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royhunters
08-04-2009, 09:32 PM
Hello all,

This was a recent article we did in our blog, a "SEO for dummies" type of article.

It is a basic blueprint for SEO of a new website and I just thought I would post it to get some feedback from other SEO experts that we could add to the list.....

Step by Step Instructions to get High Ranking in Search Results


I have written a few articles about the specifics of SEO techniques but I still get a lot of emails from people asking me what all the things they can do to get ranked high in search results. So here is your list, your instructions, on how to get a site well ranked within the first 3 months of its publishing date provided you complete all the things on this list within 6-10 weeks.


1. Verify the code in your page using the W3c validation tool and fix the errors.

2. Optimize your keywords for the most popular keyword terms if you feel you can
compete, if not, optimize for the "mid level" keywords or the ones used some of the time (middle ranked keywords using the Google keyword tool)

3. Create a blog so you have something to submit to Digg, Blog catalog, Technorati, EzineArticles, etc. Wordpress is best for the platform, make sure to use the SEO plugin for Wordpress and fill out all the SEO options for an article. (tags, keywords, descriptions, etc.)

4. Submit a sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yahoo

5. Write another article for your blog.

6. Participate in “dofollow” forums, post comments and questions. Make sure you include links to your website so people and search engines can see you outside your webpage. This creates vital links to your website and DOES help with page rank over time. This is very very important, something you really need to do, and this is the easiest way to do it. I can not stress this enough.

7. Write another article for your blog

8. Build a Squidoo lens for your website

9. Look into a traffic generator service to help boost your Alexa rank

10. Write another article for your blog

11. Submit your website to the DMOZ directory

12. Comment on some blog articles related to your business. Don’t forget to hyperlink your name to your website. Don’t just post an http link, use your first name, or company name and make it an http hyperlink to your website. That is what the search engines will see as a link back to your page.

13. Get all your friends to bookmark your site in Google Bookmarks and in Yahoo's Delicious, at least 20 of them.

14. Write another article for your blog.

15. Promote your website on Twitter and Facebook

16. Write another article for your blog

17. Make sure you have updated all your accounts in Technorati, Digg, Blog Catalog, and EzineArticles

18. Make some more comments in forums

19. Write another article for your blog

20. Pay PRweb for a press release

21. Make sure you get a listing on the Yellowpages website.

22. Write another article for your blog

23. Submit a new sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yahoo

24. Pay Yahoo to be listed in their directory ($299)

25. Invest some time with a Traffic Generator like TrafficGenie

26. Write another article for your blog

27. Build a web page on MerchantCircle

28. Write another article for your blog

29. Submit your website to the ZoomInfo directory

30. Make some more posts in forums

31. Write another article for your blog

32. Submit another sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yahoo

34. Make sure you have updated all your blog submission accounts at Technorati, Blog catalog, Digg, EzineArticles, or any others you have used.


Follow this list to a “T” and in 3 months you will have a well ranked page in the SERP's and make sure you devote at least 4 hours, every two weeks, to one or more of the steps above, writing articles, participating in forums, etc.

____________________________

So what else would everyone add to a crash course SEO step by step list?

cbscreative
08-05-2009, 02:48 PM
First, I can see why vangogh originally deleted this thread. It pushes the limits on what we allow on the forum. Now that we decided to allow it, it could generate some interesting discussion.

I believe you missed a very important step if this is a "step by step" process. I would even say it needs to be in the #1 spot:

#1 Develop a site with good, unique, useful content. All the SEO in the world is will not help a site that won't interest human beings. Make your site for people, not search engines. Only then does the process of SEO begin.

On #4, I disagree. I NEVER submit sites, yet they get crawled and indexed. Google even states in their help files that submitting is not needed and will not necessarily speed up the process. They will usually find you before someone gets to your submission anyway, and yes, Google also states this fact.

On #9, yikes, snake pit! Although there may be legit services, there are also some dangerous scams.

I'll leave room for others to comment. That's what stood out to me, and serves to get the discussion going.

royhunters
08-05-2009, 04:31 PM
Yes of course your number one is assumed before my number #1

Most people do not set out to create spammy sites. Try not to plug in false assumptions here, most people who create a site are business owners and are using the Internet for legitimate marketing purposes. The context of the list makes that intent clear and that is what we need to assume with this, that the reader has already created a decent website for his business.

I will also agree there are a lot of traffic generators that are not legit but there are definitely some that are. It is usually pretty easy to tell which one are and which ones are not. A little common sense dictates this. If a site says it will bring you 1,000,000 hits for $29... It is pretty obvious it is not legit.

Look at those companies that pay you to view web pages, .10 per 30 second view.. It is no different than an Adwords program only the chance of getting a sale are nill but that is not what you expected anyway when using their service. All you want is traffic. You need traffic to get traffic am I right?

royhunters
08-05-2009, 04:40 PM
About the sitemap submission, our site was not indexed by Bing until we submitted a sitemap and the next day we had placement. It also took 2 weeks before our new website was indexed by Google, and the indexing of the site was done 2 days after the sitemap was submitted. If they do not want it, then why even have a place in webmaster tools to submit it? Does it hurt anything? Does it teach a newbie how to access webmaster tools? Does it teach a newbie what a sitemap is and what it is for?

cbscreative
08-05-2009, 10:42 PM
I jumped too quick on the submission point. Submitting a sitemap is not the same as submitting a site. I was referring to the latter, so I should have read more carefully.

On your premise that a good site is already a given, I see your point. I agree that "most" are probably not done with spammy intentions, but I'm not so sure I would call the majority "good" sites. Good intentions, yes, but that does not automatically lead to a good site.

Good sites only happen when the person creating them avoids the temptation to talk about themselves, and figures out in advance what the needs of the visitor are. When you address the needs of the visitor, SEO will be much easier, and more rewarding. Unfortunately, this is not how most sites are created.

vangogh
08-06-2009, 01:29 AM
There are a few things on your list that I don't really agree with and I wouldn't suggest that anyone following it exactly is going to see the same results you are. I don't think there are one size fits all approaches to seo.

First since you've been talking about submitting sitemaps to search engines, I don't think it's necessary. If you've done a good job organizing your content the engines will crawl fine and the xml sitemap isn't necessary. There's no hard in submitting it and it can help get pages indexed that for some reason aren't getting crawled. However I've never submitted one and I don't have problems getting pages indexed.

1. Verify your code - important only to a point. Yes clean code is better than poor code, but as long as you've fixed the major problems that would block crawling I don't think you need to validate every line of your code for search engines. The engines are interested in ranking content and as long as they can find that content they can rank it.

2. The most popular keywords aren't necessarily the best. For example a real estate agent trying to rank for the phrase 'real estate' is mostly a waste of time. It would take a lot of effort and most of the traffic wouldn't be interested. Better to rank for 'real estate Kansas City' which would lead to targeted traffic.

3. Blogs are great - I don't think the point is to use them to submit your content though. You should blog to build relationships with people

6. I'm not so concerned with dofollow. I doubt any link from the comments section of a blog is worth all that much. dofollow is probably better than nofollow, but it's still likely a low quality link

9. Alexa is a useless metric and has 0 to do with seo.

13. I wonder what the search engines would think of that? Yeah sure it would work, though it can also become obvious if the same people and only those people were bookmarking your content

25. Complete waste of time. It's useless traffic that only exists to pad your stats. If your goal is to see nice pretty stats pay me to write a robot that will visit your site as many times as you'd like. Nice pretty stats and 100% useless traffic.

I think people place too much thought and time into trying to manipulate rankings when they'd do better to build a great site and market it well. The secret to search engines is they try to follow what real people like. If you can get real people to visit your site and offer them something worth coming back for while there, the search engines will inevitably follow.

There are a lot of little details to SEO and it's a good idea to learn them if you can, but in the end it still comes down to building a site worth visiting and marketing that site. For example I'd much rather leave an intelligent comment on a blog who's readership is likely to enjoy my blog even if the link has a nofollow added than I would to a random site that doesn't have the nofollow. The individual link might be better on the dofollow blog, but overall the comment will generate much more for my site if it's on the blog where our audiences overlap. And if done well and enough the blogger will likely take notice as well.

The big secret to seo is that you don't always need or even want to make every decision based on what's specifically better for a search engine in that particular case. If you do, you end up chasing your tail a lot.

royhunters
08-06-2009, 09:37 AM
Ok so you are not happy with the traffic generator idea.

Just for grins a giggles I had a look at one I have used in the past that did a great job of generating real leads, bookmarks, and sales, it is the one I mentioned in the post reply that actually paid people to view the adds.

You as the advertiser get to choose who views your ad based on demographics. Age, income level, etc.

The ads are listed like SERP's (only with a photo) the viewer gets to choose from so they choose the content they want to look at.

Ad clicks pay from .01 cent to .10 cents.

I set up a small and campaign just so I can report he stats to the forum. The company is called ClixSense. I chose 400 hits to pay .05 each for a total of $20, with the ClixSense fee of 20% the campaign cost me $24 to get 400 hits on my website to view my services.

As I don't sell anything on my website all I can really report is what shows up in my Statcounter account. Considering we only get about 25 hits a day this will be easy to track. I should see a huge spike in unique visitors if ClixSense does what it says it does.

I have pointed the ad to a page of our website that does not get a lot of hits (event marketing) and I will track the page with rank checker to see if the hits have any affect on its rank in the search results, as well as track it in Google Analytics to see if the campaign has any affect on the stats there. I will be looking at the bounce rate as well as the average time spent on the page to see if anyone actually was interested in my website and had a "look around".

So after the 400 are used up I will report what it did to "pad my stats". I assume this will only take 2 days to deplete the campaign.

What was interesting was who the other companies are that were also using this service. I thought I would list a few:

National Geographic Novica (their online store)
Lending Tree
Net Zero
Lonely planet
Wall street journal
USA today
Forbes
Kodak
Comcast
Wallmart - yes Wall-Mart (their online store)
Vonage
Rossetta stone
Sandals resorts
BMG music
Skype
Rubbermaid
Godaddy.com
Vista Print
Verizon (online store)
Discovery Channel (online store)
Adobe (ad for CS4)
Ebay
Starbucks
Serius radio
Monster.com
Jc whitney

And they were the big companies I am sure all of you know. Obviously if they were not getting sales from this they would not be using the service.

So if this is such a complete waste of time... then why are they doing it? Even if they are not getting any sales they are increasing their Brand Identity and that is always a benefit.

This company, ClixSense, says it has had 11,258,716 million views of ads in the last 30 days and paid out over $650,000.

Considering who is using them I would consider them to be VERY legit.

They even have a section for your enjoyment that has a swimsuit model category and a girl of the day.

How can you possibly call that a complete waste of time???

LOL

The Alexa metric may be worthless to SEO directly, But I don't believe it is.

To clarify that statement: I mean Alexa itself may have nothing to do with getting your page ranked any higher, but the more hits your website receives, the higher it will rank in Alexa. If you are improving in the Alexa rank, you are improving in the rank of the other search engines. Alexa is a simple measure of total traffic.

I mention Alexa in my article because if you use the tool at websitegrader it shows your Alexa rank. Rather than explain to a reader another way of watching your stats such as StatCounter, it is just easier for me me keep the article as simple as possible for the readers sake and considering they are a newbie, Alexa is fine and I am working within the website grader report categories.

The moral of the statement is you need to work on getting traffic to your site to improve your SERP rank. Everything I have seen in the past has shown me the more traffic your site gets the higher it ranks. I am sure all of you agree with that.

Remember, the article is targeted to beginners. It is a great starting point for them to learn the basics of SEO, it gives them something to build on.

One of the biggest challenges you face as a professional marketer understanding the level of thinking of your target audience and putting things into terms your audience can understand. You really need to understand your audience's level of comprehension varies greatly and you have to adapt your strategy to fit that level of comprehension.

If you took a person that has never developed a website in his life, took him to an adobe convention where they were promoting everything in the CS4 suite, that person is not going to have a clue what is going on, what they are talking about, what any of the watercooler chat in the lobby is about, and will walk away with zero understanding of how to use the products or what the hell went on over the weekend.

It would be the same if you took me to a Steven Hawking speech about what happens to matter when it gets absorbed in a black hole!

I have to be able to put this in terms that newbies can understand and follow easily because that is who it is targeted to.

If I was standing in front of Matt Cutts I would use a totally different approach because of his level of understanding.

You have to think at the comprehension level of the people you are addressing in order to make that communication connection. That really is what marketing is all about.

royhunters
08-06-2009, 10:35 AM
OK as of 10:32 am EST that's GMT-4

Here is what Statcounter reported based on my ad with Clixsense

http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/stats.png

I was wrong in thinking this would take 2 days, I think it will be done by noon!

royhunters
08-06-2009, 11:03 AM
So,

based on that graph I paid too much to have my site viewed. Lets say I reduced the price and set up ads for all the pages, paid more for home page clicks and less for the rest, It would be pretty easy to get some sustainable traffic to the site and because I am setting up different ads for different pages I will have repeat visitors.

Is it unnatural? Certainly, Very similar as what you would expect from an email campaign advertising a special. Will I create links because of it? If people like the content, sure.

If I am selling something useful that the average person is interested in will I get sales?

Most likely. Just because of the law of averages. SOMEONE who looks at your site is going to like what you have.

Does it have an SEO benefit? If traffic makes the site rank higher, yes.

Can it help you get traffic until the site gets ranked high enough to get traffic on it's own and possibly get you some sales, bookmarks, new users, in the process?

Most likely. Just because of the law of averages. SOMEONE who looks at your site is going to like what you have.

The ad was also targeted only to users in the United States.

Is it still a snake pit? Is it still a waste of time?

Is a service that gets you unique visitors by forcing them to look at your ad for 30 seconds a "trick"?

For me, a trick implies deception. Maybe it can be a trick to a search engine, but in an advertising campaign it is a tool to get sales and a perfectly legitimate tool you can use to get those sales.

I dont see it as anything different than an Adwords campaign. I am still paying to have my web page looked at.

royhunters
08-06-2009, 11:06 AM
UPDATE:

As of 11:15 I have received all 400 unique visitor hits to the website.

Dam!

vangogh
08-06-2009, 12:51 PM
As I don't sell anything on my website all I can really report is what shows up in my Statcounter account.

My point is that traffic exchange sites don't deliver useful visitors. Your statement above says you can't offer any proof they do. Those sites will deliver traffic which you've showed, but it's empty traffic. The end goal is not to get people to your site. It's to get them to do something on your site. I'll make the same offer as above. Pay me and I'll write a robot that will visit your site as often as you want. I'll even write it so that it can show it came from any other site you want. It'll leave you with nice pretty stats, but my robot won't buy a thing.

As far as all those other sites you say are using the traffic exchange how do you know they are using it? Where is that information coming from?


s a service that gets you unique visitors by forcing them to look at your ad for 30 seconds a "trick"?

Yes. In fact that is the exact problem. You end up with people visiting sites not because they have any interest in the site, but solely to get in their 30 seconds so someone else will visit their site. It's an artificial way to get more people to your site, but it's always the wrong kind of people. It's not people who are likely to be interested in buying something or subscribing to your blog or take some other desired action. It's people looking at their watch so they know when 30 seconds is up.

With Alexa you specifically tied it to seo here. Improving your Alexa rank does not improve your rank in search engines. Improving in one might mean you also improve in the other, but one does not automatically follow from the other.

Alexa rankings are based on a small sample size that includes only those that use the Alexa Toolbar. Not only is that a small sample, it's also a highly weighted (no random) sample of people who are tech savvy. Alexa over reports the traffic to tech related sites and underreports the traffic to non tech related sites.

Your Alexa ranking is also very easy to manipulate. Install the toolbar have a few friends install the toolbar and keep visiting your site. Because of the small sample size Alexa uses just a few people can dramatically change a site's Alexa rank.

Alexa can be useful as a quick measure of trends and to compare sites in similar industries. If you observer a site and see it's Alexa rank is consistently increasing then it probably is gaining more traffic. If you compare two sites on the same topic and one site has a better ranking then it probably is the one that gets more traffic then the two. However you can't compare two sites from two different industries and draw any meaningful conclusions and you can't take any of the numbers with any kind of certainty.

royhunters
08-06-2009, 01:35 PM
Fair enough. We will see the affect on the Alexa rank for the site after the hits in the campaign has populated. I do not agree they only get their info from their toolbar because when we were making a lot of edits and updates to the page and checking how it displayed, how fast it loaded etc. the Alexa rating spiked and we do not have their toolbar.

But like I said, I'll watch it and let you know the result. It is only an indicator of traffic. Thats it, if it was totally worthless then it what would it's value be? You even said it can show you a site is getting traffic or not my point exactly and that ties it to SEO because an increase in traffic gets you an increase in search results.

_______________________

How do I know all those other companies are using this traffic generator? I browsed the ads that were served to me. I clicked some of those ads to re familiarize myself with this system and how it works.

I made $0.45 doing it!

AND I ordered this really cool wood carving of a pod of dolphins from National Geographic to hang in the saloon in my boat for $49.

So tell me it does not work and it can not get you a sale. I know for a FACT it does!:D I also bookmarked it in Delicious.

Am I the only moron that is willing to buy something from National Geographic? I did not know they even had a store. I bookmarked it because they had some really cool stuff on it that I thought would make great Christmas gifts.

Vangogh, You have not even tried it, you have not even looked at the companies that use it, you call me out and ask me how do I know they use it as if I have any reason to lie about it in the first place, yet you have formed an opinion it is total garbage. You have not even looked at the site FFS!

Sign up for an account, pay the $10 to look at the premium ads, look at the companies that are using it, then tell me I am full of BS!

Considering the companies that have ads on it, your statement that it is totally worthless TOTALLY defies logic! It was not worthless for National Geographic!

But I know "what" goes around Boulder so I understand completely!! :p:

Or you have been sniffing your paint again... I suggest watercolors. :p:p:

(I love a good debate)

cbscreative
08-06-2009, 02:12 PM
Did I miss something here? It appears to me that vangogh simply asked a question about how you know these companies use the service you were referring to. I've known VG long enough that I doubt he was accusing you of anything, just asking a question.

I see no reason to call yourself a moron either.

Another important thing to consider with these "big" companies is brand recognition. You bought from National Geographic because you trusted the name. You are naturally more likely to buy this way. I could advertise the same way, but since so comparatively few people know me, I would not get the same results. Every situation is different.

royhunters
08-06-2009, 02:50 PM
I certainly do not take anything Vangogh said as demeaning or degrading in any way, I know this is all in good fun and the spirit of discussion. He is challenging my thinking and I am challenging his! :D That is the beauty of forum discussions and how you learn things.

I love to be proven wrong because that is when I learn the most.

But if you asked my wife about the moron comment, she would agree with me and I "learned" long ago not to disagree with her.

And yes, brand recognition is a powerful thing and they are going to capitalize on that.

But what it does show is a little "faith" if you will, in this type of traffic generation. Because if you look at all the obvious "scam" sites they are loaded with BS ads. This particular site has a human that views and approves your ads. About the only "spam" sites on it are for a lot of those muliti level marketing programs but I am sure they are legit in their own way.

There was an ad for that company that sells the .ws domains. I had seen their program before. It is legit, their software is fantastic for the purpose it was intended, and for $120 a year for the hosting and domain.. they are in line with the likes of godaddy.

In marketing I deal with statistics all the time, direct mail return rates, minimums, maximums, etc. etc. and no matter what you do, if you choose your demographic correctly and target the people you know are most likely to be your customer group you have a MINIMUM return of 3%

Now that could be 3% that generate a lead and then you go into conversion rates, but there is a return.

This site generator is going to work well for products that are targeted to impulse buyers. Selling marketing services is a tough one especially since we operate out of Sarasota Florida and like to keep it local.

So I have no business using the traffic generator to get leads. I have to use it solely for 1 purpose, to generate traffic.

It also has a nice feature for ebay sellers, you can make an ad to correspond with an auction you have running to drive viewers to your auction and hopefully get a bid.

That in itself is a pretty powerful tool for Ebayers.

My whole point to this "debate" with the traffic generators you guys "love" so much is to defend why I put it in the step by step list, show you that not all of them are scams, and that they do have a legitimate use, be it to get leads, sell products, increase auction bids, or get traffic to look at your new website to give it a good initial SEO boost, they are useful.

It is just another tool that has value. Tools are not Garbage.

Organic growth is a good thing and Vangogh favors organic natural puritan growth, but marketing is something that is designed to increase that rate of growth. It takes many shapes and forms, uses various tools, concepts, and ideas to MANIPULATE growth. That is marketing.

This is a tool with a marketing benefit, and it also has an SEO benefet, because SEO IS part of a marketing process.

Without good SEO you are not going to be selling ANYTHING on the internet. SEO comes before the sales do, once you are #1 you really do not need SEO other than a little tweak here and there for Algo changes.

Once you are #1, that is when Brand Identity kicks in.

Harold Mansfield
08-06-2009, 04:18 PM
Sites that use traffic generators are boosting stats to sell ads. They may be legit companies doing it, but there is nothing legitimate about their actions. It is basically fraud.
Of course no one has been called on it yet, but it is straight out fraud to base your rates on visitor stats, and pad those stats with bots.

As far as the Yahoo directory goes. Honestly for $299 they can kiss my a**. I have over 30 sites and there is no way I'm ponying up $300 for each of them to be listed in a directory. I haven't seen or heard the real benefit with the exception of "Possibly" some help in PR.

I have sites listed in DMOZ and it means nothing. No boost in traffic, actually hardly any. No help with PR and the DMOZ is littered with so many junk sites ad dead links now that I hardly see it as credible anymore. "Just because there is a line at the club, doesn't mean the music is any good."

royhunters
08-06-2009, 05:18 PM
I agree the $299 for yahoo directory is a joke but it is a hoop that Yahoo has created for new sites to rank in their search results, or pay the $49 per page to get "express indexing" which I also think is robbery. I despise yahoo because of these tactics but when a a good rank in yahoo is 20% of your sales/leads what do you do?

Pay the money.

1 lead for me is worth 11K converted. So $299 seems to be a small price to pay. Is it blackmail? I think it is. I dont like it, but I have no choice.

Since Dmoz is free I threw it in. Does it have some SEO benefit, I think a little. Just because it is a directory and you get an ok link out of it. Will it get me any sales? Likely not. But I am looking to get a good rank at this point, not sales. The article is about getting rank, not sales.

See, the whole reason for this is to get a newbie involved and get them some results. If you just build a site, publish it, and sit on your hands you are not going to go anywhere.

Doing all this little stuff when it all comes together does push you up in rank, it gets your website out there so someone can find it, this drives traffic, and once you start getting traffic you are on your way. Then you can start to chase qualified leads/sales.

First things first.

Just like the Aussie guy said, SEO is a lot of work! Bloody oath it is!

I am the one who gets asked the questions and has to give the answers and I also have to perform for my clients to justify $150 an hour. My reputation is on the line and people want results. You have to throw a bunch of darts at the board and hope you get a good cumulative score so you can say see, this is what we did and why I charged you 11K to do it.

It is brutal to try to find an affiliate willing to publish content for free or little to no cost, and if I do, I am going to take advantage of it for our site, not a clients.

A link on a PR10 site costs $300 a month! do you think they are just going to give it away? I wish they did.

So honestly, truthfully, what do I do to satisfy a client that wants his new website to rank NOW?

I have no choice but get the tool box out, do as much as I can, as cheap as I can, and get the best results I can with the tools at my disposal.

___________________

PLEASE give me relatively easy, and inexpensive ideas that I can incorporate into the list to make it better without making it a 202 level course. You guys are pro's and this is a brainstorm. Go back to the basics and and give some ideas.

Tell me exactly what to remove that will have ZERO ZERO benefit and I will remove it, but give me a solid concrete reason to remove it.

CBS FYI in the article in the blog I did add a sentence that states "After you have created a good site filled with meaningful and relevant content, these are the next steps you need to take".

cbscreative
08-06-2009, 09:28 PM
CBS FYI in the article in the blog I did add a sentence that states "After you have created a good site filled with meaningful and relevant content, these are the next steps you need to take".

That was a good thing to add, so I'm glad I could help.

vangogh
08-07-2009, 12:36 AM
I do not agree they only get their info from their toolbar

You should read what it says on the Alexa site


Alexa could not exist without the participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the toolbar each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. This information is returned to the community as Related Links, Traffic Rankings and more.

It's possible they also use data collected from Alexa sites, but the overwhelming majority of data comes from the toolbar.


I browsed the ads that were served to me

Could they have been affiliate ads? You also realize that just because someone else is doing it, doesn't mean it's useful?


There was an ad for that company that sells the .ws domains. I had seen their program before. It is legit, their software is fantastic for the purpose it was intended

umm the company that sells .ws domains is one of the biggest scams on the internet. Bet they told you that .ws stands for website too. It stand for West Samoa. The company that sells them is an MLM that tries to convince people that having a .ws domain is a good thing. Yeah, sure. When was the last time someone typed anything.ws into a browser.


I have to use it solely for 1 purpose, to generate traffic.

Again my point is that not all traffic is useful. Traffic itself is not the goal. I'll be happy to send my robot/spider to your site all day if all you want is traffic. It's the quality of traffic you want. And traffic exchanges do not send quality traffic. I'm not saying you can never generate a sale with them either. But they exist to send artificial traffic.

They all basically work on the same premise. You join and visit sites. You might get paid to visit sites or simply be exchanging a visit for a visit. The details might be different with this site, but I'm sure the basic idea is the same. So you get a whole bunch of people visiting sites, not because they have an interest in those sites, but because it's the only way they can either collect some money or get traffic to their own sites.

That is not targeted traffic and that is not a good way to spend your time.


Organic growth is a good thing and Vangogh favors organic natural puritan growth

You should take the time to actually read the things I've said over the years. Me puritan? Hardly. I think you absolutely have to get out there and market yourself and that sometimes you need to be aggressive in your marketing. But even more I think you need to be smart about how you market your business and yourself. Traffic exchanges are not smart. They are a horrible return on your investment.

I'm not an if you build they will come person. I believe very much in having to get your message out there. But again there's a smart way to do it and a not so smart way to do it.

billbenson
08-07-2009, 07:06 AM
I participate on a few webmaster boards and have done so for years. I have seen many posts from people that have purchased traffic. Not once have I seen somebody say that it worked for them. Over and over they say it DOES NOT give targeted traffic and that correlates to money spent for zero profits.

Roy, I think somewhere you said AdWords was the same thing. NO Adwords gives targeted traffic.

Harold Mansfield
08-07-2009, 10:00 AM
I participate on a few webmaster boards and have done so for years. I have seen many posts from people that have purchased traffic. Not once have I seen somebody say that it worked for them. Over and over they say it DOES NOT give targeted traffic and that correlates to money spent for zero profits.

Roy, I think somewhere you said AdWords was the same thing. NO Adwords gives targeted traffic.

Funny, after reading this, I answered an email from a company that targets the same demographic as my music blog and the boasted their monthly visitor stats (they are much bigger than I am) per week.
I responded with my traffic per day and added the term "natural traffic". When she responded she asked what i meant by "natural traffic"..."Did I mean unique visitors ?" and I responded "No, I mean actual returning readers, RSS subscribers, search engine traffic, and link referrals...not traffic generated by bots" and then I asked if all of the traffic that she was boasting was with out the aid of traffic services, and she said she didn't know.
It seems like that would be something that everyone in the company would know without any doubts. Especially the account managers.

A lot of people do it and it sucks. The only reason I know so much about it is because the company I worked with sold traffic and I remember being contacted by companies that I had no idea padded their stats.
They basically buy for a bunch of different sources to mix it up, and then tell you something like "We are the largest (what ever they are) with 100k visitors a day" and of course if you see the stats it all looks legit...different IP addresses and such.

There are people who's job it is , is to search out different traffic providers and keep the numbers up on a certain level and that can keep the stats logs "Legit" looking.

To me it's the biggest advertising scam on the internet and it's got to be addressed soon.

billbenson
08-07-2009, 11:21 AM
Thats interesting eborg. I think the only thing you can do as a webmaster is be as aware as you can of these scams. There are so many traps that it has to be really difficult for most newbies starting with companies like Network Solutions domain squating when the get you to register a domain with them. "Sir, hold please"... A friend abandoned a domain over that one.

vangogh
08-07-2009, 11:22 AM
I think the problem is that too many people see traffic as the end goal when it's not. It's an important part of the process, but it's not the goal in and of itself. Unless that traffic does something it's pretty much useless.

Sadly people, thinking traffic is the end goal, do things to drive any kind of traffic to their site, without considering whether or not that traffic is useful.

royhunters
08-07-2009, 11:35 AM
I am aware of that MLM "scam" as you call it selling the .ws domains. I know the domains were originally targeted to West Samoa but if you check the domain registries like Godaddy they market the .ws as standing for website. This is from Godaddy (.ws An all-purpose Web Site Domain. $14.99) That whole West Samoa thing is pretty much dead except for the 11 West Samoa businesses with a .ws domain. I dont think it was that MLM company that was first to market the "website" term for a .ws domain.

Besides, it is no different than BP marketing their brand in the US as "Better Petroleum" when BP stands for British Petroleum. I guess they figured we would not buy their gas because of a 235 year old grudge???

We have had 1 client with .ws domains he purchased and insisted we used. I think with a lot of the "good" domains in .com gone your are going to see more of these. I am already starting to notice more .info, .me. .biz keyword domains. If you are "West Side Pizza" and you have a .ws Domain and that is what you are marketing on your fliers and ads and people find you, fine with me.

I have seen the MLM program for the .ws domains. The hosting they provided, email accounts, and the software tools they had for newbies were pretty good for what they were intended for, It was $120 a year. Big deal, it got them on the net and it is a great thing to start to teach young kids about internet development. I dont see it as a "scam" because I see the value in it, and I certainly have seen a lot worse. You can get the same thing from Godaddy for the same price and their WYSIWYG tool is absolute garbage.

MLM is just another tool to sell things, it is not always a scam. I dont see Tupperware, Mary Kay, Avon, as companies that are scams.

Bernie Madoff was a scam.

I see a pattern here Vangogh, anything where you get paid to use someone else's product is a scam right? :D

As far as the ads on the traffic generator being affiliate ads... I can not speculate because they are not labeled as such. Fact is, they are there, and in the big corporate world if you are a threat to the integrity of the device (logo, trademark, etc) you are going to have a lot of corporate lawyers banging on your door(especially with Wallmart) and 99.999% of big corporations do not allow affiliate distribution of their ads without their written consent and approval of where the ads are being displayed, you may as well ask God for the 11th commandment, you will have better luck getting it than a letter of placement that has to come from the CMO.. God hears your prayers, this guy wont answer your phone call. :p

So let me ask you this?

How do you determine the value of something unless you have used it and discovered it's value? Have you conducted any research as to what the actual ROI is? Or is it just based on an assumption from your vast marketing experience? I spent the $24 to conduct the research to substantiate what I am saying to the forum.

In Adwords, to bid for page 1 of "search engine optimization" I think the bid is nearly 5 bucks. And just because you get the click, does not mean you get the job. I bet the cost to get a customer at $5 per click is about $75-$100

That is 3,750 to 5,000 (30 second) page views in the traffic generator. That is better than I can get with direct mail!

Now statistically what are the odds that someone will be interested in SEO out of 3,750-5,000 especially when I am targeting the ads to homeowners, with children 13-18, combined income of 75K or more, that are interested in business services, computers, and internet???

Considering what I do for a living Vangogh, it puts me in a pretty good position to evaluate a marketing tool and determine it's value and what to expect the ROI to be.

When you make a statement that implies that I am not able to judge that value you are basically saying I am not smart enough to do it.

If you took the time to understand what I am trying to achieve with this then you would understand the value just like I understand you do not take a puritan approach to SEO.

If your bot can give me traffic, if you have 50,000 different Ip addresses, can hit random pages in my website based on popularity, stay there for longer than 3.8 minutes, click a few adwords ads that it might be interested in, and bookmark my page in delicious and google (in separate accounts of course), then by all means go for it.

You would have just found the greatest SEO tool on the planet.

I checked rank checker this morning, we jumped 5 places over night. The page went from being ranked 58 yesterday to 53 today, and there was a huge spike in our Alexia rank (Your website has an Alexa rank of 2,131,260 which is in the top 7.61 % of all websites.)

So the increase in the search placement has been confirmed by the Alexa increase or visa versa, who cares. The fuel gauge itself has nothing to do with gasoline. It is just a gauge that someone can understand.

So the value I wanted out of the traffic generator service is exactly what I wanted and it worked, I checked our mailbox this morning for the newsletter subscribe results and I had 11 new subscribers.

We are lucky to get 5 a week.

I got all that for $24

That was an EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD ROI for this exercise.

Harold Mansfield
08-07-2009, 01:02 PM
If your bot can give me traffic, if you have 50,000 different Ip addresses, can hit random pages in my website based on popularity, stay there for longer than 3.8 minutes, click a few adwords ads that it might be interested in, and bookmark my page in delicious and google (in separate accounts of course), then by all means go for it.

You would have just found the greatest SEO tool on the planet.

I checked rank checker this morning, we jumped 5 places over night. The page went from being ranked 58 yesterday to 53 today, and there was a huge spike in our Alexia rank (Your website has an Alexa rank of 2,131,260 which is in the top 7.61 % of all websites.)

So the increase in the search placement has been confirmed by the Alexa increase or visa versa, who cares. The fuel gauge itself has nothing to do with gasoline. It is just a gauge that someone can understand.

So the value I wanted out of the traffic generator service is exactly what I wanted and it worked, I checked our mailbox this morning for the newsletter subscribe results and I had 11 new subscribers.

We are lucky to get 5 a week.

I got all that for $24

That was an EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD ROI for this exercise.

But traffic generators are not real people. Bots don't click on ads and if they did, what ever program you have on your site would catch it, especially google adsense.

Bot traffic only works for you if you are selling private advertising and base your rates on your stats.
So it may help your Alexa ranking, but it is a fake increase, not based on the popularity of your site. So for the end user, or buyer of ads, he is getting ripped because your stats are not an actual reflection of real people actually viewing the ad.
So bot traffic is not an SEO tool, it is a black hat method for committing fraud, I don't care how many "reputable" companies do it.

billbenson
08-07-2009, 01:50 PM
Also, if you are paying $5 per click in an adwords campaign, something is really wrong with your campaign. I'll default to Vangogh as to what you should be paying to place in SEO, but for $5 per click, I suspect you are paying your way to the top instead of putting together a good campaign.

vangogh
08-07-2009, 03:59 PM
You're very good at twisting other people's words Roy

The .ws is a scam because it's built on the lie that a .ws domain is just as good as a .com. When I first encountered someone promoting those domains I did some research and found a 50/50 split between people complaining strongly about the company and those working for the company who talked about how wonderful they were. Some of the complaints revolved around people not being able to cancel even after following the company's instructions for canceling to the letter.

As an SEO you should know that domains are important and recommending people get .ws domains is irresponsible. As far as some of the domains like .info and .biz there's indication they don't do as well in search engines, because they tend to be used more by spammers. That doesn't mean just because you use one of those domains you're up to something nefarious, but it seems to be a signal against you. Reputable SEOs will recommend going with the.com .net, .org or country specific TLDs. Sure some people can be successful with a different extension, it's still not going to be recommended.


Besides, it is no different than BP marketing their brand in the US as "Better Petroleum" when BP stands for British Petroleum.

There's a huge difference. BP is rebranding themselves. The .ws domain people are trying to pass off their product as something it is not. It would be like BP selling you gasoline and then filling your tank with tuna fish.


anything where you get paid to use someone else's product is a scam right?

Umm...where did you get that from? Nowhere did I ever say or even indicate I felt that way. Thinking one MLM company is a scam doesn't imply the same thinking apples to all MLM companies. Like I said you're good at twisting people's words.


Have you conducted any research as to what the actual ROI is? Or is it just based on an assumption from your vast marketing experience?

Of the specific company you mentioned no I haven't specifically researched them. I also don't need to jump off the top of the Empire State Building to know it's not good for me.

I've said it a couple of times already, but I'll say it again. The general idea behind traffic exchanges is to reward people with pay or traffic for visiting another site. That is never going to be good traffic. You end up with a network of people visiting each other's sites, not because they have interest in those sites, but in order to get their reward. It's an artificial way to inflate your stats. If all you're interested in is making your stats look good then by all means join a traffic exchange. If you're interested in actually having a successful site and business then you'd be better off avoiding them.


When you make a statement that implies that I am not able to judge that value you are basically saying I am not smart enough to do it.

What I've said implies nothing about your intelligence. I'm talking about a few specific things you've advised, which I don't think are good ideas. That doesn't imply anything beyond what I've said about those specific things.


If your bot can give me traffic, if you have 50,000 different Ip addresses, can hit random pages in my website based on popularity, stay there for longer than 3.8 minutes, click a few adwords ads that it might be interested in, and bookmark my page in delicious and google (in separate accounts of course), then by all means go for it.

You are aware that all of those things can be done programmatically. If you really want to waste your money I'll get you a price. Send me a check and once the funds have cleared I'll develop the program.


So the increase in the search placement has been confirmed by the Alexa increase or visa versa, who cares. The fuel gauge itself has nothing to do with gasoline. It is just a gauge that someone can understand.

Again you're confusing correlation with causation. Here's a different example. You're going to compete in 200 yard dash and naturally to practice you spend time running very fast. You observe that the faster you run the more you sweat. Since running is very tiring you decide why not just work on making yourself sweat more since sweating more and running faster seem to go together. I would it's obvious that sitting in a hot room to sweat more isn't going to make you a faster runner. Improving your Alexa ranking also isn't going to do anything to improve your ranking in search engines. The first does not cause the second.


The page went from being ranked 58 yesterday to 53 today

You are aware that search results fluctuate? It's not uncommon for the rank of the page to change from day to day or even hour to hour. You also realize that different people will see different results based on where they live and their search history?


In Adwords, to bid for page 1 of "search engine optimization" I think the bid is nearly 5 bucks.

Hardly the best phrase to bid on. It's one of the most general phrases for the topic and it's likely that a good many people searching for it aren't interested in hiring someone, but are interested in information. You'd bid on that phrase more as part of a branding campaign in which case you might expect to pay more for that phrase.

AdWords isn't about limiting your bids on keywords to the keywords that are searched for the most. The idea is to discover which keywords actually lead to business, whether that's a sale or a lead or whatever action you want someone to take.


If you took the time to understand what I am trying to achieve with this then you would understand the value

I do understand (or at least think I understand) what you're trying to achieve. You're looking to drive traffic to websites without consideration of the value of that traffic to the site in question. Your goal is the numbers that show in your stats. My goal is helping businesses be successful.

Spider
08-07-2009, 05:03 PM
I have been following this debate with interest - not that I'm likely to use any of the information from either side - but it seems to me there is a misunderstanding here. (Unless, I am the one not understanding - at which I would not be surprised!)

Nonetheless, let me try.

VG and others seem to be saying that the traffic generated by "pay-me-to-look" programs is "no-value" traffic and therefore is a scam.

Roy seems to be saying that this "no-value" traffic is still traffic. While it is of no value itself, it still counts as traffic and will elevate the Alexa ranking, Google page rank and perhaps other rankings. These rankings may not bring business either, and the original "no-value" traffic may bring no business, however, the improved rankings so generated will bring "high-value" traffic.

I understand the "pay-me-to-look" traffic is not to achieve sales but only to improve rankings. The improved rankings will move the target site up the serps to a better position which will bring more and better quality traffic not associated with the "pay-me-to-look" traffic.

The business gain results from the higher serps positioning, which is achieved by the higher traffic, even though the initial traffic is "no-value" traffic.

Did I get it right?

OK. You can tell me to shut up, if you wish.

Harold Mansfield
08-07-2009, 05:23 PM
I have been following this debate with interest - not that I'm likely to use any of the information from either side - but it seems to me there is a misunderstanding here. (Unless, I am the one not understanding - at which I would not be surprised!)

Nonetheless, let me try.

VG and others seem to be saying that the traffic generated by "pay-me-to-look" programs is "no-value" traffic and therefore is a scam.

Roy seems to be saying that this "no-value" traffic is still traffic. While it is of no value itself, it still counts as traffic and will elevate the Alexa ranking, Google page rank and perhaps other rankings. These rankings may not bring business either, and the original "no-value" traffic may bring no business, however, the improved rankings so generated will bring "high-value" traffic.

I understand the "pay-me-to-look" traffic is not to achieve sales but only to improve rankings. The improved rankings will move the target site up the serps to a better position which will bring more and better quality traffic not associated with the "pay-me-to-look" traffic.

The business gain results from the higher serps positioning, which is achieved by the higher traffic, even though the initial traffic is "no-value" traffic.

Did I get it right?

OK. You can tell me to shut up, if you wish.

"Pay me to look" programs are different from bot traffic, although the same result would be achieved. Bot traffic is cheaper.

I'm probably arguing the wrong side of the coin in regards to bot traffic, but I do understand where he is coming from.

vangogh
08-07-2009, 05:27 PM
Frederick that's a good summary. The problem is that pay-me-to-look traffic isn't going to do anything to improve your rankings. If it did I would be the first to say it has value, even if that value were indirect.

Alexa has 0 to do with SEO. Alexa has a toolbar and it uses the toolbar to track what sites people visit and report on which sites gave more traffic. There are problems with how Alexa gathers its data, making it's stats less useful than they appear, but let's assume for a moment that their stats are perfect.

It sill has nothing to do with seo or ranking. Search engines do not rank pages based on how much traffic a site receives. It's generally going to be true that sites that rank well have more search traffic than sites that don't rank well. Naturally if pages of your site are consistently showing up in search results people are going to visit those pages.

However that does not make the reverse true.

If P then Q does not imply that If Q then P is true. Didn't we all learn that in high school or junior high?

Search engines are collecting data about how we search and what sites we visit, but there's little, if any, indication they are using traffic patterns in their ranking algorithms. The problem is those traffic patterns are incredibly easy to manipulate, which would lead to spammy results in the search engines.

The problem here is focusing on improving the reporting, improving the stats in artificial ways that don't ultimately do anything for the site. It's like a teacher wanting to help students understand a topic better. The teacher observes that those who get better grades on tests seem to have a better understanding of the topic. So on future tests the teacher makes the questions easier so everyone gets better grades. The reporting now shows the students are getting better grades so they must be understanding the material better, right? Obviously not. The teacher has just artificially changed the way the reporting is done. Nothing has actually changed with the students understanding of the material.

royhunters
08-07-2009, 05:33 PM
Perhaps I have twisted some of your words out of misunderstanding them, your last post clarified a couple things, I apologize.

Lets get back to basics here.

When you have a website that is new, the first thing you need to do is market that website before that website can market you. You need to get that website in front of a lot of eyes to do that, you need to do what you can to improve its rank in search results and it's popularity because your customers are at the top of that rank, not the bottom.

Is that a fair statement?

So if I have a new website, my first goal should be to market that website, try to get it noticed by as many people as possible so I can find the people who like it. The people who like it will link to it, bookmark it, use it, whatever. Correct?

My goal is to market the website at this moment. I do not care about quality visitors, leads, sales, anything other than finding people who like the website. I want to find these people for only one reason, for them to link to the website because they like it. The more people that do that, the higher the rank will become.

Then when the website has become popular I switch gears I start to look for customers because then I will have a marketing tool with authority and that authority creates sales, revenue, the purpose that site was intended to do.

So to get people to see the website I have to do everything possible to get as many eyes on it as possible. Write blogs, submit those blogs to sites like technorati, blah blah all those wonderful sites filling the search results with garbage because for some really strange reason.. people use them to find information.

I found a link to my website in Norway where the guy translated one of my articles into Norwegian and maintained my link. I got that link because of submitting to those crap sites. Did he buy anything? No. He did what I wanted him to do. Create a link.

My only purpose when dealing with a new website is to increase it's popularity. PERIOD nothing else. I have a lot of rocks at my disposal I can turn over to find those people that like the site.

Squidoo is a rock, I find 2 people under it
Blog catalog is a rock I find 3 people under it
Technorati is a rock, I find 4 people there
Facebook is a rock I find 1 person there
Twitter is a rock I find 4 people there
EzineArticles is a rock I find 2 people there
PRWeb is a rock I find 3 people there
ClixSense is a rock I find 6 people there

So by doing all of those things I found 25 people that gave me the links I wanted. No sales, no leads, no money, NOTHING just links. All I wanted was the links.

So the links boost the site up from 10001 to 58

OK so now I am at 58 what else can I do to get the site to rank higher? Get traffic. I do not care what kind of traffic, as long as it is traffic that Google likes. Be it from your bot or any other bot or some woman sitting there like a zombie clicking ads all day... I dont care.

So then the page goes from 58 to 53 GREAT!

Whats next?

Directories. Pay the directories their ransom. Pay them all, pay yellowpages Quest, All of them because I want the links.

Then the site goes from 53 to 30 because I did all that. Great!

Then during all that time I was still writing blogs, I got more people to like me, I made 5,000 posts in forums, I paid cliKSense another $100 and the next thing I know...

I am ranked #8

Now that I am ranked #8 I have a marketing tool that I can use to market my business and make me some money.

Now I can submit my articles to peer's in the industry, Now I can look for the traffic that is going to get me leads, now I can spend a lot of money on a REAL adwords campaign and get customers.

You can not do that with your website buried at 1001!

A three week old gosling does not lay golden eggs. I need to feed it, water it, grow it and then once it is old enough and big enough it can start to lay those golden eggs.

All those "SEO steps" are designed to market the website. NOT the business.

I do not care one bit, one iota, about getting customers from it. NOT YET. My goal is only to get the site ranked as fast as possible without getting it banned and using every tool under the sun to do that.

Now... I can use a traffic exchange system and throw about $300-$400 over the course of 3 months to get it 20,000 unique visitors (THAT ARE REAL PEOPLE) I get some bookmarks out of it, I get some newsletter sub's out of it, I get some links out of it, I get a boost in the ranks... I'm happy

You are not going to code some bot for $300 and no, if i knew it was a bot, I would not use it. That is where I will draw the line. That is black hat, a legit traffic generator is not. I am paying someone to look at my page the way you pay someone to mow your grass.

My customers come to me for a very short amount of time in most cases. If someone comes to me and says I want you to build me a website that will get me customers, you have 3 months to do it, I will pay you 15K to do it, but I want a tool that will work when it is given back to me...

The race is on. He does not want customers from me, he wants a tool that will get him customers...

Anyway, the traffic generator is not something I usually do. It's pretty rare and I usually will only use one when the type of site is for a service in an extremely difficult segment like attorneys, used cars, etc.

It has a purpose with a benefit when used in the right context.

Try to get a website ranked high for a Law Firm... you will be pulling your nose hair out by the end of that "fun" Lawyers are the worst to work for, and the hardest sites to get ranked. I will not touch a Law Firm website for less than 50K because that is when you REALLY have to use everything that is out there and buy a lot of links to get that site ranked and producing leads.

royhunters
08-07-2009, 05:54 PM
When I made the comment about the cost of clicks for "SEO companies" It was an example of the cost for premium keywords. It had noting to do with any campaign it was an example.

Where I live to get on page one you need to bid over $3.35 for "Tampa SEO companies" the last time I looked. I know all about doing a good Adwords campaign...

Just like I am good are reading more into what was said... So is everyone else. It was only a comparison example.

If you think $5 per click is a lot of money and $75 is a lot to acquire a customer sounds stiff...

Our average cost to acquire a customer for our business is $487 But our average revenue per customer is 11K.

SEO is 20% of my business and at the low end of our service scale. Most of what we do is research, image branding, direct mail, fundraisers, events, print ads, radio, and graphic design.

It is too hard to compete with the guys at home that will build a site for $400 and a lot of our basic development work is farmed out because of it.

Some businesses you need to spend money to make money. $500 to get a customer is pretty reasonable.

Harold Mansfield
08-07-2009, 06:53 PM
Roy I understand where you are coming from on this, but is it a definite that you can still manipulate perceived popularity and gain in the rankings ?

Is there a direct correlation between traffic and placement above lower trafficked sites ?

This is not a new concept, I have heard it before and even when I sold traffic through my old company it was explained to me back then that there are 2 kinds of traffic buyers...those that understand that feeding traffic will eventually result in more SE love based on perceived popularity therefore resulting in an increase in actual visitors..... and those that think buying traffic is buying leads.

It's basically a mathematical manipulation.

Am I on track here ?

royhunters
08-07-2009, 08:20 PM
Yes

I do believe there is a relationship between traffic and your rank in search results when you are competing for keyword placement.

Sites that have a lot of traffic, lots of links, are the most popular and they rank higher because of it.

With a new site, I obviously feel getting traffic of any kind is the goal. With a new site, the concern is not to get traffic that results in sales, but traffic that boosts the popularity; for the sole purpose of getting the site to rank higher.

The money crowd or money traffic is in the top 2 pages of search results. They are the REAL traffic you want.

A new site needs to focus on the traffic that will make the site popular. That is done by writing blog articles and getting links, getting people to view the site, even if they are zombies just looking at it to make 2 cents.

My #1 focus is just getting people to look at a new site, bookmark the site, link to the site. These are people in other cities, other countries, that are never going to be my customers. But I need to get them first because they are crucial to the sites popularity and VERY crucial to the sites rank in search results.

It is the same reason I told Bill what we did with the client who had the plumbing business. The PDF files were there mainly to keep driving traffic to the site. Even if they were not buying anything they have a critical SEO benefit. They keep the site popular, the site ranks well because of it, and because the site ranks well is is a useful marketing tool that can be used to get the customers that pay.

The way I see it, when developing and marketing a website there are two distinct groups of people you need to engage. You need the people that keep the site popular so you can use the site to get the people that will bring you money.

You are not going to get the people that will bring you money if you dont have the people that are going to make your site popular.

You are marketing to two very distinct groups. The SEO steps list is a list on how to get the people that make the site popular.

Once you have that, then there is a whole other list you have to implement to get the customers you want to make money from.

My business is a great example. I only work with clients in Florida. Why on earth would I waste my time and money chasing people in other cities across the country? Because I am trying to win a popularity contest. When I win it, it shows the people here I have authority.

How? Because I am on the first page of search results, I have a website with a TON on information, I will have a forum someday like this one that they can participate in, and that is what will show them we are worth what we are charging.

The more popular we are, the more we can charge. I serve the mid to lower marketing segment. The real $$$$ is in the top mid to small cap companies as they are still more apt to farm their marketing business out rather than bring it in house like many of the big corporations do.

I want the customers that are going to pay me $150,000 for 3 months work, not $20,000.

It is totally impossible for me to get enough people here locally engaged in the website to give it the popularity it needs to have the authority it needs. I have to get them from the rest of the country/world whatever.

If I am going to charge someone 20K for a kick butt website that works and makes them money and they ask me how do they know I can do it... All I have to say is if I can do it for my site I can do it for yours. PERIOD end of argument.

Look at this example... say all you do is SEO... You are the one who says he can get your site to the top.. but his site is ranked #45

Do you think I am going to believe you? The first thing I am going to say to him is if you are so good then why haven't you done it for yourself?

I wrote an article about that.. I did some research on SEO companies and did you know that only 5% of all the SEO companies actually know what to do to get a website ranked well in Google?

I was blown away by the information we discovered. It showed how big of a scam SEO really is... you think a .ws domain is a scam... the biggest scam I have ever seen is 95% of all the SEO companies in the US.

SEO is a very very very tough service that a lot of companies really have no business providing.

The one reason I like this forum so much is I see the upper level SEO thinking here... and that is really really rare.

When I read the forum from searchengine watch and I am amazed at all the link dropping that goes on and how many of those "SEO's" really dont get it. That site will have 125 posts about a topic and 95% of them will just say YUP!

I could start a topic and say the best domain to register is a .ws and I'll get 200 of them agreeing with me!

Sure there are some good SEO's on there like Aaron from SeoBook and Danny Sullivan but it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

That forum reflects my research perfectly. 95% clueless, 5% right on the money... In My opinion of course. :D

royhunters
08-07-2009, 08:30 PM
Just to add.... I am not talking about bot traffic, the traffic generator I am using is NOT a bot. I did get "real" people response from that exercise.

I actually set up another campaign and I have reached their saturation point, the hits to the website has really dropped because the ads are only served 1 ad per person... so this definitely is not a bot. They seem to have about 700 active daily users and now I am getting about 10 hits per hour residual. Its a nice curve in Google Analytics, we received 9 more subs to the newsletter today from this.

It is working and doing what I want it to do, my placement results have come up today across the board for all 10 pages and keywords.

It's also interesting that even though the ad view is only for 30 seconds, the average time on the site is 1 min 37 seconds so some people are having a look around.

I honestly did not expect it to be this good.

Harold Mansfield
08-07-2009, 09:07 PM
Yes

I do believe there is a relationship between traffic and your rank in search results when you are competing for keyword placement.

Sites that have a lot of traffic, lots of links, are the most popular and they rank higher because of it.

With a new site, I obviously feel getting traffic of any kind is the goal. With a new site, the concern is not to get traffic that results in sales, but traffic that boosts the popularity; for the sole purpose of getting the site to rank higher.

The money crowd or money traffic is in the top 2 pages of search results. They are the REAL traffic you want.

A new site needs to focus on the traffic that will make the site popular. That is done by writing blog articles and getting links, getting people to view the site, even if they are zombies just looking at it to make 2 cents.

I get that. And I have heard it before from SEO pro's that told me "The first thing you need to do is get some traffic flowing through the site" but they never elaborated.

After actually selling traffic to people who's only questions were about unique IP's in a 24 hr period, and the use of iframes or proxies, it kind of started to dawn on me what the real purpose was over a period of time.
It's kind of the same concept as having a line outside of a nightclub.

My question is, is this still an effective method to mathematically enhance your perception to the SE bots ?

billbenson
08-07-2009, 09:13 PM
Roy, most of those links are going to be from sites irrelevant to yours. One of the basics of seo is to get on topic links. If you have a site on lawnboy lawnmowers and get links from irrelevant forums, sites about acne medication etc., that is going to make you more spammy in the eyes of Google as well confuse Google to what your site is about. You don't want those links. They will hurt you and lower your ranking for search terms that "good" visitors will use.

You say you market to newbies. It's easy for you to show your results to them and have then thinking that you did a great job, when in reality, you have done irreparable harm to their site. Google doesn't easily forget the past.

Dan Furman
08-07-2009, 10:13 PM
So honestly, truthfully, what do I do to satisfy a client that wants his new website to rank NOW?

You tell them it's prettymuch impossible, and then you help them with their adwords campaign.

I mean, that's the real answer, isn't it?

royhunters
08-07-2009, 10:16 PM
Bill

I have a marketing company, my website is relevant for EVERY website, and every company.

If the guy who owns a lawn mowing company writes an article in his blog and says what a good job we did for him and links to our company will Google ignore all my text and keywords and think I am in the lawn mowing business?

That defies logic. I am sure Matt Cutts is smarter than that.

OK Here is another one, we get a link from the local magazine when we run an ad with them. Is Google going to think I sell magazines?

When our business gets a local review from the business critic and gives us a link what do you call that?

Organic destruction???

Are we forever going to confuse Google every time a client links to us?

Matt Cuts said in a blog that Google determines the value placed on a link. They know when it is from a farm, a directory, a relevant page, an irrelevant page and assesses value accordingly.

The more links you have from similar, relevant sites only affects your page rank value not your web page popularity. There is a big difference there in what is going on. The more links I get from other marketing companies determines the page rank I get from google. PR2 PR4 PR6 etc.

One of the neat little things we do as a developer is put a link to our company at the bottom of a clients page. This is a pretty common practice. A lot of developers do that. Are those bad links?

There is a discussion on searchengine watch on testimonials and how powerful they are at getting links. Aaron from SEO book made a comment about it, so did Danny Sullivan. No one said you need to make sure you only get a link from a site that is relevant to yours or you will be hurting your sites rank in search results.

royhunters
08-07-2009, 10:38 PM
I think if I told them it was impossible they would walk out the door. Google is not going to create a situation where it is impossible, if so, then we all should just give up and never create another website again. The only thing that will be left are social sites promoting our businesses because we would never be able to have our own independent site again.

If the only way you can be seen is by creating an adwords campaign then we are back to a 100% paid placement model that can not exist because the bid price for keywords would be so high the system would collapse.

Someday we are going to have a semantic search engine that will allow searches to be so specific I will be able to say "list the Chinese restaurants on main street in Sarasota Florida" and get every answer I am looking for and nothing else.

The search on my Garmin is better than the search in Google for local businesses. LOL

billbenson
08-07-2009, 10:50 PM
Sorry, Roy. What you are doing is irrelevant and unnatural linking. At best it does you no good whatsoever. At worst it gets you banned. In particular, what you are doing may give a large amount of irrelevant links all of a sudden. Nope MC isn't stupid. He know sites like this don't grow links that way. It sets off flags at Google. You may see a short term gain, but long term it will certainly do irreparable harm.

Dan Furman
08-07-2009, 11:07 PM
I think if I told them it was impossible they would walk out the door.

But, assuming competitive keywords (and what isn't competitive these days?) it is prettymuch impossible to rank right away, right? (ETA - I'm assuming Google / Yahoo, which is really the only game.)

The rest is really irrelevant to my point.

Harold Mansfield
08-07-2009, 11:23 PM
I think if I told them it was impossible they would walk out the door. Google is not going to create a situation where it is impossible, if so, then we all should just give up and never create another website again. The only thing that will be left are social sites promoting our businesses because we would never be able to have our own independent site again.

If the only way you can be seen is by creating an adwords campaign then we are back to a 100% paid placement model that can not exist because the bid price for keywords would be so high the system would collapse.

Someday we are going to have a semantic search engine that will allow searches to be so specific I will be able to say "list the Chinese restaurants on main street in Sarasota Florida" and get every answer I am looking for and nothing else.

The search on my Garmin is better than the search in Google for local businesses. LOL

Everyone wants to rank now. That's not a big surprise. But part of being good at what you do is to give people realistic expectations and telling them the truth.
some people don't want to hear the truth...that they have been ignoring their web presence for so long, that now it will take some real work and man hours just to catch up to their competitors, let along past them.

It's a drive though society, people really think everything can be had immediately..especially when they have no clue about how the web works.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 02:12 AM
You are certainly entitled to your opinion Bill.

Any call to action marketing campaign creates an instant spike of return from the campaign. Call to action campaigns are the most common campaigns in marketing. Immediate response for a specified time.

Run an ad in the paper, 50% off this weekend only, for two days your sales spike, then return to the level before the sale.

chart it. Do it again in a month, another spike, do it again in two weeks, another spike.

What does the chart look like?

Thats advertising. Nothing unusual. Do it with an adwords campaign, sales rise until your ad budget is exhausted.

The topic is SEO I am not going to get off topic and teach you about marketing and advertising strategies.

It is not unnatural linking if a human has done it by CHOICE because they liked it. I put it in their face by advertising it. I did not make them "buy" it.

I did not buy a single link, I did not use a bot. I did not spam a mailbox.

I could do the exact same thing with a direct mail campaign and do nothing but send a postcard to 100,000 people and only type 1 thing on the card. My company URL. Someone will enter it, look at it, like it, link to it.

Because they think it has value.

ANY link you get for free was done because someone saw value in it, the ad campaign put it front of 1000000 people in one day. Just like a full page ad in the New York times would do the exact same thing.

Thats Marketing! That is natural customer getting link building whatever you want to call it, like it or not.

Optimizing your website is all about doing everything you can to win a popularity contest without using spam tactics to do it. I put the site in front of people that looked at it By choice.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 02:22 AM
Dan your statement is true depending on your budget. If you want to be #1 for any search term if you spend enough money marketing your website you will be #1. When Google got ahold of plaxo it shot up in popularity so fast it was amazing...

The result of deep pockets.

billbenson
08-08-2009, 02:35 AM
Roy, you are trying to manipulate your G ranking by what they consider to be black hat and spam tactics. It doesn't matter how you justify it, it only matters how google perceives it. Rapid increases in links, links from sites considered to be questionable, links from unrelated sites will all hurt you. Google will perceive it as you trying to manipulate rankings. They don't like it period.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 02:40 AM
Eborg9

I dont lie to my clients. I get their site and do things to win the popularity contest to get the site ranked higher so it can capture the customers they want.

I use marketing and advertising to do that.

You said it right in your post, they have been ignoring their web presense for so long... what does that translate into?? It translates into: They have not been marketing their website. Sooo they hire me to do it.

I tell them I need 3 months minimum. Then I go win the popularity contest. Then I set up the adwords campaign, do a few banner placements, give them some sponsorship oportunities with the events and fundraisers we do, print their domain name on beer cups for the events which is free just for buying the cups, and in 3 monts their website is producing again.

I set up a mexican restaurant with a travel section on their website so they could get visitors interested in traveling to mexico viewing that site just to build the traffic. The restaurant also had a recipe page and got traffic from that as well. The site had good national traffic, ranked #1 in 4 months locally, followed up with a direct mail campaign, sent out 8,000 menu's and the place was PACKED 7 days a week for 3 months until we sent out another run of Menu's to do it all over again.

That is what I get paid to do.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 03:08 AM
Bill, who said the sites were questionable? Links from unrelated sites do not hurt you.

As I said before, I am a marketing company, I am related to ANY business. If you are a SEO you are related to any business. If you are a printer you are related to any business, if you are a plumber you are related to any business, if you are a carpet cleaner you are related to any business, if you are a painter you are related to any business...

If I have a link to a painter because he did a good job on my office and I want to tell the wold about him I am going to hurt his business?

That statement defies logic!

If Google is that screwed up and can not figure that out then you better by stock in Microsoft because Bing is going to blow them out of the water.

Google wants you to build a site for people and people like to talk about and share what they like. That is natural human behavior.

Like I am going to have a website that has nothing but links to to other marketing companies... Yeah Right

I have over 3000 links on my website right now right here: Florida Marketing Consultants - Business development (http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/links.html)

Go look. I have not been banned. I am not classed as a link farm. If your statement was true then why am I still in the SERPS and have over 100 pages indexed with them????

royhunters
08-08-2009, 11:44 AM
Bill,

I had a check this morning for my sites placement in the search results. Using the keywords: Sarasota Marketing Consultants which is primarily how we are found, Using the steps in the article, today we occupy #1,#2,#4,#8,#9 of the search results.

So either Google has made a mistake or the steps work. This new domain name has only been online a bit over 4 months, has a page rank of Zero, 74 inbound links, 4 delicious bookmarks and is competing extremely well in a very tough category.

According to Google we are playing by the rules.

billbenson
08-08-2009, 12:40 PM
Google wants you to build a site for people and people like to talk about and share what they like. That is natural human behavior.
No, Google wants to give results relevant to the searchers query. They aren't a networking site. Someone types in Tampa Marketing, they don't want to hear about mexican restaurants. And they certainly don't want to hear about acne medication.



I have over 3000 links on my website right now
Got an error when all of the outgoing links were clicked on outgoing links from your links page. What are they for anyway? Outgoing links to foreign counties have little to do with marketing in Florida. 3000 miscoded outgoing won't do you any good. In fact, 3000 outgoing links to foriegn countries do zero good for your site anyway. But then your premise is quick results through garbage incoming links.

Curious how you were bragging about incoming links and all of a sudden change to outgoing link?


Using the steps in the article, today we occupy #1,#2,#4,#8,#9 of the search results.

You show up 3 which isn't bad. The other pages you show up on are things like superpages which is not a google SERP result. As usual,you are twisting things to look much better than they are. For a Tampa search you are near the bottom of the top 100. Still not bad. Mind you local searches are much easier to place for. You have only a couple of sites to compete with for Sarasota, the rest are directories or national companies geo targeting. And I'm in sarasota,so google is likely to give better results than somone in GA.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 02:22 PM
I am not in the superpages listing. Blog Catalog, Linkedin, Marchantcircle, are not part of superpages.

I'm glad to see it made it to number 3 this afternoon, it was 4 this morning. So between MerchantCircle and my actual website I hold #1 #2 and #3 Bolg Catalog and Linked in gives me #8 and #9

I'll take that.

I have other pages optimized for other search terms for Tampa. If you look how the website is designed I have 10 landing pages optimized for different services, keywords and terms.

I dont care how they find me or through what affiliate. I did not pay for any of those listings, it was all free.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 02:24 PM
The links pages are not working because I am working on an update

royhunters
08-08-2009, 03:10 PM
There you go Bill go have a look now the update is finished. Dont forget to refresh the page!

All those links have everything to do with marketing in Florida. If you are a business in Florida and you are developing markets in the rest of the country and world you need information how to do that. That is what the links are for.

Those links also get me links. The links I get from it increases my sites popularity, that popularity gets me ranked higher in the SERP's, getting ranked higher in the SERP's gets me clients.

H2 states "This page contains a categorized list of links to information related, and essential to, business and marketing development."

I guess you didn't see that.

__________

I will take 74 incoming (what you call garbage links) any day Bill.

Just curious, how do you know they are garbage? The site ranks well, gets me business, they must not be too bad.

I guess if your customers link to your page you'd consider that a garbage link? I guess if they linked to a PDF on your site you would not want that traffic?

Am I correct it that assumption?

Do you send out a newsletter and ask them to remove all links to your website so they do not hurt your rank in the SERP's?

Good SEO is getting links that increase your sites popularity, popularity increases the rank in search results, an increase in search results rank gets you customers.

I am sorry you do not agree with my steps on how to do that, but that really is a strategy that works. My rank in the SERPs for a 4 month old domain proves that.

Now that the site is ranking so well I am going to get a lot higher quality links from here on out, most likely from PageRanked pages. In 6 months time the links I have now will be totally irrelevant.

So if your competitor does what I did, he is going to leave you in the dust.

Didn't you say you did not rank very well when competing with their pages?

Maybe there is something you can take from this. But that is your choice. All I have to say is good luck. I hope your method works better than mine and I honestly do wish you and your business the best of success.

Dan Furman
08-08-2009, 05:27 PM
Dan your statement is true depending on your budget. If you want to be #1 for any search term if you spend enough money marketing your website you will be #1. When Google got ahold of plaxo it shot up in popularity so fast it was amazing...

The result of deep pockets.

So do you tell your clients that? I mean, if someone wants to rank right now, but doesn't have deep pockets (as most won't), what do you tell them? Answer honestly.

Because so far, from what I've read, I gather the answer is no, you wouldn't quite tell them that, for fear of losing them.

royhunters
08-08-2009, 06:50 PM
I inform then I do not have a "switch" I can turn on and make their page rank overnight. I will tell them I need a minimum of 3 months to do it.

What I charge depends on the amount of work they are willing to do and how much free time I have. A lot of my work is seasonal because of where I live. A lot of business here really slow down in the summer when all the snowbirds go back north. That usually leaves me with a lot of time for pet projects.

The most time consuming part of the process is writing the articles. The rest of it is pretty easy. If I can get them to commit to writing an article once a week it really simplifies things. If dont need to hire a copyright then that saves A LOT of money. I can also omit the yahoo submission to the directory and save them $300 and just focus on the services that are available for free.

So assume you come to me with your website, the first thing I'll do is look at it in domain tools SEO editor. It's a handy tool that allows me to see the structure of the page in text so I can see how all the images and links are labeled. Then I'll check it with the W3c validation tool.

If the site was professionally done and it is pretty clean there is not a lot I have to do other than optimize for keywords. I can usually do that in a couple hours. If the site is really bad then I'll spend a day with it.

If they are really broke and just want a basic site and do not have one already, I can churn out something in a template in an hour or two that is pretty clean and in Strict DTD that validates.

If it does not have a blog then I will set up the wordpress platform, get with their ISP and set up a MySQL database and get that configured, about 4 hours time. Usually we end up hosting their account. I have a premium hosting account at Godaddy that I use for all the basic page clients so it is pretty easy for me to just go in and set up the database. Point, click, done.

Then I will set up a hotmail account that is a catchall for all the services I sign up for, blog catalog, merchant circle, etc.

Setting up all the accounts takes about a day.

And that's it for the most part other than the updates to everything, I can do all of that in the evenings or between calls whatever.

At the 2 month mark I will spend a day with it checking the rank of everything tweak a few keywords here and there, see what keywords have been used the most to find the site, maybe do a $50 adwords campaign to see what keywords are working the best for the ads...

Then at three months have another final look at everything, see where the page ranks, check the traffic numbers and that is pretty much about it.

Depending on the clean up work I'll do that on the side for 3k. If they really want it to rank well I need another month so 4K.

Most struggling businesses can swing that. If I see they are really doing it tough then I will go out of my way to help them, there is a lot of work I do that I don't get paid for. I feel you have to give back to the community sometimes so I do a lot of "charity" work when things are slow. The make up for that is some big 50K job for a Law Firm that balances it all out.

I also get to eat at a lot of restaurants for free. :D

I have not had anyone complain about a project taking 3 months after I explain why I need that time. The only complaint I get is when I hound them for articles.

billbenson
08-08-2009, 10:27 PM
Half the outgoing links are 404's, the rest are linklists
None I clicked on are related to your site
Outgoing links to unrelated sites do you no good anyway.
What are these. recip links that we all know is asking for a ban?
Your incoming links are off topic

No SEO professional or decent webmaster will do or advocate these sort of things.

You are taking peoples money from the unknowing for services that you know don't work and may get them a ban down the road.

royhunters
08-09-2009, 12:47 AM
Which half of the links dont work Bill, the ones to the Harvard Library or the Yale Library? Or was it the ones to the United Nations world economic reports? Let me know, I'll give them a call Monday.

I wish they were reciprical links, I'd have a page rank of 50 if they were! :D

Im sure out of 3000 a couple of them might have expired. But HALF??? I just looked at about 200 of them today, they all worked.

Really Bill, Half?

Bill, marketing companies do this thing called marketing research. It requires a lot of heavy reading. Those links are part of our marketing research library. You have no concept how much that information is worth to someone who understands it. In the marketing world, that information is platinum! It is the biggest directory of it's kind on the internet and free for anyone to use, all they have to do is link to it or bookmark it.

Other marketing companies link to us because we have that information on our site. It took a very long time to compile that list and believe me, they understand what that info is worth.

That list is our "company PDF" files that people link to, they get us traffic, the traffic makes us more popular, so we rank higher in the search results. That is a good SEO tactic. It is our value proposition.

You would refer to it as "link bait" I'm sure.

Did you happen to see that metatag in the code that said "nofollow" so their affect on the site is inert. Google has been instructed to index the page "which it has" but do not follow the links. That way we do not get any crawler errors or fry the poor thing when it comes to visit.

royhunters
08-09-2009, 01:09 PM
Bill,

Did you happen to see that article where a 14 year old ranked #1 for the search term "make money online"

He has 60,000 links to his website and a PageRank of 4

And he did it with a blog.

It does not matter if they are relevant links or not. To get ranked in Google you need links. Not from link farms but just plain old links.

Here is the article: Carl Ocab: 14-Year Old Ranks #1 in Google for “Make Money Online” : Make Money Online with Rosalind Gardner (http://www.netprofitstoday.com/blog/carl-ocab-14-year-old-ranks-1-in-google-for-make-money-online/)

links = popularity, popularity = high rank in search results.

billbenson
08-09-2009, 02:33 PM
garbage in == garbage out

cbscreative
08-10-2009, 11:59 AM
The problem here is focusing on improving the reporting, improving the stats in artificial ways that don't ultimately do anything for the site. It's like a teacher wanting to help students understand a topic better. The teacher observes that those who get better grades on tests seem to have a better understanding of the topic. So on future tests the teacher makes the questions easier so everyone gets better grades. The reporting now shows the students are getting better grades so they must be understanding the material better, right? Obviously not. The teacher has just artificially changed the way the reporting is done. Nothing has actually changed with the students understanding of the material.

Wow, vangogh, you just summed up our education system.

royhunters
08-10-2009, 02:40 PM
Bill

The whole point I am trying to make with this is a new site needs traffic to rank better.

I agree the traffic example I have shown here is not good traffic, the best traffic, qualified traffic, but it is traffic.

The whole point to having a website is to be seen so you can do business but you are not going to be seen by the people who want to do business with you if you page is at the bottom of the search results.

All the steps are designed to build traffic, qualified or not, that traffic is essential to the site being seen by the people you want to see it. once you get to a point where you have qualified traffic, the steps in the list have served their purpose and are no longer required.

Then you can build on the fact you have quality traffic, more quality sites are more apt to link to yours, more quality sites are willing to post your articles, and then you can focus on getting some page rank to build your authority.

The reason my steps work is because Google has allowed them to work. Google really seems to endorse all these social sites, if it didn't it would not have purchased Plaxo.

They have defined what works. I have taken that definition and made it work. they have given high ranks to these blog and social site obviously because they like them, they get money from them, if they didn't like them you would not be able to find them in the search results.

In the business world everyone has to eat. If you feed me, I am going to feed you. It happens at the grass root level, I get to eat free at restaurants in exchange for services, google gives Blog Catalog and merchant circle high ranks because they get money from them. Google has a commitment to their shareholders to grow the company and drive revenue. They do not have any moral obligations. They can conduct the orchestra the way they see fit because they have no competition.

So I feed these sites and Google rewards my company with high rank. Right or wrong, quality or crap, that is just the way it is.

I am going to take that opportunity and make it work for me and my clients because in the end, I am going to make money and so are they.

To have a narrow minded approach to marketing gets you nowhere. You have to be creative and use the tools at your disposal.

We have been getting junk mail in our boxes for years, yep garbage in and garbage out... but that garbage has a payout, a return on investment, if it didn't you would not get junk mail.

But we tolerate it and dont think much of it because that is the way it has been for a long long time.

My steps are no different, they are "junk mail" but that junk mail has a return, that return accomplishes what I want it to accomplish so I can move to the next level.

Nothing I do is going to get me banned or penalized because I am not spamming anyone.

Everything I do is at the viewers choice. They choose to read it, they choose to bookmark it. I am not stuffing email boxes, creating pop-ups, or doing anything annoying to the people that view my website.

If you do not like the way people are doing things, well too bad. But the people that are doing those things are ending up ranking very high in the search results, they are making money, they are being seen by the traffic that wants to find what they have to offer.

Just like that 14 year old... If people were not interested in making money online the search term for it would not exist and he would not have 60,000 links to his site. SOMEONE is interested in what that kid is doing and has to say and that is just fine for him and the people that want to view that "garbage" as you call it.

If people who rank at the top do not have what the customer wants then they will go out of business and disappear. If they are in the top 10, have been in the top ten for quite some time... they are making money.

You said it yourself, your competition ranks higher than you do. I can see why. But that is your choice. You let them rank higher than you.

royhunters
08-10-2009, 03:02 PM
I also find it interesting that you do not like what I have to say or the way I do things but you are very interested in reading my posts. If you weren't, you would not reply to them.

billbenson
08-10-2009, 04:59 PM
You said it yourself, your competition ranks higher than you do. I can see why. But that is your choice. You let them rank higher than you.
I never said that and they don't for the better keywords.


Nothing I do is going to get me banned or penalized because I am not spamming anyone.

You are trying to falsely manipulate your placement in SERPS which Google doesn't like. You may get a short term bump in the rankings but long term it will hurt you. Most good webmasters would prefer one good on topic content link from from a site Google likes than 1000 junk off topic links.

As to the article on the kid. Thats on a useless get rich quick site. Is that the sort of place you go to develop your strategies?

royhunters
08-10-2009, 05:50 PM
No Bill, it is not, it is an example.

Those garbage links that kid has gives him a PageRank of 4.

So in Google's eyes, it is an authority site.

Regardless if you think the site has any value, it is an authority. Your personal opinion of a websites content is beside the point. If it was something you were interested in I am sure your view would change.

The web was not created to satisfy your interests.

vangogh
08-10-2009, 07:33 PM
Roy, a few pages back I was going to give you some credit, but your posts since then keep drawing so many conclusions from unrelated things. You talk well, but so many of your underlying assumptions are simply wrong.

Let me start from a place where we both agree.


authority creates sales, revenue

I'd amend that a little to also say "authority and trust create..." I think you'll agree with that, but if not let me know.

From that statement we both go in two different directions. My thoughts on becoming an authority (and be trusted) is to actually become an authority on your topic (and earn people's trust). From what you've been saying in this thread, your thought seems to be to fake authority because it's necessary to rank.

Let's look at some of the points you've made throughout this thread:


I do believe there is a relationship between traffic and your rank in search results when you are competing for keyword placement.

Your belief does not make the above true. I think it's safe to say Google is collecting traffic data and I'll even go so far as to say if they can think of a way to use that data for ranking they will. To date there is little to no indication that they are doing this. As a ranking signal traffic patterns are not very good. They are incredibly easy to manipulate and they are difficult to analyze. If you have proof that search engines will improve the rank of your pages because your site gets more eyeballs to it then do share. If not please stop making this assertion. Just because you believe something it doesn't make it true.

Traffic can help you indirectly in the sense that more people absorbing your content could lead to more people later linking to it. However most people who come across your site will never link to it. It's a certain kind of person that links to content. It's people with websites, with blogs. It's people who are publishing content. It's not everyone and so getting eyeballs to your page without consideration for who the people are behind those eyeballs is not an intelligent strategy.

You also keep asserting that traffic leads to a site being popular. Umm...not necessarily. First it has to be a good site worth coming back to and telling other people about. Just because you can get people to a site once, doesn't mean they are coming back again. And the more artificial you are in getting that first visit, the less likely people are going to come back again.


I have a marketing company, my website is relevant for EVERY website, and every company.

No it isn't. You don't serve every possible company and website there is. If you honestly think you do then you need to go back to marketing 101 and learn how to identify what a market is. It's not everyone.


One of the neat little things we do as a developer is put a link to our company at the bottom of a clients page. This is a pretty common practice. A lot of developers do that. Are those bad links?

No, but you do realize search engines have been discounting site wide footer links for years. Their value is at best minimal. I too will add that link if a client is ok with it, but it's not being done for search engines. It's more a way to let people who like one of my designs know who created it. Will the link help? Probably. I don't see where it hurts. But it's hardly part of any kind of seo strategy.

By the way do you ask your clients if you can place that link or do you just add it? Why do I get the feeling your clients are getting that link whether they want it or not.


I had a check this morning for my sites placement in the search results. Using the keywords: Sarasota Marketing Consultants which is primarily how we are found, Using the steps in the article, today we occupy #1,#2,#4,#8,#9 of the search results.

You do realize that phrase is not competitive. Without quotes Google shows 93,400 results, which is not a lot. With quotes (a more accurate way to determine your competition) Google shows 23 results. If I published a post on my blog tomorrow with the page title Sarasota Marketing Consultants there's a good chance that post would rank top 10 by the end of the day and probably #1 after pointing a couple links at it.

Don't mistake ranking for a less than competitive phrase as the same thing as ranking for a competitive phrase.

Since we're on the subject, and it goes to the point of authority, you may have noticed that I changed the title of this thread to match the one you use on your blog post with the same content. I did that about noon on Saturday and within 3 hours this thread was outranking your original post. Sounds like an indication that Google doesn't see much authority in your site.


That list is our "company PDF" files that people link to, they get us traffic, the traffic makes us more popular, so we rank higher in the search results. That is a good SEO tactic. It is our value proposition.

You would refer to it as "link bait" I'm sure.

Did you happen to see that metatag in the code that said "nofollow" so their affect on the site is inert. Google has been instructed to index the page "which it has" but do not follow the links. That way we do not get any crawler errors or fry the poor thing when it comes to visit.

So you're spending time attracting links to a page and then telling Google not to follow the links out of the page. Great way to waste all the link juice of that page. You do understand that the general point of linkbait is to attract links to a page so you can then redirect the flow of the link juice to the other pages of your site?


Google really seems to endorse all these social sites, if it didn't it would not have purchased Plaxo.

Again you're drawing a conclusion based on belief as opposed to fact. Buying Plaxo is not an endorsement for a link from another social sites. There could be many reasons why Google bought Plaxo, the most likely being they want the site or they want the technology behind the site. Your conclusion is speculation based on what you want to be true.


My steps are no different, they are "junk mail"

Great way to build authority and trust. Aren't you admitting right here admitting you're no different from the people who fill our inboxes with spam?

A number of times throughout this thread you've indicated you think that the way to win is to get more links. One good link will carry more weight than hundreds if not thousands of low quality links. There's nothing wrong with acquiring low quality links. It's natural for sites to have more low quality than high quality links pointing into a site. A good SEO is going to spend more time working to acquire high quality links though. The low quality ones will come naturally and are simple to get. They don't require much in the way of effort.

Let's get back to authority. You made a claim earlier about wanting $150,000 clients instead of $20,000 clients. With that much money flowing into your business, why so much AdSense ads on your site? Are those extra pennies really that important to your business? At $150,000 a client, one person leaving your site through an ad would cost you more than you'll likely get from AdSense over the lifetime of your site.

The first post you made to this forum was this one, which was to copy and paste an article from your own site. That's generally considered a sign of forum spam and is one reason I originally deleted the thread. Hardly something that would create an opinion of authority about yourself.

You claim to know seo very well. Why so many basic errors on your site? Why no use of redirection from non www to www or from index.html back to the root. Why no use of permalinks on your blog?

Also with the blog why didn't you develop a theme to match your site and why don't you link back from the blog to the main site. I take it the blog exists to help drive leads to your business, but there's no connection between blog and site. Someone landing on your blog (the more likely place to build links and get visitors) wouldn't have any way to find your main site.

Understand that a lot of things you've said here regarding certain tactics are fine and make sense. However your basic strategy behind those tactics seems flawed and you seem to take a myopic view to seo and marketing. A few pages back you talked about seeing a pattern with me. I see one with you as well. The pattern of someone trying to pass themselves off as an authority where it's not deserved. Instead of trying to convince people what an expert you are, why not take the time to actually become an expert.

royhunters
08-11-2009, 12:41 AM
Vangogh,

You said the link juice will not flow to the rest of my site but it does. The landing page (directory) is tagged “index,follow”, the pages that contain the actual links are tagged “index,nofollow” This way I get the juice and the search tool still works. If you label the pages “noindex,nofollow” the search tool will not function because it only works on indexed pages.

Don’t you agree that is the best way to set that up? Maybe you saw the page during the update where I had “index,nofollow tag until I was able to verify all the links pages.

This statement should really get the conversation moving…. :D

I have read an article from an SEO where he believes the adsense ads also helps ranking in search results. I am not even going to say one way or another if it does, but the first page we put adsense ads on was the Internet marketing page, only for the client example. If you read that page you will understand what I am talking about. I did not read that SEO article until after those ads were in place, and they were only on that page.

Odd thing is, that is the page that Google ranked the most often and the highest, not the index. It seemed to also ignore the keyword density. Even after we changed the keywords of the page it still ranked higher. When using rank checker and comparing the keyword search terms, bing ranks the index page that was optimized for those search terms where google ranks the adsense.html page for the same keywords, less density +adsense.

I also un-optimised that link name from internet-marketing.html to adsense.html and it still ranks higher. I am trying to understand why but as of yet, I think their might be some truth to what this guy said in his blog.

But I figured if I brought that theory up in my posts you really would have fallen out of your chair! So it is just a research project at this point to see what happens the next time the site is indexed so we can see what happens to the pages the latest adsense ads were added to just to test this guys opinion out. We also really reduced some of the keyword density to compare results from previous versions.

We also added ads to see if it has any affect on the blog and forum. It is proving to be a rather interesting experiment. Just like yours with changing the topic name, (which does not surprise me at all considering it is coming from smallbusiness.net) I like to play around with different things to see what happens.

I am also getting some interesting information from monitoring the ad channels. Which ad size and type work the best, which ad type pays the highest, those square banners pay between $2.18 to $3.80 a click! Those pennies you mention added up to a very nice dinner last month.

I will agree to disagree with you over the traffic issue. This is not the only site I follow to keep up with the pulse. There are a lot more people in the SEO world that do agree traffic has a direct effect than not. Seems reffered traffic may carry a different weight as well. It is of the assumption that because Goodle does not rank a site high enough in organic results, the traffic from affiliates shows Google what it is missing.

That is an interesting concept. All the traffic I drove to my site was referred. But I really do not know one way or another but it is something to think about.

I also have never said a good link was worth less than a thousand crap ones, it most certainly is worth more. Please make sure you read that again. That was the drum you and bill were beating and I never disagreed with that statement. My point was traffic, the effect of that traffic and a poor quality link is better than no link at all. But Bill seems to think it is better to have no link so I had to show Bill what a bunch of poor quality links can do.

Answer this for me please, I come to you with a website that is 2 months old, I ask you for a link. You have a page rank of 6. Are you going to give it to me and just let the juice flow?

Most likely not. But if so, if you have any page rank, then post a link to my website on your page and show me how easy it is to get a good link.

Continued in next post……….

royhunters
08-11-2009, 12:42 AM
Lets take a restaurant owner that knows nothing about SEO or websites, ask him what DTD is and he just looks at you like your speaking Chinese. Is he going to be able to get a high quality link to his website on his own?

Most likely not.

So then what do you do? Buy one? Buy two? Is that natural? So what is plan b? If I took all the websites that come through my door, they all want quality links from day one, I will be chasing my tail. The less valuable links are easy to get. Sometimes you have to pick the low fruit on the tree. You have to start somewhere! That low fruit pays off and that was my point.

Everything I have experienced has shown me traffic helps your rank. A lot of what I have read from other SEO’s has also confirmed this. Perhaps the result of that traffic is low quality links, perhaps it is bookmarks, I don’t know the exact effect nor does anyone else. Do you know for a fact Google does not look at the data they collect on your website visits or their bookmark site for popularity? Could that have an effect? Logically it would. You need to plug some common sense into the factor. A bookmark is a vote of sorts. It is a link.

Why do they mine this information? They create a bookmark site just because they want to do something nice? Not likely, it is a waste of resources.

Why does Yahoo have delicious? It’s all about data mining and there is a reason they are mining all that data.

Since the little traffic example, the keyword search term “florida marketing consultans” which is our toughest, where the site ranked 58 now ranks 50. Look at how competitive that search term is. 2,430,000 (I occupy #5 and #6 #14 #20 from Linkedin, dig, and Merchant Circle and I didn’t have to SEO anything for those)

The site jumped from 39 to 23 for the search term “florida marketing companies” Seems a little odd all this happens after I drive 600 visitors to the site intentionally. They had an effect on something, the site was not indexed during that experiment.

So how about we just leave it at “your guess is as good as mine” and call it done? Deal? You don’t know for sure, I am going off sloppy research results and a bunch of other SEO’s so unless someone from Google wants to give their 2 cents worth, lets call it a truce. My tactic certainly has not hurt and despite what Bill says, there is no proof it will.

My blog does have a link to the main site, in the top header bar, and if you remember correctly I did mention to you about a new theme for wordpress. I have only had wordpress for a month to try it out, we were not sure if we wanted to keep wordpress or use something else.

By all means if you want to give me a quote for a new theme plugin, be my guest. I don’t feel like pulling my hair out developing one. You like wordpress…. You can send your quote and email address in our contact form on my page.

I will say thank you, I am glad you brought the 301 to my attention, We just moved the site last week to an apache server with a dedicated IP when we got the SSL cert, and it sure would have helped if I did not save the .htaccess file with a .txt extension!!! I thought you were really nutts there for a second when I looked at the .htaccess file and there was the following code:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mymarketingcompany.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

I am sure you agree that no one REALLY understands SEO completely, it is a very subjective. I also agree to being very myopic with this topic because I am focusing on the first 3-4 months of a websites existence. So I need to be very myopic so I can stay on topic.

I said in my posts that I agree with what you said about looking for the quality links, I agree with the fact that the low hanging fruit is not the best but it gets you to where you can reach the higher fruit. Hopefully we are clear on that.

Your comment about spamming… when I was talking about junk mail I was referring to the kind your postman brings you every day. You know, the stuff that is made out of paper and was spam before email spam.

People seem to forget about the “old marketing days” of paper spam and adsense ads all over newspaper web pages but no one complained because that is just the way it was. Nothing really has changed, we just do it digitally now. The technique is still the same.

I do not cross the Google line with the technique but marketing is still marketing. You get what you pay for. The things with the highest return are the most expensive and hardest to achieve (your method) but that does not mean you ignore the things with the lowest return, they are priced accordingly. All of it together is called your marketing mix. Right now and for most people, the poor quality are all they really have access to. Would you or would you not agree with that? People are broke.

I think perhaps the biggest difference in our opinions is, your approach to SEO is just to make Google happy and to make a website that over time will get the high fruit. There is nothing wrong with that if you have the patience and ability to do that. Most small business owners do not have that time to do it, or money to pay you to do it, or patience to wait for you to do it.

You said a good SEO will take the time to get good links. Notice your keyword TIME!

I have to look at SEO from a marketers approach. I need something NOW that is going to produce SOME fruit NOW because that is all I hear from everyone NOW, NOW, NOW.

My long term strategy is still the same as yours and still gets to the same place, just a lot faster in the beginning, due to customer demand, by implementing a marketers approach to SEO versus a programmers approach to SEO. People want results NOW, programmers say “you can have it when I am ready to give it to you”.

The marketing departments never get along with the IT departments and they never will. Programming is not marketing and marketing is not programming. That is our difference.

Google bought plaxo for two reasons, to serve ads, and to get information. They did not need the code behind the page. That’s like me saying I bought a computer just because I needed a hard drive. To my knowledge there is no patent Google had to obtain as a reason to buy that platform. They had the money, they wanted the data.

And yes, Google gets a lot of money from cites like merchant circle and that is why they rank so well and this I know as a FACT and if I did not have a confidentiality agreement around my neck I would tell you some very interesting details that Bill could argue with all day.

You seem smart enough to figure it out yourself when you see how the pages of those sites rank. They do not rank like that on Bing.
So I will not tell you how to write wordpress plugins and I would appreciate you not telling me my marketing experience is not up to scratch. My new site is easy to find and ranks very well for it’s age in some very competitive terms.

I look forward to your quote.

vangogh
08-11-2009, 03:21 AM
You said the link juice will not flow to the rest of my site but it does.

If I was in error my apologies, but I based what I said on two things. Your own statement that the page in question was nofollowing all links in the meta tag and that fact that I observed the source code of the page showing that it was. I see you've now changed it, no doubt as a result of my comments above. You're welcome for the free advice. Please don't pretend it's been that way all this time since my own eyes and your own admission indicate otherwise.


I have read an article from an SEO where he believes the adsense ads also helps ranking in search results.

C'mon, you don't actually believe that do you? Again stop pretending there's any reason other than you're hoping people will click those ads for placing AdSense on every page of your site. Now there's nothing wrong with using AdSense, but no company looking to do contracts in the 5 or 6 figures would ever have AdSense on their site.


I will agree to disagree with you over the traffic issue. This is not the only site I follow to keep up with the pulse. There are a lot more people in the SEO world that do agree traffic has a direct effect than not. Seems reffered traffic may carry a different weight as well. It is of the assumption that because Goodle does not rank a site high enough in organic results, the traffic from affiliates shows Google what it is missing.

You can disagree all you want. Most SEOs do not think traffic leads to better ranking. The debate is over certain traffic metrics. Some have argued that Google is looking at things like bounce rates as a ranking signal. The theory would suggest that Google is tracking when people leave their results and measuring if people come right back and maybe how long they stayed on the site in question. No one has offered anything in the way of proof to this. It's mostly been speculation than many have discounted for a variety of reasons.

Here's a good post on behavioral metrics (http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/The-final-word-on-bounce-rates-as-a-ranking-signal.html) showing why they aren't a good signal for ranking.

If the traffic you're taking about is referral traffic then it means there's a link pointing into your site. The link is more likely leading to better ranking than any number of people visiting your site through the link. Another example where you're drawing the wrong conclusion.


I also have never said a good link was worth less than a thousand crap ones

I never meant to say you did. Perhaps my choice of words wasn't the best above. What I was trying to say is that your seo tactics seem to be about chasing after as many links as possible regardless of their quality. I don't have anything against getting low quality links. Most links will not be the best. I do consider it a poor use of time since you can probably get enough high quality links to outweigh the low quality ones in a similar amount of time.


Answer this for me please, I come to you with a website that is 2 months old, I ask you for a link. You have a page rank of 6. Are you going to give it to me and just let the juice flow?

I link to web pages that I think people reading my blog will find useful or interesting or entertaining. If I think my readers will find value in the page I will link to it. How old the page or site is or what the PageRank of the page is, never enter into my decision. I don't see any reason why they should.

Looks like my full post exceeds the maximum character limit so I'll break it to match where you broke your two posts. Stay tuned.

vangogh
08-11-2009, 03:22 AM
I'm back. Did you miss me? Bet you didn't even have time to notice I was gone. Back to the debate.


Lets take a restaurant owner that knows nothing about SEO or websites, ask him what DTD is and he just looks at you like your speaking Chinese. Is he going to be able to get a high quality link to his website on his own?

I don't necessarily expect that person to know how to get links. It doesn't follow though, that because that person isn't an SEO expert that you working for him should chase after bad links. You seem to be saying that because the client isn't an SEO expert it makes it harder for you to get links. I would think part of your job is to help educate the client anyway.


Do you know for a fact Google does not look at the data they collect on your website visits or their bookmark site for popularity?

I haven't said they don't. What I've said is not to assume they are just because you want to believe they are. I've also said that I do think they are collecting that data and that it makes for a poor signal when it comes to determining rank. The data you're talking about is easy to manipulate. Anyone can create multiple profiles and bookmark sites for example. It's also not that hard to grab a community like the traffic exchange sites you suggest and get them all to visit each other's sites. It's not a good signal.


Why do they mine this information?

For the data. It does tell them a lot about their customers. That doesn't mean it finds its way into ranking algorithms. I want to know what sites all my readers visit too. It's valuable information. Again you're drawing conclusions where none can be drawn.


Since the little traffic example, the keyword search term “florida marketing consultans” which is our toughest, where the site ranked 58 now ranks 50. Look at how competitive that search term is. 2,430,000 (I occupy #5 and #6 #14 #20 from Linkedin, dig, and Merchant Circle and I didn’t have to SEO anything for those)

One more time you don't measure your competition by the general search. When you search for florida marketing consultants the results are returned that contain any of those words. The results your seeing aren't for the phrase. The better way to determine your true competition is to wrap the phrase in quotes. The reason being that anyone who's attempting to rank for that phrase would use that exact phrase somewhere on the page.

When you wrap quotes around "florida marketing consultants" you get 62 results. At least that's why I'm seeing here. Hardly the competitive phrase you think it is.

For comparison search the phrase "added value hosting" Somewhere around #25 you'll see results for YellowHouseHosting. That was my old domain. It hasn't been up for over a year, though apparently I left an orphaned page on the old domain with no links pointing to it and it's still ranking for the phrase. There were 150,000 results showing for the phrase with quotes. A bit more than 62 wouldn't you say. Oddly enough when I took the quotes off a page from my new site ranks around #20. I suspect it's because one of the YellowHouseHosting URLs is being redirected to it. I've made no attempt to rank the page on my new domain, but there it is.


My blog does have a link to the main site, in the top header bar

Your header links back to the home page of the blog, not the main site.


I will say thank you, I am glad you brought the 301 to my attention

You're welcome. It's easy to miss things when you move.


I am sure you agree that no one REALLY understands SEO completely, it is a very subjective

It's not as subjective as you think. I would agree that no one knows with absolute certainty how the search engine algorithms work. That doesn't mean seo is subjective. A lot of very smart people spend a good amount of time testing. Many of them apply a scientific method to the tests. The issue is that in most (maybe even all cases) they can't trust their results with 100% certainty due to all the factors they can't control. However, statistically speaking you don't need to be 100% certain to act on those results.

Yes there will always be some guesswork in seo, but that doesn't make seo subjective.


Your comment about spamming… when I was talking about junk mail I was referring to the kind your postman brings you every day. You know, the stuff that is made out of paper and was spam before email spam.

My bad if I misunderstood.


The things with the highest return are the most expensive and hardest to achieve

No. The things with the highest return are the things with the highest return.

ROI = return over investment

If R = 3 and I - 1 then ROI = 3/1 or 3
If R = 10 and I = 5 then ROI = 10/5 or 2

The first has the higher return and also happens to require the least investment.


I think perhaps the biggest difference in our opinions is, your approach to SEO is just to make Google happy and to make a website that over time will get the high fruit.

I actually ignore Google most of the time. I want to understand them as best as I can in order to make more informed decisions, but I don't go out of my way to please them. In fact I do some things they would specifically say not to do because it helps my business. Frankly I don't care what Google does or doesn't want me to do. I try to do what I think will best benefit my site and business.


You said a good SEO will take the time to get good links

No. I said a good SEO will spend more of his or her time trying to acquire good links. The time is in comparison to the time spent trying to acquire poor links. I didn't say how long either of type of link would take to acquire.


I have to look at SEO from a marketers approach

If that were true we wouldn't be having this conversation. Remember you started this thread about instructions for seo and you've defending using worthless marketing like traffic exchanges because you said they help with seo.


The marketing departments never get along with the IT departments and they never will. Programming is not marketing and marketing is not programming. That is our difference.

I take it the implication is you're the marketer and I'm the programmer. You do see that SEO in my domain and company name don't you? I'm hardly the IT department here.


I would appreciate you not telling me my marketing experience is not up to scratch. My new site is easy to find and ranks very well for it’s age in some very competitive terms.

I'm not trying to tell you you're marketing experience is not up to scratch. I simply want to make sure that people reading this thread understand that many of the tactics described in it won't work as advertised. I'm glad your new site ranks well for its age, though, I disagree the phrases you've mentioned are competitive.

My apologies if you see my posts as an attack on you in any way or questioning your skills. You started this thread telling anyone reading:


Follow this list to a “T” and in 3 months you will have a well ranked page in the SERP's and make sure you devote at least 4 hours, every two weeks, to one or more of the steps above, writing articles, participating in forums, etc.

I disagree. This may sound strange but I actually care about the people reading this thread and every thread on the forum. I realize not every piece of advice given here is going to be right, but I do want to try my best to give the best information I can personally and that the forum gives our as a whole. The goal of this forum is to help small business owners as best we can. As part of that if I see someone say something I disagree with I'm going to point it out and I'm going to point out why.

When someone sees something I say that they disagree with I hope they too will point it out and point out why they disagree. In that way we can offer different points of view to anyone who happens to be reading or participating in the discussion. Those people are then free to choose what advice they want to listen to.

In this thread I suspect some people reading will be glad to try any or all of the things you've suggested. If they do I wish them well and hope they have success. I also suspect some people will follow my advice and try any or all of the things I've suggested. If they do I wish them well and hope they have success.

royhunters
08-11-2009, 11:53 AM
See I told you that you would fall out of your chair when I mentioned that adsense comment. Of course I do not agree with that article but I am going to test it regardless of what you think and I am collecting a lot of good data on the adsense ads.

Is there a problem with that? Really?

No I did not fix any page after I read your post. Having that page "index,follow" is pretty obvious as the way to set that up. Like you said "a basic mistake". Regardless of what or when is it right now? Did you have to mention how to do it or did it just happen to be set up the way it should be out of thin air?

The blog, well I was thinking about it more after the post and I think I am just going to leave it the way it is, we are only a couple months away from Google Wave so I think I want to replace the bolg with a wave client. Until I see what API's are being produced for making wave work inside blogs or what new blog platforms are created I am not going to mess with it, 3 months is not going to kill me to have it the way it is.

If you would like to create a simple plugin to be able to fix some of the things you would like to see different in the classic theme I am sure you and the rest of the wordpress community would be grateful.

Back to the list................

How about this Vangogh,

How about you create a step by step list that can be used for the first 3-4 months of the pages existence.

I am serious about this. Ante up!

Lets see if it shares anything in common.

Then we will take the best of my page and the best of your page and come up with one final list that BOTH of us agree on.

I would really like to see what you would come up with since you disagree with my list I think it only fair to show us yours.

Criteria - has to be simple that most small business owners can do on their own having only basic web page skills. You have to keep it at a 101 level. A step that goes too far outside the realm of 80% of people being able to figure out gets cut.

What is the old saying??? Put up or shut up???? LOL :D You care so much about the readers then lets go Vangogh Ante up.

vangogh
08-11-2009, 12:21 PM
There's nothing wrong with testing AdSense. However it doesn't make sense to test it on a site where you're hoping to land very large clients and it doesn't make sense to test it on pages where you're trying to sell your services.


No I did not fix any page after I read your post.

Considering earlier in this thread you yourself said the page in question was nofollowing all links out of the page and considering that's what the code showed when I wrote my post above I would suggest you fixed the page sometime after my post. Perhaps you did so without having seen my post.


The blog, well I was thinking about it more after the post and I think I am just going to leave it the way it is, we are only a couple months away from Google Wave so I think I want to replace the bolg with a wave client.

To each his own.


How about you create a step by step list that can be used for the first 3-4 months of the pages existence.

There is no such thing as a step by step list anyone can follow. Recipes don't work when it comes to marketing. Business have different business models, different target markets, and different brand associations. What works for one site doesn't necessarily work for another.

If you want to know what I think a business should do in its first few months you can read some of the several thousand posts I've already written here and the thousands more I've written elsewhere. Creating a step by step list isn't a worthwhile activity.

Here are some general things a business should do not necessarily in any specific order

1. Create a site that is truly valuable
2. Figure out who your market is
3. Build a presence in places where your market spends its time
4. Learn basic seo principles in order to make more informed decisions
5. Study your market and competition to understand what your market wants and your competition isn't delivering

That's not a recipe, but again a recipe isn't going to work. Marketing and seo is not about do x, y, and z and these results will follow exactly.

royhunters
08-11-2009, 01:25 PM
I agree whole heatedly with your principles. Some of them pose some very difficult barriers though. The case with restaurants. It is very hard to define where your target market spends it time because your target market can not be defined. If you are a very upscale restaurant it becomes easier, but just an average restaurant... It is far to difficult.

Same thing for basic services. How does a painter define his market?

It would be nice if you can contribute a list of the most common steps you would take with any business that comes to you with a website and wants you to do some SEO, your general steps for the code etc.

You said in some posts the keywords are important right? Ok there is a step.

Cant you summarize a general process based on what steps would be the most productive that cross over to any website?

Also, with a new site waiting out the google's ageing delay, do you believe it is a good idea to ride on the back of all those sites I mentioned to get placement. Merchant circle etc. As well as using tose sites to get traffic.

Regardless of your previous posts, here is a topic board on the steps to get a page ranked so lets make this simple for the future readers and summarize your tips here......

Lets extend the time frame to 6 months, and lets change the context to the Top 25 tips to SEO your website.

If you care about the readers then lets produce a summary list of SEO tips they can run with. We can take that list and rename the thread, erase the garbage and give them something really valuable they can print and begin to work on.

vangogh
08-11-2009, 05:26 PM
You're right about defining a market not being an easy thing. I won't say it's impossible though. It may seem like you can't define it, but you usually can. I'll go with your restaurant example. Right off the bat your restaurant is going to serve a certain kind of food. That helps define it immediately. For the sake of argument let's say it's a Mexican restaurant. Also your location defines the market. People will travel a good distance for an upscale restaurant. They will only travel so far from home for the average restaurant.

Sticking with the Mexican food you've eliminated all those people who don't like Mexican food. You can also choose to server very spicy, medium spicy, or low to no spicy food. As a customer I've always preferred the medium spicy. As I've gotten older my taste buds still agree, but my body usually objects so I have to go low to no spicy.

Your restaurant could create the spiciest food around and thus appeal to all those people who really want their Mexican food spicy. You could the other end and offer very little spice to people like me or perhaps to families with kids. You could go after a market that wants real authentic Mexican food. You could go after a market that likes to be entertained and have a Mariachi band playing every night. In that case the food may not be as important as the atmosphere. You could go after a different crowd who's more interested in your tequila and sangria.

I know when I first started in business and someone told me to figure out my market I was a bit lost. It seemed like my market was anyone who wanted a website, which wasn't much of a definition. I knew I didn't want to work with large corporations so my market was refined a bit to small business. Still too large. Over time and after working with a few clients I further refined things more to micro-businesses and even to certain kind of micro-businesses. The kind where when my client calls we're just as likely to talk about general stuff as we are about their websites.

A few years later I started working more and more with WordPress in part to serve my market. Because of its open source nature and the development community around it I could offer my clients more than they could get by having something custom developed.

When I saw my market as everyone there wasn't much to differentiate me from everyone else. As I define my market more I'm able to do more to appeal to a smaller group of people, but to those people I become a better choice than others designer/developers. I'm sure over the years I'll continue to refine my market and continue to tailor my services toward a more specific group.

I think it seems impossible at first to figure out who your market is, but if you start with some definition and keep refining it you'll find your way.

With the restaurant maybe they ask their customers to fill out a survey. They could offer a coupon or a free meal in exchange for the survey results. They could and should continue to offer different surveys from time to time. Ask some basic demographic information. Ask questions to help them decide what meals are preferred. Leave an open ended box for suggestions. Observe what days are the busiest, the emptiest. Which foods sell more on which nights.

As far as summarizing SEO I've done that in a bunch of places already. Here are a few:

How to approach SEO (http://www.small-business-forum.net/search-engine-optimization/7-how-approach-search-engine-optimization.html) - One of the first threads on this forum

An Introduction To Search Engine Optimization (http://outdoorbloggerssummit.com/2008/01/blog-master-class-an-introduction-to-search-engine-optimization.html) - Something I wrote for Kristine's (one of the admins here) blog about a year and a half ago.
On-Page SEO (http://outdoorbloggerssummit.com/2008/02/blog-master-class-on-page-seo.html) - A follow up to the post above

The latter two posts above were written for a very newbie audience in regards to SEO and blogging.

The posts above aren't in list format, but hopefully they'll suffice for now. I've also written a 6? part tutorial on my own blog, but it's quite a few years old now and probably dated. I've been meaning to update the series for awhile, but never seem to get to it. I'll make a note to try and get to it sooner rather than later, though I won't make any promises.

royhunters
08-11-2009, 05:43 PM
Your comment on the Mexican restaurant brings to mind a few vertical and horizontal issues that can be killers. They are more marketing related than SEO but my thoughts are that you need to be very careful not to limit your customer base.

Do you remember Casa Bonita in Denver, not sure if it is still there but they had that amazing entertainment but the food was really bad. I think it closed or changed hands because even the entertainment was not worth eating their food for.

I like the mariachi idea, good way to market that is "mariachi Friday" not all people are going to like that noise so keep it to one day a week for the people that do. You do not want to drive anyone away.

When I lived in Australia there was this Turkish restaurant that had belly dancers on Saturday. I was sold. Food was great, so were the bellies.

I am working on a revision to the list you may find more palatable and perhaps it will get some better constructive involvement that this thread has.

If you would be so kind to split the thread when I post it and delete the current one I think we could really do some good with the new concept and keep people from getting confused.

Have you seen that Google wave platform? It is all open source. It is really really going to be a fantastic thing to have. it is a very disruptive technology. I think there would be some good opportunities for you with it.

royhunters
08-11-2009, 06:33 PM
Here is a list of 25 tips to get your website ranked higher in search results.

Perhaps we could have a forum debate as to what should be removed and added to the list.

I have left the last two items out on purpose to get input from the members of the forum.

When the article is finished I would like the URL's of members websites that have contributed to the creation of the list as I will publish this article.

If you are not interested in having your URL listed I wil not do so. This is strictly an opt in opportunity as I will be promoting the finished article because I think with everyone's input we can create a very good list of tips to help a small business owner in his SEO persuit.

Vangogh, I hope this meets with your approval and you would be an active participant in the discussion of this list. Can you please split the thread and create a new one and delete the former discussion.
_____________

Assuming of course you have created a good website with useful information and unique content, these are your next steps.

1. Verify the code in your page using the W3c validation tool and fix the errors.

If a crawler can not easily navigate through your site due to errors in the code you could have some problems. A few errors are probably ok, but if you have 30 or more, you are probably asking for trouble.

2. Optimize your keywords for the most popular keyword terms.

Keywords are very important, these are the search terms that people are going to use t find you. Optimize your keyword in your title, H1 and H2 tags and have a variant or two mentioned in your first paragraph.

3. Create a blog so you have something to submit to Digg, Blog Catalog, Technorati, EzineArticles, etc. Wordpress is best for the platform, make sure to use the SEO plugin for Wordpress and fill out all the SEO options for an article. (tags, keywords, descriptions, etc.)

Blogs are a good way to be found. The more sites you submit to the better your chances are that you are going to be found and get your site linked to. The more quality links you can create, the better.

4. Submit a sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing (search "sitemap generator" for a free online tool that will create one for you)

With new websites, submitting a sitemap to the search engines helps to expedite the indexing process. Rather than just submitting a single URL, show the search engines your sites structure.

5. Write another article for your blog.

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

6. Participate in “dofollow” forums, post comments and questions.

Make sure you include links to your website so people and search engines can see you outside your web page. This helps create vital links to your website and DOES help with page rank over time.

7. Write another article for your blog.

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

8. Build a Squidoo lens for your website.

Squidoo is a neat little site for creating a mini webpage and this also helps your website to be found.

9. Look into a traffic exchange service to help boost traffic to your site. A good one that comes to mind is ClixSense.

You probably won’t get any quality links to your site this way but real people are viewing your site. It does not cost a lot to participate in, and some of those viewers ate likely using the site to advertise the same way you are, so there is a chance someone may see something in your site they are interested in. Some pretty big corporate brands use this site so there could be some value in it.

10. Submit your website to the DMOZ directory.

Though the quality of the DMOZ directory has gone down hill a bit as it is maintained by volunteers, it is free to submit to and if you get in the directory, it certainly will not hurt.

11. Comment on some blog articles related to your business.

Go where your target market hangs out and you will be seen. Don’t forget to hyperlink your name to your website. Don’t just post an http link, use your company name and make it an http hyperlink to your website. Your company name will give some relevance to the link.

12. Get all your friends to bookmark your site in Google Bookmarks and in Yahoo's Delicious, at least 20 of them.

But make sure you tell them to tag the bookmark with a keyword. For example if you have a jewelry store tell them to tag the bookmark with the word jewelry. This will help other bookmark searchers find you and if you get enough bookmarks it is possible to end up on the popular bookmarks page and this will drive more traffic to your site.

13. Promote your website on Twitter and Facebook.

Try to get people that run businesses similar to yours to follow you. Tweet your URL on Friday as that is the day most people follow their tweets. It is possible to get a good link this way. Facebook has groups that will be made up of people in your target market.

14. Write another article for your blog

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

15. Make sure you have updated all your accounts in Technorati, Digg, Blog Catalog, and EzineArticles

Pretty self explanatory, you need to keep your sites updated for the most impact.

16. Make some more comments in forums.

Again, hang out where your target market does. It is possible to get some good links this way.

17. Write another article for your blog.

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

18. Pay PR web for a press release

One of the good things with PRweb is your news release is guaranteed to be shown in yahoo news. A good chance for someone in your market to find you.

19. Make sure you get a listing on the Yellowpages website.

These sites place high in search results so it makes it easier for your customers to find you. It is free to submit your business, though I would opt to spring for their basic package.

20. Pay Yahoo to be listed in their directory.

Yahoo is being purchased by Microsoft so it is anyone’s guess what will happen to the directory, for the time being a listing in the Yahoo directory gets you in the yahoo search results.

21. Build a web page on MerchantCircle.

I think this is one of the best things a new company can do to be found at the top of the search results. Keep focus on optimizing the keywords in your MerchantCirle site as this is what will determine where your MC listing will be found in search results. They also have some very good services for small businesses and I consider them to be a “must use” service.

22. Write another article for your blog.

The more content you create, the better your chances are of getting linked to.

23. Submit your website to the ZoomInfo directory.

This is just another outlet for you to be found buy people that are interested in your goods and services.

24.


25.

Though different business will have different SEO and marketing requirements, this list will be a good place to start and steer you in the right direction.

vangogh
08-12-2009, 06:13 PM
I'm not going to split the posts and have the same conversation again. I don't see any point to that. This list isn't really that much different from your original one.

Instead of splitting this post I'll close the thread, since it's outlived any usefulness it might have had.