| LED Digest 2514: Ask an Internet Marketing Expert |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. October 16, 2007 Issue no. 2514 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= <Moderator Comment> ~ Answer Panel on Internet Marketing --== (Virtually) Unblockable Pop-ups? ==-- ~ Chris Nielsen "Put the offer right on your home page or even on every page in your site." --== Placing Links on Client Sites ==-- ~ Grant Crowell "Seasoned SEOs understand the PageRank score in the toolbar is an out-of-date metric..." ~ Alex Hughart "...web development...involves many intersecting and overlapping roles in need of definitions." --== Email Privacy ==-- ~ Adam Boettiger "...I've probably hit upon every keyword I can think of that will trigger homeland security monitoring..." ======== CONTINUING =============================== <Moderator Comment> (Queue easy breezin' sound effect here...) Here that sound? The wind blowing through bright Fall foliage, the whistle of the kettle early on a frosty morning, the air escaping my bicycle tire in the middle of a ride... That's the sound of refreshment, change, and me realizing I have no patch kit. Let's all take a deep breath and visualize the sounds of wind blowing. Okay, ready? Now let's stop talking about placing links on our clients' sites! It's been a great discussion on all sides, and constructive, educational, and entertaining. But now it's maybe getting a little tired, redundant, stupifying, and tedious. Time to move on I think, and there's no end to the topics we can discuss here. (I don't mean to disparage the discussions we've had, it's been a really interesting topic. I'm just sayin' let's give it a breather for awhile.) NEW IDEA - ANSWER PANEL ON INTERNET MARKETING Speaking of moving on... I have a fun idea. Let's have an answer contest of sorts. You can ask the list any question you have about Internet marketing, SEO, paid search, link building, online public relations, social media, email marketing, web analytics, or whatever. Okay to keep them anonymous. What we'll do is collect the best ones into a set of "stumper questions" that I'll give to some LEDers who have the savvy chops of experience marketing online. (I love saying "savvy chops") Just who are these people with the savvy chops? I know a few... but I think this'll be more fun if you appoint yourself. Send me an email if you want a crack at answering some stumpers - you can get a link back and some publicity from this, so why not: Got a stumper related to web marketing or development? Post. Wanna be on the answer team? Send me an email. Now get crackin' on those posts!! -Adam ------------------ From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Pop-ups > Does anyone know where I can buy a program > which will produce a (virtually) unblockable pop up? - Dan Rosenfield, LED Digest 2512 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1924/190/ My advice is don't do things that you can confirm your visitors don't want. Those that block pop-ups don't want pop-ups. If what you want to offer your visitors is so great, why not just make space for it on your site, or build a new site for it? It is true that some people will forget their dislikes when they see an offer, like in a spam email, that they are very interested in. That is unfortunate, since in only encourages bad practices. For myself, the offer would have to be the only one available and something I need before I would take advantage of anything offered via SPAM or a pop-up. Put the offer right on your home page or even on every page in your site. Or put up a link that's easy to see and let people decide to check it out. If it's as good as you think, then the marketing should be really easy. Thank you, Chris Nielsen Technical Nielsen Services ========= Begin Sponsor Message ========= Now you got 'em, what are you gonna do with 'em? Surfers, that is. They're at your site, but is your copy ready? Is it powerful enough to convert casual visitors into free-spending customers? At www.GetWebContent.com/LED we first write "sell" copy that makes you money and your website sticky. Then we SEO it to make sure it gets read. ========== End Sponsor Message ========== -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Grant Crowell Subject: Final post on the homepage backlink saga I would like to thank the additional people for sharing their arguments, and challenging my own, on the practice of web designers putting back links on their client's home pages, which I have said here repeatedly that its a bad strategy which should stop. Since this will my last post on the subject for at least a good while, I'll take the opportunity to better explain my position, which seemed to offended a few: the perceived "PageRank" benefit. > Now, I'll grant you that some links don't help, > but to make a blanket statement that all links > from irrelevant sites are useless is incorrect - Jeremy Weiss, LED Digest 2509 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1921/190/ Take the two criteria of PageRank stated by Google -- popularity and relevance. The client site you've just designed starts with a PageRank of zero. Now, if you were doing a search optimization campaign for the site, AND submitting it to the top search and industry directories (which have their own human editorial review fee), AND you engaged in a strong search optimized press release strategies through the online newswire services, AND you also did some strong online community engagement, it is possible that your client's site could see some decent traffic and linking to it over the next few months. (And along the way, you would have found some much better opportunities to properly include a link to your own site in the process, rather than relying on the client's home page.) But again, your link to the client's home page will be considered by Google's own PageRank criteria as irrelevant. Even the anchor text of "Site designed by..." contains no relevant keywords or other content that relates to the client site. Without the relevancy factor, whatever client-side popularity you could hope to achieve, you will not reap your own rewards from in perceived PageRank. Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, himself has stated an many search marketing conferences that PageRank data is only "1 factor in a 100" in Google's ranking algorithim. Seasoned SEOs understand the PageRank score in the toolbar is an out-of-date metric that is often misconstrued by less experienced SEOs and webmasters. I'm sure many of us get flooded with emails from sites offering a link exchange based on their perceived value of their claimed PageRank -- some which are harmless, others which are outright scams. PageRank is a quick means of getting an idea of how popular a site could be, but the popularity of one site doesn't necessarily match up to the relevancy of yours. A lot of people still forget the relevancy part, which is why PageRank and home page backlinks are given a much greater sense of importance to the less "sexy" data -- such as your website traffic's analytics. I stated in issue 2508: > Search marketers understand that links to your site are > weighed by the search engines for their relevance, and > irrelevant links will at best have no benefit, and at worst > they will hurt your search visibility. Jeremy says: > Google and all the other search engines know that > you can not control who links to you 100% of the time > so to penalize a site based on who links to it would > induce a hole where rankings could be manipulated. Here's what's missing in this analogy: it's not about you not being able to "control" who's linking to you. Remember, you're the one here who is doing the linking! How you're labeling the link and anchor text on the home page ("Site designed by [insert your own web company and backlink here]) is a very clear reference to the search engines of an unnatural, manufactured link that's out of place with the rest of the content on the site's home page. You've just sent up a red flag to the search engines that you plopped it there for the purposes of "link juice," without any regard to the relevancy of the page's core content. For a definite analysis of PageRank by someone who can't be accused of having an agenda, I would recommend reading Danny Sullivan's article, "What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters" at the following URL: http://searchengineland.com/070426-011828.php I'm not anti-PageRank; but I consider it really more a tool for quick-view entertainment purposes. It should not the standard of success for your client's site or your own; and it certainly is not an excuse to put a homepage backlink to your own site on theirs. Concentrate on building quality traffic for your client's sites by keeping the focus on the home page totally on your client, where it most counts. Grant Crowell, CEO Grantastic Designs, Inc. http://www.grantasticdesigns.com -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Alex Hughart Subject: Placing links > First, I would like to see someone define "web > designer". There appears to be a Ms. Conception > that web design is graphics and commercial art. - Al Toman, LED Digest 2512 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1924/190/ If such Ms.Conception ever existed, it's gone by now as so many people already pointed it out, myself included. It became clear in this discussion that web development (I apologize for using "web designer" so loosely in my previous post) involves many intersecting and overlapping roles in need of definitions. At the risk of starting a pointless "chicken or egg" discussion, I would ask who's going to define them? A trade union of some sort, perhaps? Wouldn't that be one of the first tasks of such web industry related entity, however you call it? > Second, the HTML guild is a joke. Pay > your fee and you're a web designer. So, the conclusion is all other guilds are and will be a joke? > Third, Alex's mention of the entertainment industry is > worse then drawing a sword through my gut. So sorry, Al, if I knew you'll get so upset about this, I would never ever mention the "E.I. word". To be fair, it's not all about big stars, big corporations and big copyrights. There are thousands of "little guys" working behind the scene in the entertainment industry (oops, there I go again!) and not all of them have strictly creative jobs. They work their way in, pay dues and enjoy certain benefits like, of all things, health insurance. It's not a perfect system but, learning from their experiences means learning the good side (let's improve it) and the bad (let's avoid it). > All y'all probably do not remember the Kenny Rogers interview > when he said that he cannot believe that for an old man who > can't sing to have 3 mansions each with 5 bathrooms. > Considering then, through self admission, should Mr. Rogers > have entitlement to the "entertainment guild"? Societal problems and injustices are much bigger and go much deeper than some self-admitted lousy singer getting and easy pass in life. Obviously, Mr. Rogers entertained enough people in his career to now be able to afford a mansion or three. Taste cannot be used as a criterion here as one man's art is another man's trash. Lucky for us, design in general, not just web design / development / fill-in-the-blanks, is a utilitarian discipline and, as such, it can be judged by its functionality. Alex Hughart -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Adam Boettiger Subject: Email privacy > ... what guarantee do you have that Google's > indexing engine won't fire off a copy to homeland > security so they can target all your email and other > internet activities for 'observation.' - Marty R. Milette, LED Digest 2511 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1923/190/ ...so what's the plan? Should we all just throw our hands in the air like little girls, cancel our internet accounts, go offline and not take advantage of technology because in the process of trying to protect the population against someone blowing themselves up in a fish market in Seattle we now have technology that is "evil"? What guarantee do you have Marty that you won't walk down the street in London or in an airport in the US and have facial recognition software analyze you and flag you for "observation"? None. Unless you move to a Yurt in the woods in central Oregon. Nobody "likes" that this stuff goes on, but the reality is that Google is not the only ISP that could technically do this. On the internet, nobody knows if you're a dog or a person. That's understood. Like I said in a previous post, nothing sent or received in email is private unless you're using PGP. If you truly want to send eyes-only messages, you should be using PGP or Steganography where messages are hidden in images. Unfortunately, that's the same tactic that terrorists use, so you may still be flagged for "observation". It is very much a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when our politicians are trying to keep the country secure, and it probably will not change until we either get a new administration in the white house or some new technology is created. Even then there will always be privacy issues. Don't misinterpret what I'm saying. I'm in no way anti-privacy. However my desire for complete privacy online, in a transparent medium where it is simply not possible without going offline completely, is far overshadowed by my desire to not be blown up. I do, however, recognize that in the process of defending against an enemy that plays by no rules, it is necessary sometimes to sacrifice a degree of privacy in the name of protection. This is an admittedly gray area and it does concern me deeply that it is happening, but there is evidence that we have terrorists operating in the US for some years now and I think it's only a matter of time before we see the suicide bombers start targeting US cities. When that happens I imagine there will be quite a few people who disagree with your view of what Google is or "may" be doing. There's no hard evidence to support it, only speculation that it is possible. And with this post I've probably hit upon every keyword I can think of that will trigger homeland security monitoring, so a huge hello to the boys in black and thank you for taking the time to read this post! Adam Boettiger Portland, Oregon (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected." - Jonathan Edwards |
