Ask the SEO Guru

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!

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

>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.

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

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

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!