You can't manufacture back links

Recently, this blogger has received requests to run guest posts. Clearly, marketers have read all the SEO literature, attended the webinars, gone to the conferences, and are ready to manufacture back links. I don't think this is possible.

None of the blogs I read, and I read a great many, have guest posts. This indicates to me that bloggers are not interested in running guest posts. There are online publications that consist entirely of marketer's donated work. I am not enthusiastic about these. I am also concerned that Google's new algorithm will punish promiscuous back links.

When SEO advice contradicts your experience of the web, trust your experience.

There is a way to drive traffic to your site, buy it. You can purchase online advertising at the news publication  your prospects read. If you don't know what they read, ask them. Send out a survey. A survey is a great way to learn more about your customers and prospects. People like it when you ask for their opinion.

You could purchase a sponsored link on the homepage of their user group or trade association. That way you could get their attention in a way that builds community.

Or if cash flow is a problem, you could purchase a sponsored link at Reddit for as little as $20.

Advertising is SEO neutral, but it drives traffic to your site and generates leads, and that was the object wasn't it?

The limits of keyword libraries

George Hulme explains it brilliantly:

it's the holistic optimized way to a solutions approach to communication utilization

For paid search a proper keyword library is absolutely essential. However, using it for blogging and other online copy writing will produce the sort of copy that only a search engine bot could love..

Who is your audience?

Do you know the names of the reporters who cover your industry? If you are a flack you do; but if you are a business owner you might not. You might know who your favorite reporters are, but not everyone who covers your industry. You should know them (or hire someone who does know them). If those reporters are on Twitter, you need to follow them.

You should follow your customers, your competitors, your employees (not to check up on them, but to learn from them, have some faith in your hiring process), industry analysts, and anyone prominent in your industry. 

Social media is your virtual store front window. It gives prospects and reporters a chance to view your business in a very low pressure manner. It gives them a preview of what to expect.

Social media is the online version of the social hour before a business meeting. It is an occasion to exchange gossip and get to know people personally. In other words, social media is a chance to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones. That is why too much attention to SEO and search engines is so destructive. It diverts your attention from where it needs to be, on your human audience.

Advertising is cheaper than comment spam

Now that I have begun to post more regularly to this blog I have seen a surge of comment spam. Sigh.

Sadly it appears to be coming from humans rather than bots. So someone is paying for humans to do this, or has purchased fancy bots.

You know what would be cheaper and actually effective? Would generate site traffic to your website and generate good will? Paid advertising.

You can buy a week's worth of advertising on low traffic blogs from Blogads for as little as $1000. Or you can purchase a sponsored post on Reddit, which will appear on the top of the sub-Reddit you select, prices begin at $20. Or you can purchase some keywords on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine.

Getting to know SEO

Recently I have begun to research SEO in a much more detailed and comprehensive way. SEO is like those piano exercises from Czerny; not music, but necessary techniques to play music.

So it is necessary to develop libraries of key words to include in your online writing; but at the same time not focus on those keywords. It is necessary to cultivate links, but not spam them. It is the difference between planting a garden and rolling out astroturf.

Matt McGee's piece in Search Engine Land, Ex-Googler: “To Please Google With Your SEO, Forget About SEO” indicates that this is the correct way to think about SEO. You can't forget SEO, no more than you can forget technique when playing music, but you can't let SEO guide your online communications. It is necessary to write for people, not software bots.

Simple test for search engine visibility

Do a search on your company's name. Does your web site come up in the first page of results? If not you are in trouble.

Fixing this is very easy, but you do need to fix it. More and more customers are finding companies by searhing on the Web. If they can't find you, they can't very contact you.

I am constantly surprised by how many well established companies fail this simple test.

Social media is your friend

Study: Referring links critical in search query rankings

This is why it is important to know who the bloggers are in your industry and to cultivate them. It is also why it it better to have lots of little employee blogs rather than one official corporate blog.

Measuring the impact of advertising

J.P. Morgan: Performance-based ads trump all others online

According to the report, “Nothing But Net: Outlook for Global Internet Stocks in 2009,” search advertising will increase 10% this year to about $16 billion. Display advertising, which includes both performance and brand advertising, is expected to grow 6.3% to $8.4 billion.

I wonder if that is wise. Display advertising builds brand awareness and brand image. It is the sort of advertising the prospects keep in the back of their minds without even realizing it. Prospects have to see your company mentioned many times in many different contexts before they respond to any marketing effort. I worry that display advertising is being undervalued because it does not necessarily produce the most click throughs.

Industry analysts in the age of Google

Alfresco

I have been in the Enterprise software business for over 25 years and I was listening to a Stanford Thought Leadership podcast recently by Tien Tzuo, one of the pioneers of Salesforce.com. This got me to thinking about the change since the mid 1990’s and today and is Google now more relevant than Gartner for enterprise software. In the 1990’s there was a disconnect between product development and sales that fed into “the complexity machine”. There was a lack of product information and access to product. To discover a new product and work through the complexity machine to get “the new top ten” you went to Gartner. There was no other choice.

The world has changed. The Internet has made access to information and product ubiquitous. Think about Wikipedia and iTunes. Today, to discover a product you go to Google. To get information you rely on the wisdom of crowds not the high priests of complexity. People are turning away from “the complexity machine” and rewarding simplicity, value and transparency. Tools such as Google trends in real-time show market trends, masses of blogs offer information. Ranking and access allows good information to rise to the top. This is what has driven the success of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica. This new world also offers transparency. Research should publically show the categories on how a product is ranked. The score and weightings should also be publicly available. This is the new world of transparency for banks governments and the Internet.

I would argue that Wikipedia beat Encyclopedia Britannica on price. But I think there is something to his larger point. A person's first inquiry begins with Google, so those first ten results shape the industry. Search engine visibility is vital. Just one more reason your employees should be encouraged to blog.

Why I swtiched to Cuil

Like everyone else, I noticed the huge discussion about the launch of Cuil. Even though the initial response was not favorable, I decided to give it a try. It is now my default search engine for two reasons, privacy, and they made it easy to put it on my Firefox search bar. I also like the visual presentation of the search results, it is very cool to the eye.

ReadeWriteWEb examines how Cuil got such a spectacular launch. From a PR point of view, two things interest me; first of all, do people really care about privacy? How many will choose Cuil just for privacy protection. This will be an excellent test of the market power of privacy marketing.

The other thing that interests me is their methodology If Cuil catches on the whole science of search engine optimization will become passé. No longer will we worry about disgruntled elements dirtying up our clients' search results, and no longer will we be gaming search results. That would be a very positive thing.

Redefining keywords

The Way You Say It Says It All: Using the 'Right' Keywords can Catapult a Run-of-the-Mill Story to Major Multi-Outlet Coverage, Experts Say

Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a "breakthrough" onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file. "PR people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the 'who cares?' and 'so what?' test," says Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. "If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that's likely to get attention. If you can use the words like 'money,' 'fat,' 'cancer' or 'sex,' you're likely to get some ink in the general audience media," she said, the International Herald Tribune reports.

In the age of Google News Alerts it is necessary to reexamine what constitutes a keyword. We want our stories to be picked up by editors; but even more, we want our stories to be picked up by readers.

Everywhere I go people tell me that they get most of their technology news from email newsletters and Google News Alerts. If you have right keywords in your relesase, they will read it whether it is on PR Newswire or The Washington Post. Google News Alerts draws no distinction.

What are these key words? Not "breakthrough", or "safe," "easy" "secret," "trick" or any sort of buzz word. The keywords you need have to do with subject matter, such as Sarbanes Oxely, Sox, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), electronically stored information (ESI), or whatever keywords or phrases are relevant to your audience. Nobody is stetting up a search on "breakthough" and using the word sex is a good way to land in the spam filter.

Because sometimes bad press happens

eWeek’s Channel Insider blog -

The news release in question came from a company called PressReleasePros.com, which is pitching a way of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) "to bury negative blog postings" about a client's company. So if your company has been the object of ridicule by a blogger, or perhaps deserved criticism, the brain trust at PressReleasePros.com is presumably going to show you how to prevent people from finding those blog entries.

Sometimes you get bad press and negative posts. Sometimes it is because your company messed up and deserved it; sometimes it’s because someone has an ax to grind. In either case it is possible to improve the results, and putting out press releases on one of the established wire services is PART of the solution.

The first rule of social media is to make friends before you need them. That is why I encourage employee blogging. The collective power of your employee’s blogs will give you a cushion when bad news breaks.

You should also encourage your subcontractors to blog and link to their blogs from your corporate site. That will create a constellation within blogosphere that revolves around your company.

When bad news breaks you should begin by addressing the basics of corporate reputation repair: acknowledge the problem and address the public's legitimate concern, and take corrective action. Without the basics, nothing else will work.

Having addressed the basic issue, putting out favorable press releases on wire services will give your search results a bump. Don’t instruct your employee bloggers to link to those press releases (that will just make their blogs boring and no one will read them) but make sure your employees know about them.

Employees should be encouraged to use social tagging sites such as del.icio.us to tag positive news stories (stories running in actual news publications rather than press releases on wire services) in order to give them a bump. The purpose of this is not merely to increase the visibility of such stories to search engines, but also to give a bump in page views for the reporter and publication concerned. Publications will be more likely to write about your company if they know they can attract additional reader traffic.

Online visibility

Whenever I want to research a company, I begin with a search on their name. I continue to be surprised on the number of times I cannot find their corporate website from a search on their name. This is a serious problem, reporters, prospective customers, job applicants, and everyone else expects to find you on the Internet.

It is one thing not to be in the first page of returns on your industry. I hate to think how far back Presto Vivace is in a search on Public Relations or even Technology and Public Relations. But it should be possible to find your website on the first page on a search on your company’s name. This is so basic.

The quick fix on this is to use social tagging sites to raise your visibility. But that is just a quick & dirty fix to tide you over for a proper solution. I can’t advise on the details on web design, but I would advise encouraging employee blogging as a way to raise online visibility, as well as the other well known benefits of corporate blogging.

Catbert doesn’t get it

Need a New Situation? Check the Internet, WSJ February 12, 2008

Digital Dirt, Digital Attraction
Scanning the Web for information that might derail a job hunter’s candidacy is now routine procedure for recruiters at many firms says Cynthia Shapiro, author of “What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here.” Many recruiters even engage in the practice even before extending interview invitations.

“If what pops up is a ranting blog about the evils of corporate America or a picture of you topless in Cancun with a beer in your hand, you’re in trouble” she warns. “Your resumé will land in the trash, and you won’t even know what happened.”

I have no doubt this is true. It is just one of the many ways search is being misused.

Whatever happened to judging a candidate on job related criteria?

The individual who rants about the evils of corporate America under their own name is not the one you need to worry about. That is not the individual who is going to anonymously forward internal company memo’s to websites. The anonymice who leak information do not have the courage to speak under their own names.

More over, how do you know that the person who rants on the Internet and your job applicant are the same person? Is it Alice Marshall, Alice Marshall, Alice Marshall, or a different Alice Marshall all together?

As for the topless lady in Cancun, well, all I can say is God forbid you hire Vanessa Williams.

How would you like it if prospective customers, to say nothing of investors and government regulators, made judgments about your company based on what they saw on the Internet? What goes around comes around. Don’t be part of creating a culture you don’t want to live in.

The Internet which can be such a force for freedom is in danger of being perverted into an instrument of conformity and intimidation. It does not have to be that way, all we need to do is learn to concentrate on the issue at hand.

Edit -
Perfect example of a heavy handed employer.

Blogs and search engines

greggersh

Wow. Wrote a blog post 1/2 hour ago, already #1 in Google for relevant keywords and getting traffic via search. Wow.

All good press is good press

Geoff Livingston has a graphic that perfectly illustrates the public relations long tail, with the red part illustrating that which clients will pay for, and the longer yellow tail showing that which is valuable, but not billable. I don’t think that is quite how he would describe it; but currently, that is how clients view social media.

I asked a friend of mine which blogs he reads and he just looked at me as if I were a fool. My friend doesn’t read blogs unless someone sends him a link. He gets his information by doing searches on subjects which interest him. If you want to reach him, you need to be on that first page of results, which brings us back to blogs. One of the blogs my friend has stumbled across is John Boyer’s, which he likes very much. As of this posting, Boyer’s blog has all of four inbound posts. Clearly you do not have to have a highly linked blog to emerge at the top of search results, only relevant content.

Which brings us to the question of what is a credible blog. Clearly that is in the eye of the reader. A blog with many inbound links might be regarded as credible or not, depending upon the reader. A blog with few inbound links might be regarded as deservedly obscure or an undiscovered gem. Several months ago I received an inbound link from Agile CMMI blog, which has a grand total of ten inbound links. Even so, this blog clearly has a regular following as directly I received the link my hit count began to climb. No client would pay for a link from either of these blogs, but clearly such a link, provided the context was favorable, would be valuable for a client.

Those of us who understand social media have much work to do in explaining its role in increasing search engine visibility and brand equity.

Google offering customizable search results

Via Greg Gershman we learn that Google is experimenting with a voting feature on search results that allows users to vote up or bury search results they see.

Presumably if this reached critical mass it would alter overall search results. Expect politicians to be the first to use this feature in an organized way. If that works for them it will work for the rest of us.

Wile E. Coyote puts on a black hat

Tom Foremski

PR in five years time will look a lot different, it will be more "public" relations than "press" relations. But there will also be a secretive side to PR, there will be "black hat PR."

Well maybe so, but only because human beings never learn. When Foremski mentioned this I couldn’t believe he was referring to black hat SEO.

On Black Hat PR and Black Hat Marketing

Strumpette has an article on “Black PR” called WARNING: Beware the Dark Side of PR 2.0 by Ivana Kalay. It is a fine article because it finally echoes something I go on and on about: the essential nature of an SEO strategy — both offensive and defensive SEO — any time you decide you need an Online PR or Online Marketing strategy.

Get the feeling we are looking at Drama Queen Train Wreck’s new business model?

Clearly people are doing this and will continue to do this. It is only a question of time before some very high profile companies get caught. When that happens the penalty will be huge. Everything you do on the Internet leaves electronic foot prints, so the chances of getting caught are reasonably good.

The best SEO strategy combines good website design with good online communications and advertising that drive traffic to the website. There is no clever way around that.

Is Google’s practice of penalizing paid links a restraint of trade?

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

More and more, I've been seeing people wondering if they've lost traffic on Google because they were detected to be selling paid links. However, Google's generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing PageRank. Now that's changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it. ...

...Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That's a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.

With traditional sources of advertising drying up, it is crucial that news organizations be able to tap into online advertising revenue. Considering that Google earns tremendous wealth by aggregating content from online news organizations, it is outrageous that they would use their power as the premiere search engine to discourage advertisers from patronizing news organizations.

Search engine saboteurs

Search engine saboteur at work.


Jim Horton alerts us to this article in Forbes:

The Saboteurs Of Search

Those rules, at least for major search engines like Google and Yahoo!, are based largely on the number of links from other pages to a given site: The more links, the higher that site ranks in Google and Yahoo! results. But this system of link-based ranking invites cheating. Search engine optimizers can use software that generates thousands of links to their site, pushing its ranking artificially high. In response, Google and Yahoo!'s search algorithms now automatically punish sites that game their algorithms by pushing the offending pages deep into the unseen layers of search results. (See "Condemned to Google Hell.")

That filtering strategy keeps search results relevant to users despite the meddling of Web spammers. But Scott and other search marketers say it also makes possible a powerful form of negative SEO. Search marketers claim they can frame certain competitors as cheaters by posting thousands of links around the Web, making a competing site look like it's engaging in "link spamming," a tactic that draws the disfavor of major search engines. In SEO circles, this technique of setting up a competitor to be punished for link spamming is sometimes called "Google bowling."

"If a new site gains half a million links over the course of a weekend, it looks suspect from Google's point of view," Scott says. "So you make someone look naughty, and then get them caught."

And what if Scott gets caught? Think that sort of tactic cannot be traced back to you? Think again.

I am not very keen on search engine sabotage, but if you feel called upon to play that sort of game, it is easy enough to use social tagging sites to raise the rankings of negative material.

Rather than pay for Scott’s sabotage service, it would be far more cost effective to buy a group of sponsored links on the relevant user groups, increase your search engine ranking along with building actual good will.