Our db controls and tracks every submission, spider visit, re-visit, indexing, rankings (for over 10,000 sites averaged over the past five years, and for far more than that average today)." I meant the following... We schedule, do, and so know about every submission, and we know about every spider visit, re-visit. We know how they respond to submissions, including changes in Google Sitemaps/Yahoo Bulk-Submit, better than anyone. We don't manipulate them. We just make sure they know about SBIers pages, without exceeding their submission tolerances. And yes, you can affect spider behavior if you have terabytes of this type of data, and know how to mine it. And yes, we know about "schedules" AND how they change and in response to what and now... in response to Sitemaps and changes in those. To Aaron and Michael, who both accused me of self-promotion, a good piece of my second post on this topic was partly a response to Shari's comment... "Ken, stick to sales. That's what you're good at." My weakness is a thin skin. I'm passionate about our business, I care that our SBI! owners succeed and outperform most Webmastered sites. So I hurt when folks toss out unfair, inaccurate claims like that. We're at the cutting edge of how to succeed online by working WITH the engines by OVERdelivering great content for their human customers, and therefore for them. I may be good at selling, but it's easy to sell a product that works as well as SBI!. And when I say things like that in response to such a personal brush-off as if we are are some scam operation that simply sells god-knows-what, well... Upon re-reading my second post, I agree it sounded rather self- promotional, but comments like "SBI! actually sells itself" were responding to the implication that the only thing we are good at is selling. We're much, much better than that, far more advanced that anyone here likely understands. It was unfair. However, I do apologize for the self-promotion that resulted. None was intended during the course of self-defence. Michael, regarding your claim that our affiliate program is "multi-level marketing," we have been around this one so often it barely deserves a reply. So I'll just say that in Canada, 2-tier does not fall within the definition of MLM under federal law. In the U.S., which lacks one cohesive federal law (or at least it did years ago since we launched this), only 4 out of 50 states consider 2-tier clearly to be MLM. We registered in all of them. The others are grey zone and in any case, 2-tier is so far off their practical level of legal concern (i.e., all the scams and rip- offs of the outrageous pyramid schemes our there). The best test, as one MLM attorney once taught me, is simply... "Does it act, walk, and quack like an MLM duck?" The answer, in our 5 Pillar Program, has clearly been "no." The focus of affiliates remains on product, not on the distribution method. Period. If you can confidently say that, you will not be pursued for a 2-tier program. We are not MLM, not in the strictly legal sense, and certainly not in the motivation and behavior sense. 2-tiers cuts it just right, with the main emphasis being on product AND with a slight (not huge due to the lack of the "power" of multi-tiers) additional incentive. Three tiers? That's where you are clearly into multi-tier. Final word from me on this... Is "SEO Is Dead" an intentionally strong headline? Of course, it gets attention. But it was not unfair attention -- its core message was both related and explained the headline. While some didn't like that message, no one rebutted it, nor the logic that backed it up in the PDF book... "SEO, however you define it today, from good hat to black, will have morphed into "no hat" common sense... good design, usability, and delivering great content." Many people would argue with that. The PDF book explains in detail why it will happen. It's not a claim. Don't say, "I didn't tell you." Like I said to Dirk in his first post about his message... "Too bad most will miss it. Yeah... too bad. ;-)" All the best, Ken Evoy http://www.sitesell.com/ ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Dan Ho Subject: SEO is dead > Ken Evoy continues to push his multi-level marketing > service in the guise of informed discussion about whether > SEO is dead or dying. - Michael Martinez, LED 2035 Michael Martinez calling Ken Evoy's program a multi-level marketing service is flatly wrong. I don't even know anyone who refers to two tiered affiliate programs as "mult-level marketing". Michael is obviously more into borderline slander than an objective analysis of Ken's program. You can almost see the sneer as you read his comments. As for many of the SEO comments here, particularly one admonishing Ken to "stick to sales," irony must be lost on said individual. Meaning: your high regard for SEO itself could clearly be labeled biased since you yourself were selling "SEO services" in your bio line. Ant then there was the preposterous comment from an individual (perhaps the same one who made the previous comment) that SEO won't be dead till Jill Whalen and the like says it's dead. Sorry, I would much rather trust Ken's opinion on SEO than on someone whose very livelihood depends on the perpetuation and propagation of the industry. I mean c'mon. I also laugh when I read the desperate comments of so-called SEO experts. 3 years ago I knew nothing about SEO, and I still don't. I had no technical ability to build a website myself -- and I certainly wasn't interested in learning that skill either. Lastly, I had no desire to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to some "SEO specialist." Thankfully I found SBI. After working a little over 1 years on an SBI site -- just one measly year -- with no experience in SEO and any technical know-how I built up a business that brings in over $15,000 income per month, all residual. My advice to the people on the sidelines debating if they should go the SBI route or incur the vastly inflated fees of a SEO, I strongly advise you do the former. And, don't worry, unlike Ken, and unlike all of the high wizards of SEO here, I have no financial stake in making this recommendation. Dan Ho ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Donald Nelson Subject: Google sandbox Dear All, In LED 2036 Caludiu Spulber asked a good question about whether the existence of the Google Sandbox effect means that short-term SEO is dead, and asked what SEOs tell their clients. One of the first things that an optimizer has to do is to look at the potential client site and evaluate the chances and possibilities of improving performance for it. Not all sites are Sandboxed. Some sites need only a bit of tweaking or some structural changes that will bring positive results. Other sites might need long-term work such as content building and link building. So what we tell clients varies according to what kind of site they have, when it was established, what niche they are trying to break into, etc. Sincerely, Donald Nelson www.a1-optimization.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Google sandbox > I published an almost exact replica of the ebook sales page as > a file on another domain -- a domain that has been established > for several years... now appears on the first and second pages > of google search results ..This is all happened within three weeks. - Donald Nelson, LED 2035 Donald, the key word that you used here was "established". I'd like to discuss that, as well as some of the other SEO-related issues that have been discussed in here recently. It appears that Google rewards "site establishment". That is, a site that has a lot of optimized, focused content, and a lot of links to it, all developed consistently over time, tends to be rewarded with good search results. Maybe that implies a sandbox of some kind, but I see it more as a process that takes place on a continuum, with results improving gradually. A business owner needs to determine if they are going to compete for free search results, then self-educate, define the search terms that they want to compete for, develop a strategy, implement the tactics to get there, and realize that this is a long-term exercise that requires patience, time, money, commitment and a certain leap of faith. There are no guarantees. Is doing that work "good optimization", or just spamming? That's not for me to decide. But understanding this requirement for "site establishment" and dealing with it effectively is the single biggest hurdle that the business owner faces when developing a successful search optimization campaign. Shortcuts, half-hearted efforts, poor planning and execution, and contrived linking games are far less effective than they once were, because there are now a lot more established competitors. On the flip side, doing nothing will almost always yield nothing. Whatever is done, the question to ask is this: Will it stand up to human review scrutiny at a search engine? If so, good. And if it works well in the search engines, will it also sell products and services to the real person who lands on that page, after a search? To many of us inside this business, these are the obvious challenges, but to many outside of the SEO realm, most of this is not at all clear. Thanks Dirk Johnson www.domaindrivers.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Philip Scriver Subject: Paypal > Does anybody have any views on using PayPal > on a commercial site. Is it a turn off? - James Miller, LED 2036 I looked into this very carefully as it did seem to be the answer to my dream. As I understand it (and my website developer) the new system PayPal has, isn't available for UK clients yet and is only available for USA clients. The "Big Boys" still have us stitched up tight here in the UK for there expensive options. Philip Scriver Explore Britain http://www.xplorebritain.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Roy Williams Subject: Paypal We have been using PayPal along with our own shopping cart for many years. We don't use their shopping cart for tangible goods, rather we 'dump' the contents of our cart into a PayPal 'single item' type purchase. We find that purchases are split 50/50 between our own card processing and PayPal. We're very happy with PayPal, so much so that we use their shopping cart for our mp3 sales. Roy Williams Nervous Records www.nervous.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. 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