Ask the SEO Guru

Guruisms for the week of 15-03-09

Why Would I Stop Buying From Who I Used to Buy From and Start Buying From You?

The single biggest thing about my lack of a life as an SEO that has always amazed me is when I ask a prospective client to tell me why I would want to buy from them instead of buying from their competitor, in other words, what makes their offer better than someone else’s, no one, not a single person who has sought me out as an SEO has EVER been able to answer that simple question without my having to prompt them.

SEO is not a way to “get around” having a business plan or a solid, value-driven product or service. In fact, if you don’t have a USP,(unique selling proposition), SEO is the last thing you need! You might as well invest in TV viewing as investing in SEO. If you can’t answer that question, it pays about the same.

I have tried so many times in so many ways for so long to get that across to anyone that would listen that one would think I’d just give it up. But like flies to stink,  I just can’t pass it by.

I have recently had yet one more opportunity to step to the virtual podium and preach. As the aforementioned flies, I carpe diemed.

I think LinkedIn, like so many other great web ideas, has turned into little more than a poor man’s ad trough. So many of the questions are thinly disguised self promotional offerings of the fecal persuasion designed to impress readers with the posters acumen for their business du jour, be it tech, design, SEO or whatever. The idea of course being to ask and answer your own question. OOOOHHHH so clever!

That is why primarily why I spend little time there any longer.

However, LinkedIn, not to be outdone by their own members at spamming you and trying to make it appear as “help” to avoid having to actually pay for advertising, send me emails of topics I was interested in some 4 years ago and every now and then I get sucked in by the title of a question and finding myself re-affirming my belief that so-called seo’s can be some of the absolute worst marketers on the planet.

NOTE: If I offended you by saying that, maybe you should be honest with yourself and go read The Purple Cow http://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-Transform-Business-Remarkable/dp/159184021X

On one such recent occasion I uncharacteristically replied in the hopes it may have a positive impact on somebody somewhere and I’d like to share it now for the same reason.

With internet marketing getting bigger by the day & loads of options available- What should one really do to promote a business/website online optimally? A lot of our clients keep asking..

The following would be our recommendation to get started (in this sequence) -
1. Optimize your website for Search Engines. This has to be done while the website is being built since it involves laying the right foundation. Basically search engines should be able to clearly ‘read’ through the context of the website and through the key content elements of the website. This link should give you an idea about some of the basics that need to be done. http://www.magnoninternational.com/on-page-optimization-services.asp

2. Set up a Google Ad Words Account and start experimenting with the effectiveness of various keywords. You can fix your daily/weekly/monthly spends depending on the amount of money you would like to spend.

3. Submit to other free/paid directories. This is some free Online Advertising.

4. If you have some kind of a ‘relevant’ database, get a nice looking mailshot designed with the right message and visual appeal. Use an application like Verticxxxxponse.com to shoot out the Email.

5. Create a Blog on your website- put in user friendly content that relates to your website. Remember good content attracts people.. This should work as a good ‘pull’ mechanism. Blogs are usually picked up very easily by Search Engines as they are content intensive. This will also help your efforts for Step 1. Check our blog.xxxxxxxx.com

6. Social Marketing - The buzz about Web 2.0 marketing is for real. Try using Social Networking sites like LinkedIn (like you are now), Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc. These are some ways of Free Advertising. Get an agency to do this for you if you would like to do a lot of volume of work here.

If you liked this piece of information or want to add on to it, or have thoughts contrary to what we think - please leave your comments on our Blog

{G comment---- notice the link drops to his emailspam aff site and his own blog. A lesson in just how thin a thinly disguised ad  can be?}

To which I replied

>What should one really do to promote a business/website online optimally?<

If we're talking optimally, then you're way off. Optimally -- how about knowing you have something worth promoting. Doing a little market research and then developing a strategy with measurable milestones.

BUT if you are referring to optimally in terms of another get out of debt/texas holdem/college degree affiliate site, then what you're describing is still sooo 2007.

Optimally, you want a site that engages the visitor by offering unique value PLUS something more. All those things you mentioned are efforts in traffic generation, (except #4 anyway. that is spamming and if we're taking that approach why build a site at all?). Traffic is too easy to get and not worth that much effort. Hell, if you want traffic just buy it.

The hard part is being able to offer real value in a hyper competitive arena. Unless you just WANT to make less money than the next poorest competitor, and plan to make sales by selling based solely on having the cheapest price, then you have to find something that makes it worth spending more for your stuff than they would spend for the other guys stuff.

Once you have that figured out, promoting is easy and even 2007 techniques will work just fine.

If you're clients are asking, you may THINK they are asking about seo, , (because they are looking for some kind of magic fairy dust), BUT what they are really asking is for you to give them a way "around" the hard stuff I just mentioned.


PS
if you don't have that product worth promoting thingee down --- then spamming people from a "relevant" database as suggested in #4 isn't going to do it for you either.

{end reply}

Peach Y’all

G

PS

Now I’ll get back to talking about the, “sound and graphics to illicit a somatic response” stuff I promised in my next post. I’m also looking forward to talking about subliminal messages!

 

 

Go git your Sunday school clothes on and you BETTER NOT git ‘em dirty before we git there!

 

 

 

 

What a St. Patty's day party this year turned out to be.

I was lucky enough to get invited to a party at the Trident hotel in Mumbai hosted by the Irish embassy in India by my good friend David Lawrence.

The ambassador was gracious enough to grant me one of the most memorable photo opps of my life.



Thank you Mr. Thompson!!
http://www.irelandinindia.com/home/index.aspx?id=52432

Looks like he's really happy to meet the ole guru huh?

Getting my picture taken with a foreign dignitary AND free liquor. What a country!



Peach Y'all

G

Guruisms for the week of 02-03-09

The extrovert in me loves online marketing because there are as many things to sell and ways to sell them as there are the sum total of human experience.

The introvert part of me loves online marketing because there is no failure. There is only missing projections and not hitting your numbers. The only way to fail is to quit and that is not failing, that is quitting.

Why Am I Not Converting?

Well, the short answer is --- you are thinking about you and not about them. Or even worse, you’re not thinking at all.

Do you have ANY idea how much money gets spent on market research? Trying to predict whether a new product will be a big hit or a big flop, or whether, “you deserve a break today” will sell more burgers than “I’m loving it”.

Don’t feel bad.  It was more of a rhetorical question anyway since I don’t actually know the correct answer and apparently neither does Google

But I can say with considerable confidence it is a XXXXload!!!

Naturally, the vast majority of us online can not even come close to being able to afford what it really costs to conduct, accepted in a scientific sense, marketing research. I’m not talking about running keyword suggestion tools while we rub our chins looking at AWstats and tell ourselves we are doing behavioral analysis. I’m talking about conducting surveys of a cross section or your target market, (do you know who you’re target market is? Some companies pay millions of dollars just to find that out). Eye tracking, psychological profiling, demographic analysis or even neuromarketing.   Anyone happen to have a MRI I could borrow?

Do we tell ourselves that stuff doesn’t really matter or do we try to expand our scope of expertise and keep raising the bar on what we CAN do? No one has to look at very many websites, big or small, to see that the vast majority of developers have built sites that pay VERY little heed to anything beyond flash templates or placing the target keywords in the title tag. And that is only the “GOOD” sites. 

So we might as well just forget about it and keep pursuing a philosophy of “if one is good then a million must be better” I suppose? Well ---- one little issue with that prospect is that million it takes to be better keeps getting increasingly expensive every day. The only winner in that game is google adwords. Maybe there is another answer?

Maybe we can’t afford paying a cross section of Americana to submit to neuro testing to tell what makes their frontal lobes light up when they see an Izod logo or to pay college undergrads to stand in front of department stores and interview walk-in traffic. Should we just give up because it sounds too hard?

Is our only logical choice to just accept that 2 buyers out of every 1000 uniques, (point zero 2 percent),  is about average and 2 out of 100 is really pretty good, ( a 2 percent conversion rate)? Or is there something we CAN afford in terms of money and time that would actually give us more time and more money in our pockets than what we have now by simply using some simple steps and a dash of common sense to increase conversion ratios by factors of 10?  

Everyone Keeps Telling Me I Need To BRAND My Site But No One Is Telling Me How To Do It

Yeah I know.

If you are like me, you struggle with the concept of branding and how it applies to my little site. I always thought of branding as Nike or McDonalds. I thought it meant that you had to have enough money that you could shove your logo up the brains of as many people as possible with all the subtlety of an enema with a 3 inch hose. But it’s not nearly that complicated, expensive or difficult to get people to sit still for.

Let me tell you a short story I got from a man I like to consider a friend. Hi name is Martin Lindstrom. The story I got from him explains branding in a way that makes it much easier to wrap your mind around exactly what it is and how you apply it to ANYTHING.

You see, we all as humans, ascribe a greater value to things we perceive, logically or not, to be in some way special.

 Suppose today is your 35^th birthday and I give you a beautifully wrapped small box with a bow on it as a gift. You smile so wide I’m afraid you’ll knock off an ear but as you open the box you find inside a single small gray rock. The kind of dull, gray rock anyone might find lying on a roadside. “Thanks a lot”, you’re sarcastically thinking.

But what if I then told you that it’s not just any old rock but a one-of-kind historical symbol. It is a piece of the Berlin Wall that was smuggled out of the country only days after the wall’s destruction that re-united East and West Germany back in 1989. You now own a talisman that represent a global event. The end of the cold war.

“Wow, thanks a LOT man”, you say, with genuine enthusiasm now. But as you hold it and admire it for a second I say, “I was kidding you man”. That rock didn’t come from the Berlin wall. It’s a LOT more exceptional than that. It is a one in million at least!

I say, "I have a really good friend that is a scientist for NASA and a few days ago he gave me that. It’s a rock from the moon when the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong made that historical walk on the moon. You remember? Well, they brought back a bunch of sample data and once they were examined they were stored but they never allowed the public to have them or even view them. It just so happened it was your birthday and I thought of you". 

Now you are literally at a loss for words to verbalize your appreciation. But the mact of the fatter is, I found a rock by the roadside, threw it in a box and wrapped it pretty. It's just a rock.

I’m not advocating lying to anyone. That was not the point of the story. The point of the story is that when we brand things with something else seen as a positive thing,  we see them in our minds as more special or valuable than they actually may be.

Branding simply means identifying one thing with another. You get people to do that by telling a story. It doesn’t HAVE to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars showing cute kids jumping in Grandpa’s lap to share a happy meal thereby getting you to associate a greasy cheeseburger,(with some brown substance that may or may not be meat), with the warmth, caring and love that a Grandpa can give. So, if you eat this particular low-priced fast food of the presumably meat persuasion, you can feel like Grandpa loves you. Nice ending to a good story huh?

You can brand anything. I just branded this article above, (and myself), by implying that the author of the book I mentioned was a friend of mine. I did it intentionally for illustration purposes hoping to show a good example of not needing a lot of money to create a brand. It just takes a little planning and forethought. Sometimes even a three thought may do.

I did not say Martin Lindstrom was a friend of mine.  I said a man I LIKE to consider a friend. I’m sure he doesn’t know me from a roll of toilet paper, but I enjoyed the book so much that when I think of this guy and what he did, I actually do LIKE to consider him a friend.  BUT whatever the purpose, it had an impact on your perception even if it was sub-conscious. It altered the way you perceived the content and the author. For better or worse, that is branding. Associating my name with his is an example of branding.

So how do you associate your personality, your website, product or service with something else. Things like, reliability, quality, family values, religion, superstition or anything else that makes people buy the things they buy? Keep in mind, negative branding can be just as powerful as positive. What do you think they are doing when the give the Pepsi challenge trying to get people to select Pepsi over Coke? Think they are trying to make Coke look good?

First of all, if you have not taken the time to identify your target market, then keep doing what you’ve been doing and shoot for that million hits to get that .0002% conversion ratio because doing anything will probably not result in much of an increase until you have a pretty good idea of who you are wanting to do it to. Of course you can always get lucky AND don’t forget the G’s quote at the top of this post. You don’t really HAVE to do anything except not quit to keep from complete failure.

But if you do have even a vague concept of who is most likely to be your customer then you can start telling a story using words, graphics, videos, sounds, layout, colors etc.  that will most likely get that target to start associating you with something else that stimulates an impulse to be a part of your story.

If you look honestly at your index page, does it tell a story or does it just repeat the same boring crap anyone can find on 100 other sites about the same topic. See, even if you don’t tell a story at all, you are telling a story that brands you as the same as the other crap! When they think of you, (probably for not more than a few seconds while they look for the back button on your site), they are thinking of all the other crap. You’re building brand whether you actually want that brand or not.

My next installment is going to be about how you can use sound and or graphics to stimulate some somatic response in your visitors and that alone may shoot your conversion rate through the roof!

If you are not familiar with the term subliminal messages, maybe now would be a good time to start doing a search or two on the subject as we will be discussing that very shortly.

 

Peach Y'all

kem cho

The “anti-seo”,SEO Guru

Additional References

Buy-ology - Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom

READ IT!

All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin

READ IT!

Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

 

 

 

 

It MUST be Wednesday. We’re havin fish sticks for supper ain’t we?

 

Guruisms for the week of 23-02-09

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Aldous Huxley

 The True Cost of SEO

While there are a great many heated debates regarding the scope of what SEO entails, it is generally accepted, (that means not argued over much in SEO communities),that SEO’s basic function is the traffic generation from organic, (mistakenly used to imply free), search engine results. The truth, while admittedly brutal for some, is that more times than not, traffic generation is more cost effective if you simply buy it. PPC has it’s merits.

That statement may seem odd coming from a man who has capitalized significantly on “organic” placements but it is only because I am one of that small percentage of netizens who actually does know the real cost of those “free” placements.  That voice of experience is telling you the truth now; whether paying for PPC, purchasing  prospects from affiliates, or hiring the assistance of an SEO ---- you ARE paying for traffic. Well, --- If you got lucky and hired the right seo anyway. If not, then you’re just paying.

Would you like to know the secret of figuring out the true cost of SEO for yourself?

 It’s ROI. Return on Investment

THAT is what establishes the value of traffic. Duh! We all knew that right? Then why are there so many really crappy websites all scrambling for top spots?

The truth is that all traffic, regardless of where it came from, is worth something. At the very least, an effort. But the word something is a very broad, very subjective term.

I may be running the risk of a death sentence by the grammar police here but I feel this MUST be said. To me ----

It ain’t worth a squirt if it don’t convert

Your business will die if they don’t buy

If it don’t convert – it don’t work

Learn to convert - It doesn't hurt

Made my point yet?

So I’ve conceded, all traffic, ANY traffic, does have some inherent value. However, if you are  able to use logic to come to a conclusion and are able to rise above the din of the blinded few, then maybe you can agree with me that those 4 grammatically flawed euphemisms above have value as well.

If you can agree that the end goal of any traffic generating strategy should be increased conversions, (hopefully resulting in increased profits), then the idea of increasing conversions has to have at least equal appeal to increased seo, (whatever that is),efforts.

Think about this.

If your site enjoys an average conversion rate of .05%, meaning 1 out of every 200 unique hits converts to a desired action, then which is better in terms of return? Increasing traffic to 1000 unique hits to get 5 sales, OR increase conversions to say 10% or 20 orders out of every 200 hits?

WHOA THERE COWKID, we’re not through thinkin yet.

What would you think the cost of generating 5 times more traffic would be compared to increasing conversions to 10 %?

Now, which approach do YOU think makes more sense?

The reality is that whether you think more traffic or more conversions is better ---- you’re right! I’m not trying to argue or put your mindset into a spin. It’s your site, your business and your money. Spend your time and money any way you feel is best for you and guess what? You’re doing the right thing --- for you anyway.

For me, I’ve found it exponentially less expensive to increase conversions IF you can afford it. Once you know you can convert, THEN spend money on generating more traffic. If you go about it that way, you should actually have revenue to invest generated from your efforts instead of stolen from your mom’s purse. (vague adolescent reference added so you don’t think I’m talking about you . If you don’t have generated revenue from your efforts then you lose more money with each passing day and more traffic is only going to make you lose more money faster.

3 Second Back Button Boogie Defined

When an internet user elects to click a link from a source document, be it a search engine, an email, a blog or forum, it is a conscious act. To use an index finger to push a mouse button indicates a response to an emotional stimulus. It indicates the expectation of finding data related to that stimulus at the destination.

In other words, when someone clicks a link they are expecting to find something that relates to the specific reason they clicked the link in the first place.

 

  So How Do I Stop the 3 Second Back Button Boogie?

The concept is simple, the application --- ahhhhh, not so much.

If you are converting at 3% or less, you are going to have an increasingly difficult time maintaining your margins for the long term if that model depends on generating more and more traffic.  I know, I know, we all read on seo frogs, (forums and blogs), that so and so has been #1 for years or that the “other” guy just doesn’t REALLY know seo. Well, I DO really know seo, (whatever that is), and I also know that webmasters and programmers no longer rule the cyber roost. The cowboy site jockeys of yesterday have traded in their undershorts and bathrobes for Birkenstocks, (http://www.birkenstockusa.com/), and their khaki colored cargo shorts while punching the clock at their 9 to 5 for the suits. As in all things media, eventually, marketing rules. Maybe that is as it should be. Whether it should or not, it does.

The web is getting more competitive every day and each day we see it becoming a battleground with better trained, better equipped, better financed warriors. AND, the more profit there is in your I-only-need-a-2%-conversion-rate-to-make-a-profit web service, the more that targeted traffic is going to cost AND the cheaper your corporate competitors are going to be selling the same goodie as you. YIKES! Not a pretty picture huh?

So what are we to do? Hire the next SEO who talks about metrics without telling you what to DO about them once you analyze them?  Hire $500 an hour consultants to tell you to post more on twitter? Give up and go back to environmental engineering?

HERE’S AN IDEA. WHY NOT LEARN HOW TO INCREASE CONVERSIONS?

All is not gloom and doom. Yes it is going to get more and more competitive and you are going to have to learn to figure your ROI to know how far you want to go and in which direction, but it’s not that hard.

I know you don’t have to look very far on the net to find articles and posts, (or if it is an seo community, childish name calling and circle jerks of the textual persuasion), extolling the virtues of metrics and analytics. AND they are virtuous indeed. The problem comes in when asking, “ok, I see I have 9% of my hits coming from Zimbabwe, and 22% of those come in between 1400 and 1700 hours, soooooo now what”? It’s the now what that doesn’t get talked about too much.

Well, I’m going to talk about the now what. Figuring out how to use ANY information you can get to increase conversions doesn’t have to be that hard. It CAN be as hard, (and as in-depth and expensive), as you let it be and the more you can afford the better, BUT you don’t have to be a MNC,(multi national corporation), to be able to analyze data to develop a strategy and then execute effectively. Worried about doing it right? Don’t worry,#1. You can’t do it wrong because if you do, your numbers go down. #2. If your numbers go down stop doing that  

The great thing about the net is that those kind of numbers used to cost a LOT of money thereby raising the cost of the service or product being sold. Corporates still spend a GREAT deal of money on those kinds of numbers, (but it is changing), which gives you at least a small advantage.

Now it is so cheap that any single mom sitting in her underwear, (ummm, give me a minute here until I get this image out of my head), at her computer can compete with all the money and power any corporate can bring to bear when it comes to research, data organization and analytics within her market. Again, the trick is what to do about the numbers you get.

You can trust me when I tell you, If I can do it, ANYBODY can do it.

In my forthcoming blogstallments, I’ll tell you how I use referrer based ad delivery, subliminal messaging, learning curves, superstition and religion to increase conversions at a minimal cost and without needing another four years of college.

 

Kem cho Y’all

(I’m an Okie learning to speak Gujarati)

MAJAMA

 

The Guru

 

 

I’d like to leave you today with some wise words my Mother told me as a young boy. I hope it serves you as well as it has served me over the years.

Boy, if you don’t stop flipping that gawddamn clicker I’m going to slap your ears off!

 

 

 

 

 

I was more impressed with the technology of search back in 1996 than I am today.

When I first started playing around with Infoseek, Excite, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Webcrawler,(well, Ok. Webcrawler and Open Text --- not so much), and the other now rotting carcasses of failed search based ad delivery systems, I was blown away.

Millions of pieces of data organized in a somewhat logical framework. Pages were often indexed within minutes. Scalability seemed endless as each day they all grew by hundreds of thousands of documents.

You could cross reference. You could research. You could locate data that could fill the largest libraries on the planet from the comfort of your chair and without having to have a library card or pay late fees. It was amazing.

Granted it was all text based. Period, (and even back then we all knew that would change), and the algorithms were far too elementary. I mean if a guy like me could figure them out ----- weeeelllllll

As for online promotion and search marketing, I actually did fall off a log once when I was a kid and placing on Infoseek for MLM, credit cards and online poker was easier. And took about as long.

One of the first things that bothered me about search engines was the way they forced terrible conversions. Back then the index page reigned supreme and if your meta refresh tags were done properly,(what an oxy-moron), your domain name could pop up in top 10 for literally hundreds of related terms. Shoes.com could place #2 for gold shoelaces when the shoes.com/goldshoelaces.html page was three levels deep.

From a marketers viewpoint, it wasn’t all bad. I mean which is better

1000 hits with a 1% conversion

Or 100 hits with a 10% conversion?

Answer ---WHO CARES!

It wasn’t until 1998/99 that “doorway pages” started coming into fashion. Not because they didn’t make sense before, but because engines were starting to realize that humans had too many choices of where to look for data and if they did not deliver a better perception of relevancy for specific searches, the aforementioned human would simply move on to Excite, or Hot Bot or Northern Lights, (one of the first to actually invest money in an attempt to raise the bar on relevancy).  So they all got better at reading text and comparing it to a text based query and voila! A cloaked, automated doorway page CRAParama was unleashed upon the straining storage resources of all search engines, major and minor alike.

That Was Then and This Is Now

Then came Google and the world changed.

To be perfectly honest, I have always been much more impressed by Google’s marketing prowess than with the quality of their search engine based on page rank. We had noticed Alta Vista was working with link analysis before Google had even started selling ads. What Google did was actually make it work. But even back then with only 50 or so Phd’s, I kind of expected a little more.

So now Google has become the undisputed leader. Fine. And once PR was refined a little and then reverse engineered a lot by the same people who had figured out the text based stuff that came before Page Rank, and then some hick from Oklahoma started marketing links, (boy, did THAT piss off Google!), PR started working for individual interior pages based on a combination of text plus all that democratic nature of the web crap.

MORE CRAPARAMA!

Now it actually became even easier to auto-generate the kind of content we have all come to accept.

{grab a suitcase – we’re going on a side trip}

So to me, I have never been amazed by anything that has happened and called a leap forward within the search engines self promotional press releases, “leaks” or blatant blog posts as I was when I first visited Infoseek some 13 years ago.

Even taking into account all the social media hype, buying, (or rather gobbling), up a lot of tech companies, tracking and analyzing everything you do online, (and off BTW), and delivering personalized, geo targeted, demographically influenced results for every search,(Still only a glimmer in some ad salesman’s eye but coming at a blinding pace), those things are all about improving an AD DELIVERY experience and not a searching and FINDING relevant to a specific query experience.

That actually doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact, it is the way it should be except for one little aspect. The proportion of profit to relevancy improvement is getting a little out of whack.

The ad buying, delivering and tracking technology seems to be progressing at an incredible rate. I am as amazed at how fast the ad delivery systems are improving as I was when I first started diddleing  Infoseek.

So, ready to have your gears shpunn?

It’s because of the focus on ad delivery that any engine attempts to improve relevancy. Why? Because you finding answers to your queries is what keeps you from looking somewhere else for the answer and you looking THERE is what offers the opportunity to display ads that they have spent much time, money and energy trying to learn which one YOU are most likely to respond to with a click of your cyber wallet.

What this means to anyone who cares to look is a huge shift in conventional wisdom thinking.

Conventional wisdom has us all trying to build pages that satisfy a search engine’s algorithm to determine relevancy. That is all based around the concept that

#1. Relevancy is all that matters to a search engine when in fact REVENUE is all that matters and that makes the machine an ad delivery system and not a relevancy delivery system

#2. That a search engine takes humans where the search engine tells them is the best place for the human to go.

The truth is:

 HUMANS tell the SEARCH ENGINES where to go

I know that is going to be VERY difficult for some to accept and that is fine. There is nothing wrong with most people trying to satisfy search engines and thinking that you can influence a search machine any easier than you can influence a water pik!

Sure you can twist some screws, add thicker wires to deliver more current, and even replace the head to make it sphinn the opposite way. But at the end of the day, it is still going to squirt water between your teeth because that is what it was built to do. If it doesn't - it's broke!

Search engines are built to deliver revenue generating advertisements to HUMANS and that is why the secret to ultimate domination of organic traffic generating placements is to remember that search engines follow HUMANS and not the other way around.

You may be thinking, so – which came first the chicken or the egg. How do I get organic search traffic if I have to get people searching for me in the first place?

It’s not as hard as you think. Influencing people is actually cheaper, faster and easier than trying to influence search engines. http://www.seobook.com/archives/001819.shtml

I’m close to finishing my next blog post called  “How To Beat the 3 Second Back Button Boogie”. In that article I’ll start showing you ways to get people to force the engines to follow them and it can start with what you do with people when they get to your site. That is one of the easiest ways to start understanding the concept that search engines follow people!

 

Peach Y’all

The anti-seo seo Guru

 

 

 

 

I swear daddy I don’t know what happened to your magazines that were under your tool box out in the garage

        

 

 

No wonder so many who call themselves SEO’s are worried about their future what with all the talk this past few months of personalized results, bounce rates and changing search parameters. There is no question the organic search results landscape is changing and behavioral metrics analysis is playing some part in that change. But, as online marketers, what does that really mean and what can we do about it?

Understanding a concept such as behavioral metrics analysis isn’t too tough. Tracking and analyzing which people do what, when and how often to try to determine their future response to a specific problem or opportunity. For our purposes that simply means which ad they are most likely to respond to when based on past historical behavior.

BUT, that’s the concept as it’s spoken of in SEO circles.  What is the academic definition? Well here is how Wikipedia defines it:

Search results

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You searched for behavioral metrics analysis (all pages starting with "behavioral metrics analysis" | all pages that link to "behavioral metrics analysis")

Jump to: navigation, search

No article title matches

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=behavioral+metrics+analysis&go=Go

 

HMMM, maybe this will help clear it up:

On Behavioral Metric for Probabilistic Systems: Definition and Approximation Algorithm
Taolue Chen; Tingting Han; Jian Lu
Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, 2007. FSKD 2007. Fourth International Conference on
Volume 2, Issue , 24-27 Aug. 2007 Page(s):21 - 25
Digital Object Identifier   10.1109/FSKD.2007.426
Summary:In this paper, we consider the behavioral pseudometrics for probabilistic systems. The model we are interested in is probabilistic automata, which are based on state transition systems and make a clear distinction between probabilistic and nondeterministic choices. The pseudometrics are defined as the greatest fixpoint of a monotonic functional on the complete lattice of state metrics. A distinguished characteristic of this pseudometric lies in that it does not discount the future, which addresses some algorithmic challenges to compute the distance of two states in the model. We solve this problem by providing an approximation algorithm: up to any desired degree of accuracy epsiv, the distance can be approximated to within epsiv in time exponential in the size of the model and logarithmic in 1/epsiv. A key ingredient of our algorithm is to express a pseudometric being a post-fixpoint as the elementary sentence over real closed fields, which allows us to exploit Tar ski's decision procedure, together with binary search to approximate the behavioral distance.

Or maybe not.

I first recall hearing about behavioral metric analysis a long time ago and if memory serves it was an article published by NASA talking about trying to design space capsules in such a way as to be able to predict the humans reaction to specific events that were identical to, or at least resembled, previous events. Hence the probabilistic bit.

While I have no references to list, I’m pretty sure that most of the research and application of the concept is not in the field of space exploration but rather advertising and marketing.

There can be as many metrics I suppose as there are people wanting to track them, especially if you start blurring the lines of behavioral metrics with demographics. Again, a simple concept such as a person who did this before will likely do it again, becomes very complex when attempting to digitalize it and then un-digitalize it into something a human could take action upon.

But as marketers, usually with limited time and resources as in the case of small online promotion firms, we need to focus on only the ones that increase our convertible traffic and/or make us more money. So from there it comes down to:

#1. What can we get within the boundaries of what can we afford?

#2. What of what we can get can we do something about within the boundaries of what we can afford?

 

There are certainly times when knowing things like the time of the visit , geo-location, IP address, search history, where a prospect spends the majority of their time, who do they talk to about what and how often can come in pretty handy in making a feature, benefit, call to action presentation. It’s not difficult to see how any one of those things or any combination of those things could influence how you would display your presentation in the hopes of getting the most desired responses.

Then comes the demographics which some would argue are even more important than the behavioral metrics. Where they live, how much money they make, what religion they are, what political affiliations they have, education level, what kind of car they drive, how much credit they have etc, etc,  etc.

BUT LET’S GET REAL:

As close as it appears anyone can tell, there are approx. 273 pages per domain on average

http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html

Now regardless of how many pages YOU have, take a quick look at how many unique referrers you had this past week.

I picked one of ours at random and checked. That domain last week had 1438 unique referrers from 970 unique IP’s. That particular domain has 114 pages. So that gives an average of 12.6 unique referrers per page within one week.

SOOOOO, if the average unique referrers is 12.6  per page and the average domain has 273 pages, that would be 3440 unique referrers to try to figure out what to say to get the maximum conversions for each referrer. Now if you try to analyze just where the referrer came from geographically and it only took you 4 seconds to do that, you’d be looking at 13,760 seconds or 229.3 hours. Considering Mother Nature only allows each of us a total of 168 hours per week, that wouldn’t leave much time for eating, sleeping or bumping uglies with the old life partner now would it? Even foregoing all those creature comforts, you’d still be getting behind more  than 60 hours a week. YIKES!

My point is simply that if you lack the bandwidth, technical ability and financial wherewithal to automate the entire analytical process based on selected criteria, then pay someone,(even if it’s you), to read the reports and THEN modify pages to enable you to split test a vast variety of displayed content, you ain’t gonna make it brother!

If you do lack any of those things, then join the club. Pretty much all of us that have not gone public lack at least some of those resources. So what are our options?

#1. Throw as much bullshit content and bullshit links at as many pages as our auto generator will belch out and be satisfied with a .02% conversion ratio, (which in this guru’s opinion is the major problem with the web today. The old, “if one is good, then a million must be better philosophy).

#2. Be satisfied with building a web business at the speed of height, never really knowing what to change when or where, but always believing that if you just keep adding quality, original content,(whatever the hell that is), somehow you will magically win the day and eventually get financially rewarded for all your hard work and devotion,(hahahahahaha. Sometimes I crack myself up).

#3. Eliminate the noise. Forget about all the stuff that consumes too much time or too much money and pinpoint what you can get fast and cheap and then focus on that to double your conversions. Once you have doubled your conversion ratio, THEN figure out your margin and go get more of the same traffic. 

If you go for #3, all you really have to do is 2 simple things. Know what the referrer was, (the search term or where they came from such as a forum post, a blog, a newsletter, email, etc.), and what language they speak, (and even that is not as important as the referrers). Then show them what they expected to see when they got to your page.

The 3 Second Back Button Boogie

That’s it. I call it, eliminating the 3 second back button boogie.

Just by following this simple process, I have increased specific pages conversions from single digits to over 70% !

All you have to do is track your referrers so you know what your prospect was looking for and then show them that SPECIFIC content within 3 seconds of them hitting your page. That alone can increase your conversions dramatically.

I’m not suggesting cloaking. I’m suggesting simple ad delivery or content management. The same thing major sites do when they know what IP you are coming from. Besides, when it comes to me running a legal business for my benefit and the benefit of my clients, guck foogle and the horse they rode in on!

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>disclaimer<

Guck foogle is a fictional phrase devised in the twisted mind of a fictional character and any association to any past or present actual persons or entities either living or dead, is unfortunate.

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In my next post, I intend to discuss exactly what the 3 second back button boogie is and how to avoid it using a unique philosophy and a cool little tool I’m going to soon release as a free open source project.

 

Peach Y’all

Da Guru

 

Some pretty cool reference reading

SEO Bounce Rates, Behavioral Metrics and the Birth of SEO Surfbot Nets

Sphinn Discussion

 

 

 

If you kids don’t quit jumpin on that bed I’m gonna git my belt and come in there and give you something to jump about!  

 

I don’t believe the customer is always right. I believe as humans, we are all capable of being wrong at any time about anything. In an environment as ambiguous as the misnomer many refer to as SEO, the potential for mistakes is virtually boundless.

BUT, I do believe you can win the battle and lose the war. You can convince a customer that you are right and he is wrong but trust me, you very likely just lost that customer.

The smart thing to do is LISTEN to what they are demanding until you understand their concerns and then deliver!

When dealing with demanding clients it is easy to become frustrated and it is only human nature to blame the client as the cause of your frustration. The truth is that YOU are the reason the customer is being demanding in the first place.

If any reasonable client is demanding, it is only because they are expecting something they thought you could deliver. Why did they think you could deliver it? Because YOU gave them that impression in the first place.

I’m ashamed to admit that I failed to take my own advice. You don’t become a guru by always being right. You are able to teach only by sharing the mistakes and failures as well as the successes.

I was fortunate to have a client late last year that was demanding and completely honest and professional. We tried hard to satisfy his demands but the truth is I lacked the quality resources I he was expecting and that was my fault.

Until I had the chance to work with him, I thought I did have the quality. I had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to better than my direct competitors and I did that. My mistake was in thinking that was good enough.

I forgot I wasn’t selling my services to my competitors, I was selling them to a person who made their expectations very clear, was 100% open and frank about their expectations and I was the one who didn’t hear him.

I spent over two months trying hard to understand what he was telling us in plain English but to my great disappointment, I didn’t “get it” until it was too late and this client, who could have been a huge boost for my business, had lost faith and given up on trying to help me and he canceled.

Only after he canceled did I really put forth the effort to understand. He and I had an arrangement that could have been EXTREMELY beneficial to us both and I knew that if he canceled, he wasn’t being demanding, he was trying incredibly hard to get me to understand and perform at the level he believed I was capable of from the beginning.

The ONLY issue he ever had was over the quality of my Indian content developers when they were producing articles, blog posts etc. I would look and each time convince myself the content was far better than my Indian counterparts and think that was good enough. I was wrong.

I am very disappointed in myself that I failed this person. He deserved better. But I am grateful that it made me finally understand.

I’ve since spent a sizeable sum of money and resources to set up a completely different set of procedures and it taught me a lesson I’ve been preaching to you about all along.

I hired as good of talent as I could find in Ahmedabad, THEN I set up an editorial department back in the states. Now everything that gets written by our content developers in India gets sent to an American editor who reads the entire document and corrects any grammatical as well conceptual errors against American English standards.

This takes a great deal of more time and money but the quality is now excellent. Every time.

And do you know what I found? All the extra time and expense is not an expense at all because I learned AGAIN, that one quality article/post/blog is worth 100 automated ones. One piece of excellent quality content is worth more than 50 posts that are better than my competitors.  

Had I not been brought to task by this demanding client, I have no idea how long I would have kept disappointing clients who were less vocal about their expectations. But thanks to him, we are already seeing increased satisfaction from our clients, increased traffic from improved placements and increased conversions from better content!

I know it sounds trite but I’m telling you the truth from experience,(and of course experience is what you get when you’re expecting something else); -------

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BAD CUSTOMER !

When you find yourself getting frustrated and defensive with a demanding client, stop and think for just a moment and try to avoid the mistake I made. Those demanding clients are the best and they are trying very hard to help you! Those are the ones you NEED to satisfy and the all the rest come easy.

 

Peach Y’all

Da guru

 

 

 

Stop Jumpin on the damn bed or I’ll come in there with my belt and give you sumpin to jump about!                           

I’d say one of the biggest problems SEOs struggle with is that it is all about rankings and traffic, rather than conversions. It’s easy to keep focusing on trying to work the extremes to bring in more visitors when the time might be better spent on ensuring you’re doing better to convert your existing visitors.

Danny Sullivan  Internet Consulting firm Calafia

 

I can understand the world paying little attention  to my soapbox preaching about the need for conversions as the ONLY metric of value, BUT when someone in the search marketing industry of Danny Sullivan’s caliber says it, maybe it’s time the world realized the winds of change are blowing.

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How Small a Part SEO Plays In Getting a New Site to Dominate SERPs

I have a VERY strict policy of never revealing clients placements or the strategies/techniques I use for their online marketing to a third party without the express permission of my client.  What you and I do is our business and no one else’s. How would you feel if you knew that a competitor had called me and I discussed you and your business with them? Wouldn’t trust me much would you?

With that said, I hope it comes through on my blog that my intention is not to make myself look smart,(I’m pretty sure that’s obvious at least), or just to toot my own horn.  It is to offer real, from the trenches advise on how to get results in a complicated, information overloaded environment.

That is not to say I don’t attempt to market myself and Techndu.  I just do it a little differently because I really do believe the more you give, the more you get.  The secret to giving details in terms of generating business for yourself  is  the more details you give, the more sense it makes to outsource the difficult or unappealing processes to someone better suited to the task.

So, I’m going to share a question I got from a client last week because I think it is a topic that deserves more air time than it gets and I also think few actually know some of the things that I have tested and proven to myself and my clients. I think I can help but I can’t divulge the client or their site or their target terms. Sorry.

The SEO Guru helped put the Sandbox debate to bed well over a year ago with this post:

http://massa.techndu.com/2007/08/19/FinallyTheSandboxDebateIsDEADAndTheSEOGuruKilledIt.aspx

But there still remains the challenge of how to get a brand new site trusted enough to start ranking for it’s top tier terms and how to do it fast. 

Question for the Week of September 25th, 2008

I need to get an estimated time frame and hours estimate for a brand new website. 

My brother is a salesperson for a city Based Moving Company and he is looking to bring in additional leads on his own…separate from the main website. 

I plan to create a website for him and then want to and optimize it for the following list of keywords:

City movers

city moving companies

city mover

city moving company

city state movers

movers in city

city state movers

moving companies in city

moving companies city

moving company city state

city local movers

city st  moving companies

 I know this is a pretty competitive market so I want to see if you think we could get top ranking for a brand new website and how long you think it may take.

 Thanks

 

Hi David. I'm the only one in the office today due to a holiday here in India called Uttarayan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttarayana. It's a kite flying celebration and EVERYONE closes and flies kites for two days!

Anyway, I have a LOT of experience with this type of challenge and actually played a pretty big role in dis-spelling the myth that there was a sandbox. I know a little secret that can get the site producing from brand new to generating traffic within a matter of 8 to 12 weeks.

Secret #1 is to register the domain for more than 1 year. At least 3
Secret #2 is to get people searching for the target

You can expect about 400 -600 hours taking a minimum of 2-3 months. If the budget is there the best option is 200 hours per month so that it is pretty well established and trusted within 3 months but if that is too much strain on the budget then it still works at 50 or 100 hours a month it just takes more months to reach the same objective. Anyway you do it,  you're looking at about 400 -600 hours online/offline.

Also you need to figure some $1500 - $2000 for hi end directory submissions. Yahoo/ business.com and about 50 or so other paid directories.

the trick to getting people to search for the company is to NOT think SEO and instead think marketing. keep in mind I know NOTHING about the company or it's goals so these things I'm about to mention are only examples for the purpose of illustration.

Get  your name and a very strong offer in front of as many people as possible and make it ONLY available from the website.
Here are a couple of things I've done with clients in the past that worked VERY well

we gave away $200 to local high school seniors that we termed most valuable player of the week and  we would announce the winner on the site every Monday. Then we would give the award AND MAKE SURE THE PRESS WAS THERE. At first we had to shoot our own photos and interview ourselves and write the stories and send it to the papers and all local and neighborhood publications including shoppers and weeklies but within 4 weeks the press was always there. We did a 15 week campaign and by the end of the 15 weeks not only were they getting some 2000 hits EVERY monday, they won some award from the Chamber of commerce, (getting front page press again), and they were placed #1 on dozens of keywords and dominated their local market.

another one we did was for a  extermination business. They gave away a trip to cozumel to the person who could guess the temperature of a Caribbean resort the day their house was to be scheduled for the  spraying because you had to be out of your house for several hours when they sprayed so the idea was why not take a vacation on us while you have to be gone anyway.

All they did to advertise was put flyers on bulletin boards at grocery stores and they took a booth at a home show.  Within one year they became the undisputed leader for pest control services in a market of about 2 million.

I should also mention that they also offered a healthy referral program and set up an email system to send b day greetings and they started a blog about the benefits of pest control by educating people on what to look for to keep bugs and rodents out and not spreading disease. VERY EFFECTIVE ! Several of those articles got picked up online and off.

So, that is the trick. If people start searching for a specific term or company name that is NOT in the index, trust me, the search engine will start looking for it and put it in! Once it becomes trusted, it will start placing for target terms. This process doesn’t take long either. Especially in local markets.

Massa

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I had suspected that in a “family deal”, there may be some low end expectations in terms of investment and sure enough, the next day I got this response.

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Hi Massa,

Thank you very much for the information.  I will have to get with my brother on this, but I think we will probably have to take much longer on this one because he cannot put that much money into it up front.  So it might be a year long project as opposed to getting rankings within 3.4 months. 

Thanks

I figured that David. That's why I mentioned the offline stuff.  If you can think of low cost things to get people hunting you, that is going to cut those online hours needed to about half. I mean it's close to impossible to give solid numbers like 400 hours or cut in half  but the more things you can do that gets people searching for you the less you need the online hours.

What I suggest is  to come up with 2-3 plans of how to get people hunting for you, (I had a friend in Scotland a few years back that went around Edinburgh putting post it notes in toilets that said BEWARE! and his url. He had over 2000 hits in a week), then do the paid directory submissions then pay us to handle the on site stuff like titles and H tags and that COULD be all it takes.

sponsor a local special ed sports team in the special Olympics

shoot moving videos and get them on you tube and then promote it locally

give coupons to local churches and have them  mention you in their newsletters

Actually, I believe the best advice I can give ANYBODY is

Think more marketing – less SEO

That is actually the secret to traffic AND conversions

 

Peach Y’all

The anti seo-SEO Guru

 

 

 

Your gonna go blind if ya don’t quit sittin so close to that TV damnit!

 

                                                                     If you think Education is expensive – you should try ignorance

 

As I promised a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to attempt pull back the shroud of mystery that is so often associated with highly complex mathematical concepts to a point that even marketers and Canadians can understand them.

I learned long ago that sometimes simple concepts the human mind can conceive, turn into a VERY complicated programs when turning that concept into an actual working algorithm. If you are not a scientist involved with Information Retrieval, (IR), then reading the patents and white papers can leave you feeling confused and intimidated.

So, what I do is read the text of those white papers and patents, (skipping all the math formulas and illustrations), read what some others whom I respect say about those papers, then devise my own testing process derived from I THINK I understand and try it out. Once I prove to myself that I have the “gist” of the concept as it applies to what is important to me, (usually organic, relevant traffic generation),  I’m satisfied that I understand the concept well enough to capitalize and profit from it. It’s not as hard as some might have you believe.

Today, the "Dumb It Down" anti seo-SEO Guru will de-mystify:

Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI has been around for much longer than you’d think. In fact, LSA, (latent semantic analysis), was patented in 1988. But I became aware of it from a man I was lucky enough to call a friend. A very smart man and one of those IR scientist guys I mentioned earlier. He was VERY involved in LSI research and application and he was the one who helped me understand it at a high level and then apply it at a low level. In my experience, when you can learn it high and apply it low, it usually means $.

His name is Edel Garcia. I haven’t seen him around in a while so I’ve kind of lost touch with him but he still has a great site covering this and related topics and while possibly a little dated, it is still very good foundation kind of info.

http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/svd-lsi-tutorial-4-lsi-how-to-calculations.html  

Ok, let’s get started.

One of my favorite sites about LSI is http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm

let's say we use LSI to index our collection of mathematical articles. If the words n-dimensional, manifold and topology appear together in enough articles, the search algorithm will notice that the three terms are semantically close. A search for n-dimensional manifolds will therefore return a set of articles containing that phrase (the same result we would get with a regular search), but also articles that contain just the word topology. The search engine understands nothing about mathematics, but examining a sufficient number of documents teaches it that the three terms are related. It then uses that information to provide an expanded set of results with better recall than a plain keyword search.

Ignorance is Bliss

Before we discuss the theoretical underpinnings of LSI, it's worth citing a few actual searches from some sample document collections.

• In an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president's name at all.
• Looking for articles about Tiger Woods in the same database brings up many stories about the golfer, followed by articles about major golf tournaments that don't mention his name. Constraining the search to days when no articles were written about Tiger Woods still brings up stories about golf tournaments and well-known players.
• In an image database that uses LSI indexing, a search on Normandy invasion shows images of the Bayeux tapestry - the famous tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the town of Bayeux, followed by photographs of the English invasion of Normandy in 1944.

 

Cool ? Not too long of a stretch to grasp huh? BUT what does that tell you about how to build your pages so that you start generating converting traffic from organic results?

I’m going to give you several links at the end of this post that displays a wide variety of explanations, definitions and opinions that all give you as much depth and insight into the topic as you want to dig for. But when you start looking for what all those definitions mean as it applies to making your competitors suck SERP wind, the list gets pretty short. That’s what I’m trying to help with.

I’ve read most of them, as painful as many are, and I can save the majority of readers a lot of time and teeth grinding. Boiling all the information down into workable solutions is the key and to do that you don’t need to be a scientist or mathematician. You just have to use your common sense and realize that all these papers were written too satisfy some personal agenda of the author and we can all be pretty sure that agenda had little to do with OUR success.

So, bottom line, what does all the self serving information tell us as online marketers?

STAY ON MESSAGE!

That’s right. Perhaps millions of words online describing a pretty basic process and it all comes down to 3 words. Stay on message.

I understand how difficult it is to plan out an entire site for the long term. Things change and experience is what we get when we were expecting something else. So even though I am a big supporter of planning and developing objectives and strategies, I’m making it even easier than that. You can do it on a page by page basis and simply spend five minutes thinking about what the new page is about, what is it’s purpose what words best serve that purpose and then stay on message.

It is really not that different than talking to a few people at the same time. If you had the attention of say half a dozen people for 10 minutes and your objective was to get them to buy a couple of raffle tickets, you may spend a little time talking about the charity you were pitching, maybe a little time talking about yourself to establish trust but the majority of the time you would spend talking about the benefits of them buying the tickets. Why? So they associate the benefits with the product. ASSOCIATE. That’s a big word when it comes to LSI.

Assuming someone in the group raised their hand and asked a question about some other charity? Would you talk about THAT charity and their benefits? Why would you want to point out the benefits of a different charity? It would confuse the people you just convinced about the benefits of YOUR charity.

Would you talk about the other charity trying to make them look bad? Again, buy talking about them instead of you, you risk someone disagreeing with you and you lose affinity with them.

So what is the best route? STAY ON MESSAGE.

It’s the same with web pages and online content. The only difference is you are not using a vocal medium, you are using a textual and graphical medium.

So you use the alt tags for graphics to associate words to serve your purpose. You use heading tags, titles, anchor text in links both interior and exterior. You think about what words you want to be put together by the search engine and by the humans reading the words and     STAY ON MESSAGE. If you are talking about plastic surgery, don’t start talking about plastic car parts. Use medical terms, use anatomical terms, use common words and phrases that paint a mental picture of the target topic.

The next page you build you can talk about anything else you want but on that page, again, talk only about one thing. Use as many words as you like,(the less words you use to get the message clear in the readers mind the better BTW), but only talk about that one thing.

That’s it. I could elaborate but there is really no need. If you don’t understand staying on topic or if you suffer from ADD or some other affliction that hinders your concentration or focus, then you should seek professional help, but for the mast vajority of us wanting to make a buck online, just focus and stay on message.

 

Peach Y’all

The Anti-seo SEO Guru

References

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis

www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm

lsa.colorado.edu/papers/dp1.LSAintro.pdf

www.freshpatents.com/Scalable-probabilistic-latent-semantic-analysis-dt20071011ptan20070239431.php

 

 

 

Don’t eat your lunch before you get to school. You won’t have anything to trade for something better and you’ll go hungry!