Google Launches Another attack on Link Pimps.

Reports abound about another Google attack on the toolbar PR of those who persist in attempting to profit from the pimping and outright prostitution of paid link placement on prominent pages for the passing of link putty.

http://www.searchengineguide.com/robert-clough/search-engine-guide-publisher-responds-t.php

http://www.gregboser.com/toolbar-hysteria/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-drops-pagerank-for-many-sites-paid-links-or-new-algorithm/5890/

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015119.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/toolbar-pagerank-losses-for-hundreds-of-websites

Just to point to a few

{public notice}

NO LINKS IN THIS POST HAVE BEEN  PAID FOR, SOLICITED OR COMPENSATED FOR IN ANY WAY. PLEASE, PLEASE BELIEVE ME MY DOG IS HANGING BY A THREAD AS IT IS

*********************************

I Have Solid Proof!

That little green bar deserves all the attention it gets and I have solid proof!

Back in '02 my site, my baby, Searchking got whacked. It went from an 8 to a four. Now, here comes the spooky part.

The very next week my car had a flat! Coincidence ? HA! I think not!

Then, not having learned my lesson and still persisting in making a public nuisance of myself with PR publicity, my 4 got zapped to a 0. A ZERO! Well guess what? Within just 4 months I had to have a rectal exam and was left with no other options than to have a colonoscopy! Now if that doesn't convince you, well, you must just be refusing to see the finger in the dyke.

Seriously ----

Kids, the point of my being so facetious is that life goes on and if you are spending time right now, looking at, reading about, worrying about or being overly concerned with page rank in any shape or form, but especially the PR displayed in the toolbar, then your time is being mis-spent. Few people in the history of the internet have been dealt a harsher hand in regards to page rank drop for any reason let alone for the specific reason of selling links than I have. 

Fewer still have so obsessed over the penalty to take it to the lengths I did. After month after month and thousands of dollars spent, the one thing I learned above all other things is that life goes on. I don't see how my loss of page rank could have been anymore public or discussed at greater length and guess what? I didn't die, my car's flat got fixed and in regards to my colonoscopy, everything came out all right. 

I continued making money, I did not go out of business, and the only bad things that happened, I caused myself.

I realize that I am just a guy whose opinion has little impact and probably deserves less. But I am a guy that has lived through what many seem to think is the worst that can happen and all I can tell you is -- it ain't that bad.

Income Dependent on PR

If your income is dependent solely on what the toolbar says and the distance from left to right has shortened, then you are going to have to make a decision to either accept total defeat and try to get your old job back or buck up, evaluate your situation and move forward. If you choose the latter, then your time is much better spent thinking about your business and how to capitalize on the resources you have than it is spent on complaining, theorizing or especially worrying about page rank. I know it's easier said than done, but that is the truth and the real winners are going to be those who can see it.

We are all free to believe who and what we want but I'm telling you, PR, as we know it, means very little in terms of your business potential or even your placement potential. Page Rank was, (and still is), a brilliant marketing ploy but it's not your marketing ploy.

Links Have Great Value

Links have great value for a broad range or reasons. Page rank has very little if any. Sales and profit margins are all that matter. Links can help with that. Page Rank can not. Sales and profits, (or losses), are a reality. Page Rank is a perception.

I'd like to make one more observation. The more effort put forth on controlling the perception of page rank, the more perceived value it will have.

The word for the day -- hosted content.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled F.U.D.

Peace Y'all

The SEO Guru

If something has value, you should be prepared to pay for that value. There is nothing inherently wrong or dishonest with free-to-submit directories. In theory, you get a listing, (or at least a review), free of charge because the directory is getting data to fill it’s directory providing value to it’s users. The trick here is not giving up your data AND still getting spammed beyond recognition.

Pay for listing or review is also not inherently bad. Keeping in mind that most review sites only came to be to satisfy a misguided demand for page rank which no one can guarantee except Google. The trick here is knowing what the value is and whether you will get a positive return for your fee.

Only you can decide what you are willing to pay and feel good about but I can tell you the ones worth paying the most for are the ones that can actually send you some traffic that converts. That has always been and will always be.

Auto  directory submissions aren’t worth much and you’ll get submitted to a lot of directories that will make you realize you can get something for free and still be ripped off.

BUT, I believe there are a LOT of directories that can do your site some good in a lot of ways and even the worst ones you submit to will do you no good but they won’t hurt you either. I’ve submitted a lot of sites to a lot of directories a lot of different ways and I don’t know of a single site being penalized because it was submitted to or listed in any directory.

The FREE Directory Submission Process

I’ve put a lot of stock into directory submissions long before Yahoo started charging for reviews and DMOZ was still little more than a sparkle in Rich Skrenta’s eye.  SearchKing was actually born in 97 when Jude Lacour and I first partnered on a directory after meeting at the Warriors forum, (http://www.warriorforum.com).  I can’t even remember the name of the engine we built now.  WebWombat or some such nonsense.  

 This was long before Jude became a very wealthy man in the pharmaceutical industry and I became the grandfather of the link brokering industry. Still wondering if I made the right choice. But I digest. Like I said, I have a LOT of experience with directories and there are some who say experience is what you get when you are looking for something else. Whatever ----- experience I have loads of.

Directories, (especially niche directories), have always played a vital role in the development and direction of the web. In my opinion they still do.

There is the perception within the SEO community that selling links degraded the value of a large number of directories and while there are some good ones;  many, a great many, deserve to be devalued and even punished by Google  and that submitting to the “bad” ones will do no good and may even cause harm.

Recently there have been reports about directories getting busted en masse thus indicating there is no longer any value to promoting your site to free directories or paying for a review.

http://www.seobook.com/what-do-you-call-yourself

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-makes-a-good-web-directory-and-why-google-penalized-dozens-of-bad-ones

IS THE PARTY OVER FOR DIRECTORIES?

Even the undisputed king of link Eric Ward, (http://www.ericward.com), has recently stated on The SearchReturn Discussion List:

> As hard as it is for the hundreds of no-name general directories
to accept, the recent devaluing of their links has been predicted
by those of us old timers for years.   Frankly, I hope they have
saved any money they made, because the party is over.<

Eric Ward is very smart, been around forever, proven his ability many times over and mostly he is one of those people that when they speak, smart webmasters listen and listen carefully. I have nothing but the utmost respect for him and as much as I hate to, I kind of disagree with the party being over thing.

I would agree that a lot of old-timers, (such as myself), have predicted the downfall as a business model of directories that were set up simply to capitalize on the links for page rank hysteria, but I don’t see just being a no-name general directory as being any reason to call a cab to take me home from the dead party.

The fact is there have always been a LOT of little known directories and the industry just keeps getting bigger. There have always been great ones, good ones, ones nobody cared much about and ones that were the very definition of spam crap. But there are a great many little no-name directories that I believe do provide some value worthy of a small effort and/or financial investment. Especially ones that are specific to a location or topic.

Whether the party is over or not, the point remains that there are and always have been, (and likely always will be), directories that would do you some good and some that wouldn’t.  Some are free and some are paid for a listing or a review.  Some send traffic, some pass a little juice, some do both and some do none of the above. So the big question becomes do we ignore them or submit to them and if we decide they really do provide some marketing value, how do we determine which ones are worth what?

About 3 years ago, after the 3,000th or so SEO blog or forum post about a top 100 directory list I had seen, I decided to instruct some of my staff to do our own reviews and compile a database of what we referred to as “premium” directories that we then sold to clients as a premium submission service and charged a premium rate.  

We followed what could be considered the conventional criteria for determining quality.  Age of site, PR, quality of listings, number or listings, whether they were for real or just hustling your email or begging for a backlink, etc. We used a scoring system of 1 thru 5 with 5 being the highest.  Anything below a 3 we discarded and just threw back into the cheap, fast, automated submit pile.

The thing I found odd was that clients bought the service because they didn’t want to take the time to do their own reviews, that is smart business BUT many of them didn’t mind reviewing every one we submitted to. I’m sure it has something to do with how as humans the fear of not getting as good a deal as we MIGHT have is a great motivator after the fact. We won’t take the time to do it ourselves but we’ll certainly take the time to check to make sure we aren’t being cheated by the people we pay to do the job for us. Maybe that is only as it should be. Whatever.  That is how it is.

Over time we started to realize that it really didn’t seem to matter much in terms of benefit to the target site. The directories that one client would complain about did as much good as the one that another client loved.  So, we just kept adding to the list until finally we dropped the premium tag and just hand submitted to the entire list by charging for the number of submissions the client ordered because we were simply basing the fees on the time it took.

SHIFTING FROM PAGE RANK TO TRUST RANK

Then about 2 years ago, I started seeing some fundamental changes in the search engine placement landscape. I could see the focus was shifting from Page Rank to Trust Rank. http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=426

The more things we could do that could instill trust in a target site or term the better.  Links were as important as ever but we could see that HOW they were important was changing.

Now we get into a little of the “Art” of SEO. Art being basically another term for “my opinion”. The art of seo is about taking what you see and using all resources available to you, including the many successes and failures of the past, using them to make educated guesses and being right a lot more than you are wrong.

If you were a search engine engineer, would you expect the average webmaster to promote his site by submitting to relevant directories?  My answer is yes and that is the primary reason I believe niche directories have value in promoting a website online.

If you were a search engine engineer which would you trust more? A site that had been submitted to 3,000 directories all the same day or a site that had been submitted to a relevant category in a few niche directories over a period of time?

My gut tells me that any reasonably intelligent person, or even a programmer, would expect any webmaster to look for and submit to directories that were even remotely relevant to their site or term.  To my mind, NOT submitting to relevant directories would raise more red flags than seeing links coming from directories that were related to the theme of the site. As long as it was pretty obvious that the submission was not automated, (hundreds in minutes is a pretty good clue to automation), that the webmaster had taken some time to “select” this particular directory and this particular category and as long as it had a reasonable title and description, it was an indication that this person was simply trying to promote their site without trying to spam anyone.

So, whether it’s free or paid for review, taking the time to select an “appropriate” directory and category that you feel could benefit your site, writing a proper title and description that indicates you care what someone reading  it would think of your site and doing these things on a schedule that a human could actually do is not only a good way to promote your site on a virtually non –existent budget but I also think it helps to build a little trust in your site. It is natural, logical and should be done because it is kind of like online promotion  101.

Ahhh, but whose got the time? Doing all this is no doubt time consuming and in my opinion, the debate should not be about whether directories have value, rather it should be, “is it worth it?”

So, I built my service to slow down, select only directories that meet the “premium” criteria and manually submit based on:

#1. The relevance to the target sites overall theme  

#2. The client’s selected keyword/phrases, (we use our own little premium database to do exact match searches)

#3. To submit varying titles and descriptions by hand to compliment the specific directory

#4. Spread the submissions over a 30 day period

Because of the time it takes, I’m not the cheapest but remember, there is hardly anything in the world that another man can’t produce with less quality and sell for less. For those who consider price alone, they are that man’s legal prey.

Be warned that submitting your site to 250 directories is not going to magically whisk your site to #1. It helps and should be done as a basic promotional step like I mentioned but it is just another brick in the wall.

We’re  just about ready to release my little premium directory database and make it available to the public. That will pretty much kill the directory submission industry but to be honest there are better things to focus on that produce better results faster.

That takes care of the free directories, or as we call it, the DSP.

Next I think I’ll cover what we call “the bible”. It’s the on page stuff that we have turned into a process that we perform on every site every time. After we do those things THEN we can get creative. It will probably bore the heck out of most of you, but The Guru feels it is somewhat obligatory.

 

Damnit! Quit jumpin on that bed!

Peace Y’all

 

The SEO Guru

 

In my last post The Process of SEO or An American Werewolf in India, I said I would continue the series by discussing the DSP, ( Directory Submission Process),  and I will but I actually should have started this series of detailing how one can take the Art of SEO and turn it into SEO processes that can be monitored, managed and reproduced for a greatly reduced cost discussing design and functionality. You’d be surprised how many websites have come to me looking for SEO when  one quick look at the site and you instantly know that #1’s all over the place isn’t going to sell heaters to Eskimos from this site.

Keep in mind that we are all free to believe what we want to believe. You don’t have to pay heed to me or listen to anyone about anything for that matter. However, the whole purpose of The Guru writing this blog is to show anyone interested exactly how I do that voodoo that I do so well.

I tell everyone what I do, how I do it, why I do it and I tell the truth. Anyone that wants to take the time is free to do it too.  I give away my secrets because basically, the truth is, there are no secrets. SEO is about common sense, experience, focus and hard work. There are some little nuances that come from a basic ability and a lot of trial and error, (what is commonly referred to as the ART of SEO), but all-in-all, if I can do it, ANYONE can do it given the drive and motivation.

The reason I am so open about my processes is not that I’m trying to save the world by giving away for free what should be paid for. It is certainly true that anyone reading this can duplicate my processes and expect the same results, BUT, the reason I’m so open is because it is good business.

The more people that realize just what kind of effort and resources it really takes to effectively promote a business online, the more likely I am to have some of those people realize that in business it is often smarter to simply let someone with the experience and resources just get the job done than it is to spend their time learning new things, (that part sucks. I know I hate it), investing in the infrastructure and shifting their focus from running their business to learning the art of SEO.

So, you may look at your site in a whole new light after reading this or maybe not. But it doesn’t matter if you decide your design is perfect or you feel it is lacking and you take it upon yourself to rectify the situation or hire an expert , the fact remains

A Good Design Is Worth More Than All the #1’s Google Can Give You 

Ila Trevedi http://outsource.techndu.com/meet_your_new_employees.html  was the very first person we hired in the SEO department  when we set up in India. She’s a creative, skilled designer that  understands the objective of a commercial website and how important it is to not make the visitor think. 

 We hired a couple of coders first to develop some custom spidering goodies and a couple of hot rod database apps, but  the designer came any other SEO staff or even marketing suits  because the very first step to making a sale online is not being in Google. It is having a website that looks and feels like it should to make the sale.

A decent, effective design doesn’t have to be any big or elaborate production. It doesn’t have to be expensive and it doesn’t have to take months.  It just has to be right. Clean and clear.

If you ‘re not making sales from your site and you look at yours and compare it to other sites in your niche and you think your site looks as good as theirs, do yourself a favor and let somebody else look at it.  In my 11 years of looking at sites that look like a third graders ransom note, a better design is the easiest thing to implement and the hardest thing to sell. I never have been able to figure that one out.

Be that as it may, the design is the MOST important aspect of online promotion. I understand that it is an abstract concept and that there is no set rule for what a good design is, but you can be assured that there are people who see it and if you are not one of those people, get someone who is.  

For all the things I owe a debt of gratitude to Aaron Wall,(http://www.seobook.com ), for, getting me to read Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug has to rank right up at the top. If you’re not selling from your site, then consider your design and functionality carefully. If you feel your design needs upgrading then either hire someone competent to do the job for you or  GO READ THE BOOK!  http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0789723107

Enough about design.  If you don’t get it, then my discussing the topic at greater length will do little to change your viewpoint. That is really a shame for many of you who feel :

The web is against you and nothing you try works

you’ve been ripped off by seo when in fact your placements DID improve

you should just be satisfied with conversion rates that barely make you enough money to pay your hosting fees

Oh well, my next installment will be about the Directory Submission Process or

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF SUBMITTING TO DIRECTORIES EVEN AFTER GOOGLE HAS SPANKED A FEW OF THEM WITH THE MONKEY STICK?

 

You kids turn that TV down! Are ya Deaf??

 

Peace Y’all

The Guru

After my last post about the Art and Science of SEO, I got an email from a Mr Tyler DeWitt of http://www.dewittsmedia.com/seo-blogs/ asking me some questions about setting up an outsourcing company in India. As luck would have it his question fit in nicely with my plan to write about the SEO processes I set up and why I moved the entire operation to India. So, with Tyler’s permission,(complete with his ads and phone number BTW), I’ll post his questions and my response here as the second in the series about building the ART OF SEO into a scientific process.

QUESTION ABOUT SETTING UP AN OUTSOURCING OPERATION FROM DEWITT MEDIA
Hey this is Tyler Dewitt I know Aaron, and Jim pretty well. I actually never even heard of you I read about you on Aaron blogs, but anyways I notice your moving to india. I was wanting to ask you a few question what do you think of out sourcing work to india the reason I ask is because I plan on flying over there one day and setting up out source companies for the us to India. Which not to many people will know about it as I speak I have a few people over there now, but I'm thinking of building it pretty large, or as large as I can.

 

What do you think of that you seem to have been around for awhile. I know that it's a pretty big thing now days, also I seen john scott on your blogroll I know him to he offered me a job over in toyko, but I  urned it down awhile back. Anyways you think that's a good field to get into from your experience cause I notice a big majority of IT companies are out sourcing which its not talked about that much, but if I was to out source I would build the companies under our company and not outsource to other companies if you get what I'm saying.

Tyler Dewitt (CEO of DeWitt's Media Company)

765-274-6877

Rank Higher in the Search, Buy Contextual Links Now!

<http://www.dewittsmedia.com/pages/contextual-links/buy-contextual-links.php
Subscribe to my RSS feed and learn how I achieved top competitive rankings in 5 1/2 months you can subscribe by e-mail
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or rss feed <http://www.dewittsmedia.com/seo-blogs/feed>.

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Ok for the first question:
>what do you think of out sourcing work to india<

Well, obviously I think it is good enough that I would endure multiple 30+ hour plane rides complete with body cavity searches and rectal probes,(be fore-warned though, the rectal probes cost extra), malaria, typhoid fever, salmonella and just the weirdness of sticking out like a raisin in a bowl of milk to be able to do it.

>Anyways you think that's a good field to get into from your experience cause I notice a big majority of IT companies are out sourcing which its not talked about that much,<

Yes, a lot of IT companies are outsourcing.

I don’t know that I would say a majority but there is no question there are a lot. 

The trick is that you have to have two things to really make it worth it. First you need the volume.

In the US, any programmer with even a Bachelor’s degree is going to cost about $40,000 per year. At that salary you can be pretty sure the employee is gone at the first job offer that pays $40,005. You are paying the least and of course there are exceptions to the rule but the rule remains you get what you pay for. In terms of talent, education, focus, loyalty and just about every other aspect of a good employee.

In India $8000 a year is a good job. $1000 a month is a GREAT job and you are now interviewing people with Master’s degrees and 3+ years experience. $24,000 a year and you have the best of the best.

There are also cultural differences that provide benefits to an employer. Again, I’m speaking in generalities and every culture or country has it’s good, bad and ugly but as a rule, reputation means a lot to Indians. This fosters an environment of a little higher sense of duty and doing what you say you will do. There are certain accepted practices to leaving one job to start another that simply do not exist in the US job market.

So, yes, reduced salaries by as much as 50 to 70% can be very attractive BUT, when you still have to cover the expense of the travel, the rental for suitable, (suitable being a VERY subjective term), temporary living quarters, hiring reliable financial and legal counsel, the re-location of key organization people, the cost can still be prohibitive to some companies who do not have the revenue to justify spending several thousands of dollars to be able to save 60% on salaries.

A good way to look at what I mean is that if your total cost in labor last year was $100,000, (not counting your own salary of course unless you want to reduce that by 70% as well),and you can save $60,000 next year by moving the bulk of your labor requirements but it will cost some $40,000 to go there, get the counsel you need, set up an office, buy the furniture, interview and hire the people BUT,(and this is the big but), you only made a profit of $20,000 on sales of $200,000 last year, you can’t afford to save the $60,000 next year. 

That is why the first trick is you have to have a company with the volume to justify the initial expense of moving there and getting set up.

TO MAKE OUTSOURCING WORK, YOU NEED TO HAVE THE MANAGEMENT IN PLACE

The second trick is, you need someone you KNOW you can trust to be there to manage the operation. It’s not that you can’t trust the lower level staff members, it’s that with any new company there are a lot of things that need to be defined and without a strong leader/leaders in place that you are confident understand and share your vision, the whole train can easily take the wrong track.

In my case, I had worked with several people in India for over two years and I had started thinking of making the move a good year and a half before I mentioned it to anyone. I started doing things to kind of test certain people that I thought displayed management ability.

I found someone that I felt fit the bill and began a slow, tedious process of kind of grooming them to become my partner. I got lucky and found the right man for the job. Someone who has a high sense of ethics coupled with the education in management and the experience of running several large teams over the past 10 years.

I had considered moving someone from my Oklahoma staff there but no one was jumping at the opportunity to move 10,000 miles away to an exotic land that few knew much about. So, instead, I slowly started shifting more and more of the “process” I keep talking about to other companies over there. I was actually recruiting kind of.

So, if you have the volume and the management, (assuming you’re not prepared to go yourself and do it), then you just have a lot of problems to overcome BUT it can be a very good move. The thing to remember is not to be afraid of the problems. You are going to have those in India or in Oklahoma City. It still boils down to the same basic principles of business anywhere on the globe.

I’m very happy with my decision. I now have a staff of 18 for about 1/3 of what a staff of 7 was costing me before the move. I now have a staff that is motivated, well educated, focused and well managed. Amish Vyas, our SEO manager alone has a MBA from one of the most prestigious business schools in India as well as a Bachelors in electronics and telecommunications. http://outsource.techndu.com/meet_your_new_employees.html

Plus I am now able to rent out most of the office space we had in our building in Oklahoma City and reduce our cost in utilities, payroll taxes, health insurance and so forth. All in all, we have cut our expenses by more than 50% overall.

Of course I will have to travel to India at least twice a year and stay for 2 to 3 months at a time. That can be a hardship on some. For Kathi and I, we love it. We see it as an opportunity few others ever get to experience. We get to not only travel to but live in a place that is exotic and beautiful with a very old history that we can’t wait to explore and learn more about. What a life adventure! 

BEST OF ALL – WE’RE ACTUALLY LIVIN THE DREAM

With our laptops, our expert staff in India and our new Aircard 875U
http://laptoping.com/att-sierra-wireless-aircard-875u-usb-modem.html
We really can live the dream that most SEO’s have only talked about. We could run our business from the steps of the Taj Mahal, (we actually did do that We were surprised the Taj was so small. I always thought it was bigger ), to lying naked on the beach in some remote part of Tahiti, (yikes—there’s a mental NO ONE needs to see).

Next I’ll start describing the actual processes I’ve developed and why they work so well. I’ll start with the DSS or Directory Submission Service.




Ronnie! Quit picking your nose at the dinner table

Peace Y’all

From playing a guitar to painting the Mona Lisa to knowing how to get one website to place above all it’s competitors in a search engine, there are those who do these things so well that what they do could be considered an art. Results are produced that are beyond the norm in their particular fields and that gives them the reputation of an artist and it is well deserved.

These people become artists in their chosen field by applying the natural talent they have plus a lot of focus, dedication and hard work. When you want to hire these people to bring that ability to bear for your benefit, THAT is what you are paying for. Their talent, dedication to their craft and their experience all being applied to your business.

A great example of that talent and dedication making someone an artist is an interview with Michael Gray of http://www.wolf-howl.com/ (a blog well worth your time by the way). You can find the interview at http://www.linkjuicy.com/blog/michael-gray-interview-advanced-link-strategies/ and you will quickly get a feel for the difference from someone who can talk about links and someone who takes it to a level that can only be seen as an art.

By the way, http://www.linkjuicy.com is another great seo blog that is published by a man who is fast becoming an artist in his own right in the field of SEO interviews, Peter DaVanzo. Do yourself a favor if you have any interest in SEO or online marketing and make these blogs a part of your learning routine.

The science of SEO is more about proven techniques applied in a systematic way that can be assigned to software or staff and then monitored and managed. These techniques are meant to do the most good for the most sites with the least expense. The science is more about mass production where the art is more about custom solutions to specific sites.

Of course there are more ways to describe the art of SEO compared to the science but I’m referring to both strictly from a business online promotion perspective that should serve both the SEO selling services and the client trying to decide what he needs for the money he can afford to spend. 

Hiring an artist to provide SEO services can be expensive. I refuse to insinuate that the fees may be over-priced because it is difficult to put an across-the-board value on the artistic ability of those who truly possess that mixture of talent and in the trenches experience. When someone can truly practice their craft with stellar results for your specific business that is worth a lot. What would you pay if someone could actually double or triple your profits within 90 to 180 days? Well, that figure you just thought of is very likely a bargain.

Of course the artistic approach isn’t for everyone from either side. For my own experience, when I have taken on jobs where the client was paying for my undivided focus and expecting me to use all resources at my disposal to get the results they were wanting, I have to not only charge for my time but for the time of my staff as well as all the resources needed to support the entire operation.

I don’t really like the artistic approach to SEO for several reasons but the main negatives for me are having to charge enough to cover the expense of not only me devoting so much of my time to one client or one project putting my services beyond the reach of most small to medium size online businesses, but also because of the demands that exclusivity puts on me. I have always had a problem with authority figures and I simply don’t like anyone, (even clients), telling me what to do. Also when it comes to SEO and business, it is never enough. Every business always needs more traffic, more sales and more profits. Oh yeah and yesterdays success means very little today. It’s a lot of pressure and frankly I‘ve worked myself into a position where I just don’t have to do much I don’t want to do.

I much prefer the science as a process. To me the very definition of business is to find a demand for a value driven product or service that you can provide at a profit. Develop a set of procedures that can be managed to provide that product and service and then do it faster, cheaper and more efficiently. Once you have the process hitting the objective, just keep doing it. As long as it works for more people than it doesn’t, you have a solid business model.

The process allows you to offer a service that provides value to a much broader market at a greatly reduced cost expanding the market.

I still take on projects where the client is expecting, (and paying for), my artistic approach for the sole benefit of the client, but I am much happier training my staff to develop specific processes that produce value for the most clients at a very attractive rate.

Over the next few days I will be discussing the exact processes I have developed enabling my company to offer SEO services at a price that almost any business of any size can afford and expect to see positive results with. This will also give insight into how you too can set up the techniques that you know work way more often than they don’t into processes that can be easily duplicated and monitored reducing the cost of trying to perform those tasks on a site by site basis.

In other words, I’ll try to help you decide when you need the exclusive focus of an artist and  what you could expect to pay for such attention and the results that could bring, as opposed to developing a process for performing the tasks that bring small results time and time again. Do you want a lot once for a high price or a little a lot of times for a low cost?

Once I explain a few of the processes I have developed, (born out of the artistic approach turning it into a science), you’ll also understand why I made the move to India. What is significant about my decision to go to India to set up my company is in the way it deals with training staff and managing expenses to keep cost down. The online promotion industry is very competitive and finding the right price points can make all the difference in the world.

 

 

 

Y’all say hey to your mom’n’em for me

 

Peace Y’all  

The Guru had a comment from a rabid fan, (not to be mistaken for an AVID fan), to a post last week about how to find a good plumber or SEO. I was going to reply to the comment but as it turns out it is appropriate for the opening of the follow-up post I had planned to make today anyway. So, I'll use the comment and my reply as the foundation for the clarification I had wanted to post.

The comment was:

>I was expecting to find specifics on how to find a good, credible SEO based on your experience in the field. Coming from you, that would be golden!

Although this lists solid general rules for finding any reputable business I was hoping you'd tackle SEO specifically, with examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly SEOs out there. I know you're not afraid of a good argument, so why did you lay up from the last post to this one?

You're not getting soft on us, are you old man? <

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The Guru will address this comment specifically just a little further down in this post. For the moment I would like to point out that I've amassed quite a body of work over the last 11 years even though since the Google right-to-sell-my-own-links lawsuit, I rarely spoke publicly. Even before that, going back to my days of moderating at JimWorld for my dear friend Jim Wilson, (whom I still miss dearly), I always chose my battles carefully and tried to only speak out when I honestly felt I had something to contribute.

I rarely post without purpose. I try not to let emotion dictate my words and I usually have a strategy to hit a specific objective with every post I make. One reason I don't post more often is simply because it takes me so long for each one. Sometimes it can take me several days to have a purpose in mind and then write, edit and re-write until I'm confident I'm saying what I REALLY want to say. And often that is only for a brief reply.

I freely admit that I have a tendency to piss some people off when that is not the intent. It is just that I can be brutally honest and opinionated. That's a dangerous combination in anybody's book. Even so, if someone were to waste the time and look at every public remark I had made, I'm sure they could find several instances of justification, or clarification on my part, but I honestly don't think there would be a single instance of retraction or apology.

This latest series of posts, the slapping, the tips, and this one as a closer, is no different. I had a definite purpose in mind and it was not to simply offend a peer. This one happened to be two-fold but a purpose nonetheless.

My primary purpose was to attempt to sway the collective mindset of the online promotion industry from perpetuating a negative perception of the industry it serves and is served by. My secondary purpose was to actually do what I felt I could to help online business people feel more comfortable about seeking professional assistance in the face of such negative perception being promoted by the people within the very industry itself for little more than a few cheap links.

As to the primary objective, I have been reading for a long, LONG time how SEO is chock full of con men and incompetents, (the number usually thrown about was 90%) by some of the most well known and widely read figures within the SEO community. It has always made me uncomfortable and often downright personally offended seeing the hand that feeds being bitten and with so little reliance on historical reference or anything close to scientifically arrived at data. There have actually been two strangely symbiotic discussions going on simultaneously within the seo community one perpetuating the other so neither needed any real facts to back up either.

One of course being that 90% of SEOs are con men or incompetent and the other, "Why does SEO have a bad reputation".

It is true that there have been stories about the reputation problem of the industry in the mainstream press but where do you think the journalists got their reference material? They get it from the SEO community itself. The bad press the industry gets is being handed to the media by the very same people who stand to benefit most from an improved public image.

Every profession has it's share of people who can not be trusted either due to the fact they are a thief or simply incompetent and SEO is no different but the truth is much closer to 90% of the people in the profession being hard working business people trying their best to build a quality service compared to only 10% being untrustworthy or incapable of delivering quality results. AND, anyone that has had the occasion to attend a conference or get together of any kind focused on SEO, met some SEO's or dealt with them directly by phone or email knows full well that the vast majority of the people they know are decent, honest, hard working people that can be trusted to perform to the best of their ability. You could ask no more from anyone in any other profession. So, why on earth are these same people who know this to be fact writing articles and blogs perpetuating the misperception that anyone needing SEO assistance had better be VERY careful and watch out for all the 90% of rip offs and then the next week writing another article bemoaning the bad reputation of the industry?

Now that you think about it, does seem a little odd doesn't it? Of course it does and I believe it is time for the practice to stop. It doesn't have to be this way and the mainstream media would be quick to change if we would change first.

My primary purpose was to use this series to throw down the gauntlet to those in the industry who have the voice, have the following and the leadership to sway the perception of their readers. To challenge my colleagues and peers to stop talking about the abstract negative that doesn't even exist and seek their links from articles and comments extolling the positive contributions of the people they know within the industry. To do as the Guru did and encourage their readers to learn and exercise a little more business principle and use that to find SEO services that can understand their needs and deliver based on solid business objectives and strategies.

If the prominent figures in the industry would start talking about the good that comes from SEO and good people in it, as opposed to spreading more FUD, SEO would clean up it's own reputation. It is the people with the voice who made it bad and it is the same people who could make it good. It is time for the whole thing to change and I'd like to see it start changing today and I hope I'm not alone.

It's not hard just take a quick look at what the Guru did with his blogroll and his article http://massa.techndu.com/default.aspx?page=admin#ac0e4c85c-7f39-4431-b0c6-09d49be04085. It's easy to find nice things to say about the people you know and admire. And here's the kicker. Guess what saying nice things about people you like can do for you? IT CAN GET YOU LINKS !

So, I'm challenging all those who have a voice in the industry. You are the leaders and are the ones who shape the present perceptions and the future of the industry as a whole.  Speak out for the positive aspects of SEO when you write your own articles and call out those who would continue to perpetuate the unsubstantiated bullshit!  If you can't say something nice about the profession you have chosen, then don't say anything at all and you'll soon see the affect.

Remember this when next you choose to publish something negative about the game you have chosen to play. If it is bad and you are a part of it, then you not only belittle THEM, you make yourself appear smaller as well for only a fool would choose to be a part of something bad and expect others to see them as better than the game they play.

In whatever field of endeavor you choose, do the best job you can do, be proud of what you do and do what you say you will do ---- and charge accordingly.

Now as to the comment and my secondary objective.

One part of the comment was:

“I was expecting to find specifics on how to find a good, credible SEO based on your experience in the field. Coming from you, that would be golden!“

Remember when I said I don’t always tell you what you want to hear? One problem with we humans all face is that we tend to not hear what we don’t want to hear. The entire point of the article was that I was giving the specifics.

Finding a good credible SEO is not hard and the choices you have are great. The hard part is in you not expecting the SEO to be golden. Rather to make sure your own business objectives are golden. THEN just about any seo can help you if you know the help you need but expecting anyone to recommend someone to eliminate the hard work required to run a successful online business is a recipe for disaster and THAT is from my experience.

I can certainly understand how thinking an SEO is going to take a little money and make you a lot without you having to actually run a business is very appealing but that is at the root of the problem.

The next part of the comment was, “Although this lists solid general rules for finding any reputable business I was hoping you'd tackle SEO specifically, with examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly SEOs out there”

That was EXACTLY the point. That finding a reputable SEO is no different than finding any other reputable SEO and that is tackling SEO specifically.

If you tell me exactly what issue you want help with, I could give you a list of people that I would recommend to do that job without hesitation. But if you want me to give you a list of the good bad and ugly, that no one can do for the simple fact that just about every SEO has the ability to be exceptionally good or exceptionally ugly depending on what service you need.

Again, it keeps coming back to you needing to stop thinking in terms of needing to get your site SEO’d and start thinking in terms of your site needing more traffic, (I know a lot of people who can help you with that), and what risk level you are willing to accept to get more traffic how fast, or your site needing more conversions, (I know a lot of people who can help with that), or your site needing better functionality, etc. You need to define what type of service you need and set verifiable levels of performance and THEN I can help find you the good, the bad and the ugly and so can a LOT of other people. Once you do the work you need to do, it becomes no more difficult than finding a good plumber but as long as you are looking for some kind of magician to solve your problems, you are going to find a whole lot of ugly regardless of who anyone would recommend. That was the point.

And finally:

“. I know you're not afraid of a good argument, so why did you lay up from the last post to this one?“

You are right. I am not afraid of an argument and I laid up from the last post because I honestly thought it was the best help I could give the most people. I knew that a lot of people would not like hearing me blaming them for the problem instead of going with conventional wisdom and letting people assume they didn’t need to take responsibility for their own business, rather to blame fraud and incompetence. I can see how blaming the other people can be popular but it is simply not the truth and like I said in the last post, you can blame anyone and everyone else all you want but you’re still stuck with a failing business. Once you accept and address the fact you need a solid business plan and to identify specific problems that need an experts help, now you will be able to easily find the professional help you need with little worry.

Now, I can’t think of much more I can say on this subject without further belaboring the point. This will bring this short series to a close. I hope the Guru has been able to make an impact and maybe help to have start making things a little better. (probably not. :(  

Next week I'll start on a series discussing what I see as the differences between SEO as an art versus SEO as a process , what the costs involved are for each and when and why you would want one or the other. This is also the single biggest factor in my decision to set up operations in India and I'll explain why getting malaria and typhoid fever is so worth it.

 

 

 

You kids get outta bed and git ready for skool

Peace Ya’ll

G