Yearly Archives: 2009

Users Or Search Engines Is A False SEO Debate

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Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London, England is an amusing place to visit if you like to hear empassioned debaters. They often take up extreme positions so as to attract the crowd. Ideally if a few hecklers join in with counter-positions, it all adds to the fun.

You might imagine that Speakers’ Forum was not a suitable place to discuss how best to make websites perform well on the Internet. You would be right except that the online debate often resembles that Hyde Park scene.

That image came to mind in a recent post by Jill Whalen that talked about A Fatal Flaw In SEO. Those are dramatic words and you might wonder what would elicit such a headline. It turns out that Jill was incensed by a post by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. This had included in the title equally inflammatory language with the words, Terrible SEO Advice.

Jill said that Rand’s advice could

… potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.

In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”

If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.

This is certainly soap-box rhetoric. Both have taken extreme positions. After all that’s what attracts the crowds, … and the comments, … and the backlinks, which is what SEO is all about, at least with Google.

Whichever you would label Black or White, neither is correct. The truth as usual is a shade of grey. You need a balance and should be considering both Users and the Search Engines at the same time. It’s probably 70% Jill’s advice and 30% Rand’s advice. The problem is that such a shade of grey will probably not stand out against the simple Blacks and Whites.

Equally if the best advice is somewhat more complex, some will opt for a simple approach that is supported by one of the luminaries of the SEO world. After all, that is what a Google search may indicate is the most relevant advice. The only saving grace here is that hopefully these contradictory positions will make some people realize that the true answer may lie somewhere in the middle.

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Google Chooses Big Ugly

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Google has a bigger Search Box and many observers find it big and ugly.  It is surprising how a move from a 13-pixel font for the search box, up to 17 pixels can have such a visual impact.  This same font size is used for the list of possible searches that is presented by the Google Suggest process.  If this change is not yet apparent in your part of the world here is what the Google Search Box with the Google Suggest list looks like.

big ugly google

Below the Search box, the buttons also are increased in size and are now more square:

big ugly buttons

It is surprising how that I’m Feeling Lucky button survives.  Even more so when you realize that whenever this button is clicked, it may well cost Google in lost advertising revenues.

The thinking behind this change is not at all clear, given so many adverse reactions.

The official word is that the Google Search Box is now S-U-P-E-R sized.  Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience introduces it as follows:

For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you’ll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use.

It is perhaps something that only its Mother could love.

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Marketing Right Now e-book

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Marketing Right Now was originally an 8-part blog series that appeared on the Cre8asite Flow blog in the fall of 2008.

It now has been updated and brought together in one place in an e-book (PDF file).  Here are more details on the Marketing Right Now e-book.  The aim is to help entrepreneurs and SOHO (small office, home office) workers start their business in the right way and then grow it successfully.  It covers all aspects of this in a concise 55 pages.

It is intended as a work book, which is the reason for presenting this as an e-book.  It discusses throughout what are the success keys of business and in an Annex presents these keys to success in a single page work sheet.  It does suggest ways of doing extra reading, but the action-oriented entrepreneur will find the essential first steps are covered so that the action plan can start quickly.

Three Key Factors

Why is this book different from all the others that appear so frequently?  The major difference is that this is geared for rapid action rather than slow and leisurely planning.

There are also three important principles that influence how actions should be taken:

  • Internet mindset
    The Internet creates greater openness and changes the balance of power between buyers and sellers
  • Customer-centric
    Unless you see things the way the customer does, you may be surprised when they are cool about what you thought might be good for them.
  • Time Is Job One 
    Time is valued by customers much more than companies acknowledge.  Offering attractive time-related services to your customers will give a competitive advantage.

Why Pay For An E-book

One reaction to an e-book may be to question why it is not free.  There are so many things written on the Internet that are free.  Why would someone not explore those? 

Well of course they can but their own time must be factored into the equation.  It is the principle that Chris Anderson discusses in his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  In this case you can see a good part of the information in the blog posts mentioned earlier and very little has changed since then.  However if your time is valuable, then you may feel it is an equitable arrangement to pay the author a modest contribution so that you have the content in a more usable format that will save your time.

The advantage of an e-book is that you know exactly what you are paying for.  Many sources of marketing information are put behind walls and you must pay a monthly entry fee to have access. One cannot be sure exactly what is the ROI for such more hefty investments, but usually there are a few glowing customer references to encourage you to enter the door. 

If you want to get a better appreciation of such ‘closed gardens’, Chris Garrett wrote a description of how he Built His Authority Blogger Member Site.  As he says there  is a good deal of interest in Teaching Sells and membership sites in general, so he wanted to set out how you can easily create your own membership site using WordPress.

buy marketing right now

Membership sites are certainly one possibility if you think you will have the time and dedication (and money) to follow all that they have to offer and then take the necessary actions.  If you are not sure about what is in that ‘brown paper bag’, then a more appropriate way to go may be a modestly priced e-book that covers all you need.

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Natural Links Bring Search Engine Visibility

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Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.

Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

Creating Link Value

A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.

The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.

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Rapid Response Service For Online Success

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Karen Mazurkewich suggests that Rapid Response is the key to online success.  Unfortunately a factor that weighs against online ecommerce is that Canadians are more wary about online security.

Online retail sales showed promising growth in Canada. Sales reached $12.6- billion in 2006 — a 61% rise over three years — according to a 2007 Statistics Canada report. Online sales increased only by 3% in 2008, says the Raleigh, N.C.-based media marketing company Sage Works, but are up 9% for the first eight months of 2009.

Canadians have not embraced the online shopping model with the same verve as their U.S. counterparts. Fear of credit card fraud is an issue.  Darrell MacMullin, general manager PayPal Canada, says “Canadians have one of the highest sensitivities globally when it comes to security.”

Nevertheless some online stores have achieved remarkable success including the following:

Raman Kashyap, owner of cybershopping.ca, suggests that for success, companies have to be very niche-oriented and have strong social networking programs.  If they can also still any credit security concerns and provide rapid response service, they should have it made.

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