| LED Digest 1852: Is SEO Losing its Effectiveness? |
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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 adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ August 6, 2004 Issue #1852 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Chris Nielsen "...SEOs try to scam for extra advantage, and search engines treat them like parasites." ~ James Miller "You can also look at these from the user's point of view..." ~ Salem Kashou "...searchers will quickly learn that the top-end results are...ultimately irrelevant..." --== Part Simple, Part Industrial Stats Programs ==-- ~ Sandy Galvin "We use the up version of Freestats and it's been quite accurate..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Common Spam Hacks ==-- ~ John Smart --== Help with Shopping Cart Code ==-- ~ Tom Anson ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Future of SEO > ... with the cost of acquiring new prospects likely to escalate, > and the limited long-term effectiveness of techniques such as > SEO, investigate economical alternatives such as paid-inclusion. - David Yancey, LED 1851 This is going to be a busy week for the moderator... Such a long post that challenges an entire industry is sure to create a flood of responses, still, I felt that I too should respond, since several things that were said were somewhat accurate in their description, if off the mark in the conclusion, in my opinion. To address your summary paragraph above, I just want to say that basic SEO practices are as effective today as they ever have been and there is no reason to think this will change. Basic SEO involves the very simple idea of adding to a site the same keyword phrases that people search with. Once this content has been indexed by a search engine, it will show the searcher what they are looking for. Current mainstream SEO practices are generally very focused on a limited set of keywords or phrases. This can be effective and very competitive, but also limiting in some ways. Since search engines change and the competition modifies their site to get above yours, then you must change your site to regain lost positions. We have found and built our business around the idea of "General Optimization", which just means including as many keyword phrases as possible all through the site. The more phrases and more combination of phrases you have, the more you can be found for. This basic form of SEO is effective and very cost-effective, with no on-going maintenance required. This type of optimization may not be as well suited to large commercial sites, or the most competitive industries, but they can afford the added cost of more competitive methods of SEO. PPC fraud has been going on for quite a while now and is nothing new. From what I've seen it's rampant on the smaller PPC systems, and active, but more professionally done on the larger providers. In our opinion, when the providers care enough to really work with clients to weed out the abusers, will the problem get under control. 7Search.com has been doing some of this, but more is needed from all quarters. What I see in the media does lend strength to what you say. The PPC industry leaders and those that profit from making SEM and PPC seem like the only real option are getting all the attention and benefiting financially. But the SEO industry, with its widespread non-professionalism, pettiness, and pockets of those that are unethical, keep it from properly being known as the most cost-effective method of Internet marketing. In the publications that I get aimed at the direct mail industry, almost all the articles (and the advertisements) talk about SEM and very little about SEO. Often SEM is referred to as SEO which greatly confuses the issue. Also, SEO is spoken as being somehow inferior to SEM. The SEO industry is currently not organized enough to recognize what is happening and to counter the confusion and mostly bad publicity that we get. However, this does seem to be changing. As was mentioned, there has been a running battle between SEOs and search engines which adds to the mess, We don't understand this and feel it must either be freed or a lack of understanding about how things should work. We almost never pay for submissions. We feel that good quality sites that have good descriptions are a valuable commodity that search engines want and need. We provide the quality content and the search engines provide the traffic. What happens all too often is that SEOs try to scam for extra advantage, and search engines treat them like parasites. This problem, and several others with our industry has led us to form a small, informal (please!) group for SEOs AND search engine operators called SEOBy.org. There are many SEOs like us that have been in the industry for several years and have seen all the changes. There are still only a small percentage that see that the basic idea of matching what the searcher is looking for has not, and will not change. Basic search engine optimization should be the foundation for any well-balanced web marketing effort, now, and I hope forever. But then, I would, wouldn't I...? Thank you, Chris Nielsen Where Search is one www.seoby.org ------- new post - same topic --------- From: James Miller Subject: Future of SEO You can also look at these from the user's point of view. One of my bugbears is that if I want a particular hotel web site, I have to go through endless combined and inevitably useless listing in Google, until I find the site of the actual hotel I want. This may be much more of a European problem with hotels, as many of the best small hotels are family-owned, have small web sites and don't have any affiliations to a large company. The minute Google put in a switch to cut out these consolidated listings the better! I'm also working on deep search techniques for such as lawyers, patent agents, medics and general intelligence agents, who need to find all the references they can to a particular person or subject. It's fine to look up Eisenhower or Attlee, but what about Bush, Major and Thatcher! Basically, the program successively calls Google and then arranges the references in a special chart that can be mined for the required data. It will probably use a standard form of my Daisy Chart. http://www.daisy2000.com/Daisy2003/daisychart.html This enables you to click on keywords, dates, names and other data contained in the references. Now techniques such as this will become commonplace for those who seriously want to search the Internet. It will mean that wherever the reference lies in the list in Google or whatever, it will be found and hopefully immediately obvious! James Miller Daisy Analysis www.daisy.co.uk ------- new post - same topic --------- From: Salem Kashou Subject: Future of SEO Sorry, but I believe this post to be long and wrong. It falsely assumes that the future holds one search engine and one fate. Wrong! Once the PPC's and bid wars get overwhelming (which they will), most companies will spend time and money optimizing newer engines. Why? Because, searchers will quickly learn that the top-end results are not only paid for and in-your-face, but ultimately irrelevant in most day-to-day searches. Internet users are getting smarter. Users will learn how to page-down, or find a new engine that better finds what they're looking for (just like the way Google used to). Ever type "your name" into a engine and find a paid-ad for "you at ebay" or "you at Amazon"?) I have, and it's funny because I am not due to go on sale until 2008. Irrelevance will soon change where we search and how company's optimize. If you view this as a threat and not an opportunity then you must be tired. Gear up or quit. But please refrain from sounding the alarm with hopeless conjecture. It sounds too end-of-world-ish for me. Peace. Salem Kashou ------- new post - new topic --------- From: Sandy Galvin Subject: Freestats We use the up version of Freestats and it's been quite accurate in the overall when compared to our server web logs. I look mostly at their raw logs page when following things on a minute-to-minute basis, the hourly hits page, and the monthly stats for use in our spreadsheets and financials. There have been one or two outages this year, but usually short duration. I don't find it quite as informative as Hitbox was, but have gotten used to it. Cheap. Sandy Galvin Barclay Blocks http://www.barclaywoods.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: John Smart Subject: Spam hacks I have lost many hours in the past two weeks. Here is the problem I have had. One of my servers was drowning under a ton of e-Mails that could not be processed - mails filling the mail queue and making everyone's mail crawl. Not a good situation. A lot of research showed that someone was sending out a lot of spam through our server, without our consent. We are not an open relay. Some research indicated that formmail.pl was causing a headache. I replaced the few of those that were on the server with the latest version, making sure that the referrer addresses were set correctly. The mail flowing through our servers did not dissipate. Talking to an admin guy at the data-center we use, I was told that even the latest formmail.pl was not secure - there was a way through it. I replaced them with PHPFormMail - Classic (http://www.boaddrink.com), The mail going through our server dropped very quickly - it is still higher than normal, but that appears to be bounce-backs from the spam sent through us. The numbers are dropping by the hour. Now, I don't have a good enough lawyer to be able to say that formmail.pl was the security hole. It could be the timing was coincidental, and there is a security hole I am unaware of. But if any of you are experiencing anything similar on your servers, you may want to try replacing the .pl with the .php version (I uploaded the file, changed the referrer list in the php script, changed the form to point to the php instead of the pl version, and it worked. Perfectly) and see if that helps. Of course, for security, the best method is to have the e-Mail address imbedded in the script, with no option for changing that with POST or GET data. But that is beyond some of our clients, and probably beyond some of yours! (Not to mention the time involved!). I hope this information can help someone - and save them from the hair-pulling that I have gone through! John Smart, Technical Director InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Tom Anson Subject: Shopping Cart Code Hi LEDers, I have a question about coding for a shopping cart, and hope someone among you can help. For the last four years, I've been using EZ-Net Tools (from ICServ) for my website. They were a great way for me to get started with my website, and I like the integration of everything; but I've learned enough with this forum that I'm starting to outgrow the Tools. I've been reworking my site(s) in Dreamweaver MX 2004; and this past weekend, I tried my first shot at building a page with an order button / shopping cart. I've gotten it to work (took all day), but when I try to validate the code (in Dreamweaver -- I'm not brave enough for the W3C validation), I get a long list of code problems. Most of them are within the shopping cart script. I have a lot more questions than ideas on what to try. All I know is that I'd like to stay within the Tools for now (for hosting), but I'd like to be able to tweak things so that my pages are XHTML-compliant, and lose all the extra junk in the code. For that, I need some help. I have no idea of where to look for answers because I'm not even sure what it is I'm talking about here (the down side of the Tools). I guess what I'm looking for are some answers -- and maybe a suggestion of where else to look for more. Basically, at http://snipurl.com/88ub [therapeutic-grade.com] and http://snipurl.com/88ub [therapeutic-grade.com] I is the code for the Essential Oils Desk Reference shopping cart. I've built a page with (pretty much) just the code in question here: http://www.health-essentials.info/shopping-cart-questions.html. I want to put the price, quantity and "Add to Cart" button in the page http://www.health-essentials.info/resources/desk-ref.html (If anyone can suggest a better way to do it than I have here, I'd love to hear about it.) I know this sounds dumb, but what kind of script is this? Are scripts for shopping carts unique to the system, or would any good code (of the right sort) work? If I can use my own script here, where should I go to find good information about it, and what kind of script is this???? If anyone would like to take this and basically weed out the garbage and add in what it needed to W3C compliance, that would be great. If you could take the time to explain what this stuff does, that would be wonderful (although just recommending a good reference would be great, too). In your reply, assume that I basically understand nothing. You wouldn't be too far from the truth. Thanks in advance. I look forward to hearing from you. Tom Anson http://www.therapeutic-grade.com http://www.health-essentials.info ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. 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