Shailendra Dubey

By Chris Boggs

In a down economy heading into 2009, business development for SEO becomes increasingly important. As an agency or consultant providing marketing advice to clients, you’re missing a crucial opportunity to provide long-lasting ROI at a still relatively cheap cost if you aren’t pushing for investment in organic search.

SEO can always be enhanced, especially for large and dynamic Web sites. Whether the decision to invest in enterprise-level SEO has been put off, or the project is already underway, additional ways to generate results are usually only hampered by lack of budget or resources. Let’s look at some of the ways to position SEO when selling to existing clients or new prospects.

The Pitch

Usually, the SEO process still requires an introduction at the onset of any presentation. Level-setting the room will ensure that people are at least aware of the primary tenets of SEO, and reinforce the decision made by prior “converts.” Research from the likes of SEMPO,
MarketingSherpa, and Forrester is always excellent material to present, because quantifiable data often speaks directly to the decision makers.

As Forrester’s Kim Le Quoc and Jaap Favier succinctly stated in “How to Stimulate Consumer to Buy Online”:
“Creating preference with online buyers starts with search engine optimization (SEO). As search increases in complexity, marketing leaders need to move their teams toward advanced search marketing programs.”

SEO should always be an ongoing project. It has been said over and over, but you can’t “set and forget” SEO, especially when competing in crowded industries or verticals. Fresh content and links, and continuous monitoring of site structure, information architecture, and things like 404 error code best practices are paramount to reaching organic visibility and traffic goals.

The process by which the SEO will be performed should be clearly identified, and the pitching team should be prepared to answer questions in a clear and concise manner, in language and terms that are indicative of a trained understanding of traditional marketing. It’s very important that the business development personnel not try to answer a question that they aren’t confident enough in their knowledge to attempt. “We’ll get back to you with an answer on that”
is much better than “I’m an idiot trying to fake the answer.”

The Q4 Factor

Anyone who facilitates banner and paid search advertising for a marketing team, either internally or in an outsourced manner, knows about “Q4 money.” Magically, during late third quarter and into the fourth quarter, money seems to materialize that “must be spent in
order to get it again next year.”

Although this status quo may be slightly less prevalent this year, there’s a lot of extra money floating around looking for a place to stay. This year, you should really think outside of the box, and send at least some of the money towards ramping up your SEO efforts.

The extra cash can be put into a yearlong SEO engagement (or longer, depending on the surplus) that will provide returns over many years to come, allowing for work to be completed into 2009 that was paid for in 2008. Another way to spend this extra money for the purpose of SEO is to consider entering into a large-scale agreement with a directory, or by entering into sponsorships or other arrangements which will provide valuable inbound links that generate PageRank or
traffic.

Now, I’m not advocating buying links just for the purpose of increasing PageRank. Although I don’t judge people by the tactics they use to gain links, buying them is too easy. Google and other
engines provide value to links found within association or sponsor pages, assuming the relevancy factor is met. These memberships/sponsorships should be considered as an additional aid to
any SEO program.

Best of the Web has a new local product that provides geographically categorized directory links for a number of industries. If you have a client with hundreds or thousands of physical locations, and they have extra money to spend, consider entering into a large-scale agreement with BOTW, Superpages.com, or any of the other respected local directories. These provide link relevancy and should lead to additional traffic. Ideally, BOTW or other local directory pages will
also occupy a top page position, increasing exposure in the SERPs, as well as providing further brand strength.

This economic downturn should be a major driver for new SEO contracts sold over the next few months.

Frank Watson Fires Back

Regardless of the economic situation, companies need to continue marketing their products. Otherwise, they will stop being a business eventually.

As has been reiterated in most articles, search is more measurable and may be a more successful means of spending limited advertising. As Chris suggests, a long-term play to improve organic listings is one option that can bring back long-term profits.

What many overlook in discussions about our economic downturn is that if people pull back on advertising now, the impact isn’t really seen until later. There’s a need to continue advertising and SEO is a solid way to spend part of that money.

The link building option is always going to be controversial. Google uses them as a large part of their algorithm, but polices methodology of gaining them. I disagree with Matt Cutts about buying links. Even when you reach out to relevant sites to ask for links, you’re spending time, which as we know is money.

Courtesy- http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

Popularity: 2% [?]

Official Google Blog: SearchWiki: make search your own

Popularity: 1% [?]

By John C. Dvorak

It’s called SEO—search engine optimization—and it’s pretty much all anyone working with Web sites ever talks about nowadays. You may think it consists of ways to trick the search engines, Google in particular, into giving you higher than usual page rankings. But in fact, it centers around the idea that Google sucks so much that companies think they need to use SEO to get the results they deserve.

By reverse-engineering the way Google operates, SEO experts can see how the process works. From a user’s perspective, once you learn how Google does what it does, it’s a miracle that you ever get the right results. And from my experience, the right results in many circumstances are nearly impossible to obtain—and may never be obtainable in the future.

Let’s look at some of the problems that have developed over the years.

Inability to identify a home site. All the search engines have this habit, but often it is laughable. You’d think that if I were looking for Art Jenkins, and Art Jenkins had a Web site named Artjenkins.com, search engines would list that first, right? Most often this page is never listed anywhere.

Too much commerce, not enough information. There seems to be an underlying belief, especially at Google, that the only reason you go online is to buy something. People merely looking for information are a nuisance. This is made apparent anytime you look for information about a popular product. All you find are sites trying to sell you the product. Hey, here’s a challenge: Ask Google to find you a site that honestly compares cell-phone plans and tells you which is best.
Try it! All you get are thousands of sites with fake comparisons promoting something they are selling.

What’s particularly bad about this is that the few honest sites trying to present information without SEO and all the trickery needed to get attention are put out of business; nobody ever finds those sites. The site you are pointed to should be the best site, not a mediocre popular site. This is the biggest flaw with page ranking.

Parked sites. Have you ever gone to look for something and found what seems like the perfect site near the top of the Google results? You click on it only to find one of those fake “parked” sites, where people park domain names, pack them with links to other sites, and hope for random clicks that pay them 10 cents each. How does page ranking, if it works, ever manage to give these bogus sites a high number?

Unrepeatable search results. Ever run a search a week later and get completely different results? In the end, you have to use the search history and hope you can find it. Can things change so drastically day-to-day that the search results vary to an extreme month-to-month?
This is compounded by the weird results you get when you are logged in to Google. These are somehow customized for you? In what way?

Google sign-in changes a query’s results to an extreme with no discernible benefit. Often two people are on a call trying to discuss something and both will try finding something online. The conversation often goes like this: “Here it is, I found it. Type in the search term ‘ABCD Fix’ and it’s the fourth result listed.” “I don’t see it. The fourth one down is a pill company.” “You typed in ABCD Fix, right?” “Yeah.” This goes on for a while until you realize that one of the two people is logged into Google.

The solution to this entire mess, which is slowly worsening, is to “wikify” search results somehow without overdoing it. Yahoo! had a good idea when its search engine was actually a directory with segments “owned” by communities of experts. These people could isolate the best of breed, something Google has never managed to do.
The basis for Google page-ranking is to equate popularity with quality, and once you look at the information developed by SEO experts, you learn that this strategy barely works.

We have to suffer until something better comes along, but there is at least one crucial fix that could be easily implemented: user flagging. Parked sites, for instance, could be flagged the way you flag spam on a message board or a miscategorized post on craigslist.
The risk here is that creeps trying to shut down a specific site could swamp Google with false flags, so maintaining integrity would be difficult. People with their own agendas have already infiltrated and controlled aspects of craigslist and Wikipedia, unfortunately. On Wikipedia, for example, a group pushing the global-warming agenda prevents almost any post with contrary data or opinions, no matter how minor the point.

One suggestion floating around involves the semantic Web, which anticipates even more SEO tricks—and requires a certain level of honesty that can never be maintained. I suggest rethinking the basic organization of the Web itself, using the Google News concept. In other words, compartmentalize the Web to an extreme. Tagging might help. But you should be able just to search through a subsegment and check a box that eliminates merchants with faux-informational sites.

And speaking of check boxes, over the years there have been numerous attempts at creating an advanced search mechanism utilizing check boxes and a question-and-response AI network. You’d think that idea would have gotten further than it has. Hopefully, someone will conceptualize something new that works better than what we have today. The situation is just deteriorating too fast.

Courtesy- http://www.pcmag.com

Popularity: 1% [?]