| LED Digest 1855: Who's the Oldest (Online)? |
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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 12, 2004 Issue #1855 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== The Oldest of the Old School? ==-- ~ Brad Waller "So now, who knows of anyone that has been around since before October 1994?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Dan Thies "A huge wave of competition is coming." ~ David Yancey "So here is the reasoning for suggesting that smaller site owners should *not* place too much faith in SEO..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Using Multiple Domains Properly ==-- ~ Salem Kashou ======== NEW ===================================== From: Brad Waller Subject: Who is the Oldest (online, that is) Hi all, here's a post to change the subject and hopefully mine the vast knowledge of this group. We were thinking about what to do for our 10th anniversary online (coming up in October) and got to talking about how many pure play dot com companies are left that are older than us. I did some research quite a while ago and found stats on the numbers of domains and dot coms registered in the early days: Month -- # of Web sites -- % .com sites -- # of .com sites ===== Jun-93 -- 130 -- 1.5 -- 2 Dec-93 -- 623 -- 4.6 -- 29 Jun-94 -- 2,738 -- 13.5 -- 370 Dec-94 -- 10,022 -- 18.3 -- 1,834 From this I have extrapolated that we were one of the first ~1,500 dot coms registered. I have no idea how to determine (other than trial and error checking of whois data) which sites predate ours, and which ones are still active, and which are real online businesses (not defense contractors - who were the earliest .coms I know of) So now, who knows of anyone that has been around since before October 1994? Can I claim to be the oldest pure play? Brad Waller Classified Ad Affiliate Program: http://EP.com/b/csp.html Manage & Sell Site Banner Space: http://AdJungle.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Dan Thies Subject: Future of SEO > I think the search industry, Web design, software > development, advertising, and usability industries > need to mature... I do not believe any of these industries > "get" search... So, has SEO reached an "end"? Absolutely > not. SEO is evolving. I'm a better SEO now than I ever was. - Shari Thurow, LED 1854 It's easy for Shari Thurow to say that the end of SEO isn't coming any time soon. For her, that's true. Firms like Shari's that understand the total picture of design, usability, traffic quality, and conversions don't need to fear what's coming. The world is waking up to the value of search engine marketing, as search is becoming a viable and measurable means of marketing. A huge wave of competition is coming. SEO and PPC both cost money, and the key to long term success is making the most of that spending. That means better targeting of keywords, channel selection, improving websites to convert the resulting traffic, and leaner business processes that improve margins and lower costs. What will come to an end sooner or later is "SEO in a vacuum," as practiced by so many amateurs and would-be professionals. The "free ride" will probably end on the paid side before the organic side, but it's inevitable. A good indicator of survivability is how much you can afford to pay for traffic. If your business depends on finding leads at a nickel or a dime (or less), no matter where those leads come from, you'd better take action to change your business while you still can. If you can't do that, good luck and thanks for playing. Dan Thies SEO Research Labs http://www.seoresearchlabs.com ------- new post - same topic --------- From: David Yancey Subject: Future of SEO As expected, my post on the present and future limitations of SEO is eliciting a number of responses. Thanks to all who posted or will do so! I seem however to have failed to make the main points clear to at least some readers. First, I am not "worried", "negative", or "pessimistic" about the future of the web, or search, or ecommerce, or even the smaller websites that are today finding online marketing to be full of complexities and barriers. Analyzing numbers, facts and trends and making predictions, if done by a qualified professional and done well, is bound to raise issues and challenge some fixed ideas. Those who are staking all their hopes on SEO, or praying that PPC, PFI and the like will go away, won't like my predictions, naturally. But hey! I *may* be wrong. As to SEO specifically, I am *not* saying SEO is useless or dead. To the contrary. it is still very much a necessary part of any website traffic-building strategy. My reasoning deals with trends, and tries to show why, as a priority for most sites' traffic building strategy, SEO will probably be less and less productive, relative to other kinds of promotional programs. Nor am I saying one should not invest time and effort in applying the basics of solid site and page design, as taught by Shari Thurow, Jill Whalen, and many others, in order that the search crawlers can find all the relevant pages of your site. In fact, I recommend that all site owners apply proven SEO techniques. If you expect to have a successful web business, then this is one of the many things you simply must do. Nor did I say that searcher behavior won't change. Obviously it is evolving, right along with everything else online. It is tempting to hope that users of search engines will somehow become more sophisticated and smarter in their ability to construct key phrases. Unfortunately, there is no data I am aware of that suggests this is likely to happen *to a substantial degree*. The harsh facts show that the typical consumer (that is, about 85% of global web users!) does *not* use the search engines much or at all, for various reasons; and that the minority who do mostly ignore all results except the top-most few, plus the sponsored ads. I am simply predicting that this usage profile of the search engines will not change very much in the next few years. Instead, users will be turning to *other* search tools - ones like directories, where SEO cannot be employed to raise your site's rank. In a parallel trend, I predict that the *typical* user will drift toward search tools that suggest the key phrase combination(s) he or she is looking for. Contextually-based suggestion techniques are already demonstrating this evolution. Nor was my post mainly concerned with the technical defects in search engines and the resulting problems in implementing a *sustainable* SEO-based traffic-building strategy. We can debate the whole deeply flawed concept of crawler-driven search, and the various misleading techniques for ranking results, in some future thread. (And we should explore this admittedly complex area, because, not only are the search engines at serious fault in many areas, but, as Shari Thurow pointed out, the folks who set document and graphical standards are doing little to help make files produced by their tools more easily "findable" by the crawlers.) And, just to be clear, I am not "attacking" or undermining the professional SEO community, at all; rather, simply trying to explain why the art they practice is not now very useful for *most* web-based businesses, and the reasons its utility will decline even further in terms of ROI. But trust me there are *plenty* of web-based businesses with the requisite deep pockets to hire all the thousands of SEOs we have, and at least as many more in the years to come. Nor, Mike Jacobs, did my argument ignore the "localization" of the web that is now proceeding apace, as I hope a careful read of my forst post will show. To the contrary: my prediction of the gradual decline in the "finding share" of the big crawler-based search engines is based in large part on my earlier predictions of the last 2-3 years of the rapid rise in locally-focused online search. Indeed, "local search" is where I have chosen to put my own money, by developing www.Vivante.com as the first truly generalized platform to combine local and "global" website listings in a seamless design. OK, so what was my reasoning, then? My argument in this thread deals with the next 2-5 years of the web's evolution as a tool for building businesses. If you want to have a successful business, you need to make and execute a traffic-generating plan that is realistic over that time-frame. My concern is with finding a realistic strategy for the smaller, locally-focused, and newer businesses, not those who are large or technically advanced. My objective is to help site owners learn which traffic-building techniques will probably yield the best pay-out for their time and money. So here is the reasoning for suggesting that smaller site owners should *not* place too much faith in SEO, in the simplest possible presentation I can think of: 1 3-5 years from now, as today, there will be, globally, 5-8 search engines that dominate in terms of user traffic. Note that I do *not* say which will be on top, as Google presently is, or if there will be a new king of the crawler hill by then. For this argument, it doesn't matter who is the 800 pound gorilla. 2 Then, as today, the number of key phrases that can generate enough visitor interest to, in turn, lead to substantial traffic to the listed sites, will be relative fixed. This is due to the ways people use words. How many ways can one say "golf", or "recipe", or "France"? Of course, there will be new keywords that are popular. And many that are popular today will not be, then. Clever or longer keyword constructions will yield a bit of incremental traffic, too. BUT, sorry, I predict that key phrase expansion is not going to generate LARGE proportions of search traffic for the typical site. 3 A few years from now, as today, the few top-ranked sites will capture the great majority of the click-out traffic. In other words, if your site can't make the upper first page in one or more of the then-dominant 'free' search sites, you will see little traffic from these sites as payback for your SEO efforts. 4 Then, even more than today, the competition for these precious top slots will be fierce, as professional SEO experts battle it out to keep their clients on top of the heap. This ever-increasing competition is *inevitable*, folks, because for every web-based business trying to optimize for a top-ranked position today, there will be at least five by then. And for every qualified SEO expert today, there will be, I am confident, at least 3 more. I hope these points are clear, and that readers will see that they are essentially quantitative, not based on my opinions or yours, or on my (successful) attempts to use SEO, or on yours, nor on the many, many other attempts that have yielded less positive or zero results. Now, let's add to the straightforward statements above a few more hopefully easy-to-understand predictions: 5 3-5 years out, as today, the majority of users will *not* be regularly looking to search engines for help in finding sites. Worse, the heretofore rapid rate of increase in total web users will be trending down, because most people who ever can be online will already be connected. In other words, new sites will not be able to rely on the steady inflow of new higher-speed, English-speaking users, (a temporary phenomenon that was the basis of Google's rapid usage growth, by the way). 6 By 2008, a very substantial portion of search traffic will be going through special interest, locally-focused, or some other type of search tool. *These will generally not be "crawled" engines, so SEO techniques will not have any effect on a site's page position.* Rather, they will be directories, with ranking and visibility based on some combination of PFI or PPC pricing. They *certainly* will not be free, with the possible exception of the valiant survivor DMOZ.org. 7 Thanks to 5 and 6, by roughly 2008, probably 90% of new visitors to the average web site will *not* be coming from the "free" results in the big search engines. The result? About five million webmasters and site owners, assisted by perhaps 5,000 truly expert SEO engineers, will be slugging it out up at the top of the main search engine pages for perhaps less than 10% of the *real* new visitor traffic. The conclusion is hopefully clear to all: for bigger sites or those with big budgets, or those run by true experts in the many complex aspects of this art, SEO *may* still be a cost-effective way to generate visitors. But for the vast majority of the, by then, 5 million or so smaller businesses in North America with websites, SEO, and the entire so-called "natural" search process, will be a bust as far as generating substantial numbers of new visitors is concerned. Hence my seemingly 'negative' statement that, thanks to the inevitability of growth in online business, and the resulting numbers, SEO is not going to be a *cost-effective* option for the vast majority of smaller sites. It really is a simple case of numbers, folks. Smart business people will take them for what they are worth, and make sure they have a dozen or more reliable ways and channels to generate new site visitors. Hopefully, those who misread my analysis and predictions as being pessimistic can now better understand that there was no "crisis of confidence" in my post, just some possibly useful planning advice for those LEDers who hope to be around and succeeding five years from now. By all means, for now, use SEO for all it can do for your specific site or business. But test all other alternatives, and keep on the lookout for other possible tools and promotional channels. For, as Martha Retallick and Shari Thurow say in their different ways, the world of interactive marketing is constantly evolving. There will be new tools three years from now that I and other long-timers in this business cannot foresee. And SEO, too, will be changing, as new competitors assault Google, and as more and more of the vast billions of the world's digital pages become visible to the web spiders. The key idea is that far from advising smaller and newer site owners to "give up", I am encouraging them to find and master every *other* technique they can to generate new visitor traffic. Doing this requires significant elapsed time, and thus these efforts should be your highest priority. David Yancey http://www.vivante.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Salem Kashou Subject: Multiple Domains What is the best way to use alternate domains to build traffic to primary websites? I have many domains that are unused. I wish to build traffic to my primary websites, and my host recommended that I just point them to my main site, but I'm sure there is a better way to these domains indexed and to build traffic as a stand alone. Any suggestions would help. Salem Kashou, Marketing Manager Kangaroo Brands, Inc. www.kangaroobrands.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Human subtelty will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous." - Leonardo DaVinci |
