SoloSEO

Accidental Page 1 Ranking for One Word Keywords

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 27th, 2007

Have you ever found yourself ranked for a popular one word keyword that you never intended on ranking for? Maybe we’re an odd ball, but the top one word keyword (besides our company name) that drives traffic to our site is “tagged“. That’s right folks, as in tag you’re it. Last year I created the Blog Tag Tree and it drew in literally thousands of links, many of which used the anchor text of “tagged”. Obviously this wasn’t one of those keywords in my keyword glossary, so I found it interesting how much traffic we actually get from this pretty unrelated keyword.

Content alone isn’t going to make it happen, links with specific anchor text is needed.

What one word keywords do you “accidentally” rank for?

5 comments Visited 3749 times March 27th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Treat your Visitors from Search Ads and Contextual Ads Differently

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 21st, 2007

If you are running a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign with search engines, you can create campaigns that are either Search or Contextual based. Both have their merit and usefulness, but both have unique traits about the customer and their current frame-of-mind. If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate (who isn’t?), knowing these differences can certainly help. At the end, I’ll give some tips for programmers to tell the difference between your Search and Contextual Ad visitors.

Before we get into those differences, let me first just make sure we all know about these two types of PPC campaigns.

Search and Contextual Ad Refresher

A Search ad campaign will run on the top and side of a search engine when users come to perform a search. They type in a keyword and the search results page shows up, with both natural results and paid results. The paid results are based on the actual keyword used in the search by the user.

A Contextual ad campaign is displayed on websites that want advertising revenue from their site. You can even bid separately on the price of your keywords for content ads. The ads that display on these websites are based on the content of the page. If a page is about dog food and dog toys, the ads displayed on that page will be based on those topics. Your ad shows up when your keywords from your contextual ad campaign match the topic of the page, as well as other factors (bid price, quality, etc).

The Scenarios

Let’s start with a scenario to make it more real for you to see the differences, and see if you can spot them yourself before I give it away.

Search Ad Scenario: Joe’s wife just reminded him it is almost Mother’s day, so Joe is looking to send flowers to his mother in Colorado. His first method of finding a flower company that delivers flowers to another state is to use a search engine. He types in the first keyword that comes to mind, “mother’s day flowers”. Joe gets the results page and glances through the ads at the top of the page. There are even some prices in there, some mention Mother’s day too. He clicks on one of the ads.

Content Ad Scenario: Joe is reading about a new gardening technique for his tomatoes that he just can’t get to grow right. He notices an ad on the side of the article that reminds him that Mother’s day is coming soon. He thinks of his mother and that it would be nice to do something for Mom. He clicks on the ad.

Differences between Search and Contextual Ad Visitors

1) Focus
Joe, in the Search Ad Scenario, was specifically looking for flowers to send to Mom for Mother’s day. He set aside the time and is focused on doing this task right now. Your challenge as a Flower Delivery company would be to have the ad that captures Joe the most, be it by price, on-time delivery, freshness of the flowers (quality of product), or some sort of guarantee.

In the Contextual Ad Scenario, Joe’s mind has been on his struggling tomatoes, but the Content Ad diverted his attention to his Mother and Mother’s day. Your first challenge was capture him with the ad, which worked. Your next challenge is to follow through and maintain his focus so he gets the flowers (through your site) before he continues thinking about his failing tomatoes.

2) Readiness

In the Search Ad Scenario, Joe is ready to buy something. He may compare a few companies, but he wants to buy something. Your challenge is to allure him to your ad, then keep his interest in your site and product, and fulfill his needs and questions. His readiness can easily be quieted if there are stumbling blocks to the purchase (not trustworthy, too pricey, not enough options, no guarantee, not secure, etc). Joe from the Search Ad probably won’t care that your sale ends next week because he is ready to buy right now.

In the Contextual Ad Scenario, Joe has diverted his attention to your product, at least for now. He wasn’t specifically looking to buy flowers for Mom, so he may either buy now or come back another day. Both of these need to be addressed in your content and atmosphere of your site. If he is ready to buy now, it should be so easy to find the perfect flower bouquet for Mom and to make the purchase, that he doesn’t lose interest and go back to his tomatoes. If he is going to come back tomorrow, you need to find a way to make your brand/product sticky in his mind. Will he remember your site (branding)? Can he easily find the special you advertised again? Because Joe from the Contextual Ad is not necessarily buying right now, anything you can do to make buying now more advantageous would be good for you and for Joe.

The two scenarios above are helpful for showing the focus and readiness. Other products/services may have additional differences in Visitors’ frame-of-mind, but generally these two are applicable across the board. Certainly not all Search ad customers are ready to buy now, but compared to Contextual ad customers, they are “more ready”. Some advertisers will find they generate more revenue from Search and some from Contextual, it depends on many factors. But understanding more about your visitor when they come may be able to influence your conversion rate.

Treat your Visitors Differently based on Ad Type

If there was a way to tell the difference between a Search Ad visitor and a Contextual Ad visitor, would you do something about it? If it helped your conversions you probably would! There are two different ways to do this that I will illustrate. The first method isn’t as reliable and not as easy to implement as the second method.

(Method 1) In programming you can capture certain variables from each visitor, including what URL they came from. This is the HTTP_REFERER server variable. In PHP for example, you can capture this with $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. In Perl, you can capture this with $ENV{‘HTTP_REFERER’}. And for spelling freaks (like me), yes, REFERER is supposed to be spelled that way. Sometimes based on HTTP_REFERER alone you can distinguish whether the ad is Search or Contextual, but this is not always the case.

(Method 2) The best way is to include it in the URL of your ad. Set up separate campaigns for search and contextual ads. When setting these up, include a variable in the URL (address to your page) that distinguishes the two from each other. For example:

http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html?adtype=search

http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html?adtype=contextual

Then on your landing page, capture the variable ‘adtype’ and then adjust the content to fit the focus and readiness of the visitor. There are other strategies you can combine this with, such as basing the content on inferred intentions from the actual keyword that was used in the search.

What other differences do you see between visitors from these two sources, Search Ads and Contextual Ads?

2 comments Visited 5180 times February 21st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Out SEO Your Competition

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 19th, 2007

We all know SEO assists a site to perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but the reasons people SEO can differ. Some just want to share their knowledge with the world and aren’t selling anything, (like in informational blogs), some want to rank as an authoritative site to increase the revenue in their AdSense campaigns, and some want to find new clients through organic search, or do better in their PPC campaigns. There are also some that are motivated by all or a combination of these motivations. For me personally it is the opportunity to find more clients, and to out-compete my competitors for those clients.

In the introduction to his seminal book On Competition, Michael Porter (recognized Harvard professor and expert in competitive studies) states:

“No company, and no country, can afford to ignore the need to compete. Every company, and every country, must try to understand and master competition” (Porter, 1998, p. i).

I come from a primarily business background, and have spent a good bit of time studying competitive analysis theory, or the use of different analytic tools to attempt to understand, predict and prepare for the strategic adjustment competitors are most likely to implement in the marketplace. It is truly a fascinating area of thought. However, each of these competitive analytic tools requires considerable amounts of time and research to make them worth anything, and even when the analysis is complete, it can only provide the researcher nothing more than a more educated guess as to what a competitor might do. Some widely used competitive analysis tools used today include: SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), Competitive Array, Game Theory (very interesting), Five-Forces, etc., just to name a few. There are even many firms that will perform the analysis for you, using a variety of these tools for a fee. Dun and Bradstreet offers small business firms information about their competitors for a fee, $9.99 per firm, for a firm analysis, $24.99 for an industry analysis and $65 for various marketing lists. Despite the inherent weaknesses of these various analysis tools, innumerable firms continue to spend all kinds of resources to run these analyses in hopes of putting themselves in a better competitive position.

Now on to why I love the online competitive world… There are certain SEO tools and techniques which provide us the opportunity to really know what our competitors are up to online, with real data. The SEs (Search Engines) have already aggregated the data, and using these SEO analysis tools properly can drastically reduce the ability of a competitor to surprise you, or make huge moves online unnoticed. Not to mention this real data reduces the need of firms to “make educated guesses” as to what their competitors are really up to. Online, the competitive marketplace is more transparent than offline, and with the increased competitive information comes the increased importance to be more competitively astute and responsive. So once competitive trends are discovered, firms need to react more quickly to address these trends, to stay ahead of the curve, and remain competitively viable. This is done by using other SEO tools which assist your site to become more competitive online, specifically in the SERPs. SoloSEO was built to not only to provide competitive intelligence tools, which efficiently watch industry competitors, but to also offer effective SEO tools, allowing firms to improve their online competitive position.

This week we will be launching a new service, which will make the competitive intelligence process more convenient and streamlined for our subscribers. We are very motivated to assist our clients become more aware of their competitors more quickly, and assist them improve the competitiveness of their sites with effective SEO tools. Please stay tuned…

Add comment Visited 4267 times February 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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SEO vs. Paid Search Marketing Clash

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 13th, 2007

If you have not gone over and read about the tussle between Dave Pasternack and SEO pros, you must take a minute to review it, it has been quite entertaining. Our friend Michael Gray has jumped in with both feet, and his post called Dave Pasternack of Did-it.com – How to Fix Your Problem is an excellent place to get a good overview of the feud. Essentially Dave Pasternack has come out saying SEO isn’t “rocket science,” and it has caused a bit of a stir among the SEO ranks. Pasternack claims he gave up SEO years ago, and now considers himself a PPC expert, and co-founded a company that consults and assists firms with their paid search campaigns. It is his opinion that SEO is a “Fix-it-Once” Task, not an Ongoing Service. It is this statement where Mr. Pasternack loses credibility. It would be nice for all of us small business owners if SEO really was a quick, one-time fix, but instead it is an ongoing and unrelenting pursuit. Not only to keep our sites optimized to do well in SERPs, but also to stay ahead of our competitors, competing for the same keywords in the same marketplace. I think this point gets glossed over by many discussing SEO. As a business person first, I personally don’t care if I show up as #1 on a SERP, I just want to show up above my nearest competitor for the same or similar products and services. Some markets will be more volatile than others, but keeping an eye on competitors, and their movements in the SERPs will always be important, and most likely a moving target. The importance of competitor watchdogging will continue to increase as more firms figure out the benefits of online marketing, and begin to implement SEO and Paid Search techniques.

So personally, I have no problem with the use of well researched, and wisely created PPC campaigns, and well managed SEO techniques; there is a place for both practices, and using one without the other doesn’t make much sense. The first step however is to SEO your site and get it optimized for the traffic which the PPC ads will hopefully drive to it. I have noticed Paid Search only gurus occasionally suggest SEO pros use “scare tactics” to encourage long-term service contracts, but unfortunately the Paid Search guys do the same thing, making site owners nervous about doing PPC campaigns themselves, and perhaps blowing their opportunity to do well. PPC isn’t too tough either, don’t let either of the two groups scare you, just realize both take some expertise, and some patience to LEARN. The main reason there is demand for these two services is they both can be overwhelming if you don’t understand them, and they are both work.

As an example, 5 years ago I use to sit down and do my business and personal taxes myself, I even used TurboTax a few times. Even with all the Turbo Tax tools it took quite a bit of time, it wasn’t rocket science, and I got the job done, but frankly I did not enjoy it, even though a sizable refund was my eventual reward. Now with a dozen different business running, and less time, and no patience for our screwed-up tax system, I love the fact I can pay someone, an expert, to do all that work for me. I could do it, but I don’t want to, I have other pressing matters more important to me. There is the SEO and Paid Search services in a nutshell. The tools, advice to do both are out there to learn, but whether someone has the time or desire to learn and do them on their own, is completely another issue. I will also admit there is some increasing art to the SEO process when we consider link baiting, creating a buzz and social marketing aspects into the online equation.

Finally, there will be times when all the SEO and Paid Search in the world isn’t going to get you anywhere, as marketing results will depend on the industry you are marketing within. One of our companies has a very nice site, it is SEOed well, and we have been running solid PPC campaigns for the most appropriate keywords in the industry, but we have gained little traffic and only a few leads a month. We know the industry well, we know our service is widely sought after, we know we are priced nicely, but we still don’t have the business we know we could have. So last week we headed Orlando to exhibit at a large trade show in this industry. The results were amazing, our service was highly sought after and well received. We heard comments like “where have you guys been?” or “we have been looking for something like this for years,” from booth visitors. So the golden question… where were our potential clients looking when they couldn’t find us? The answer… obviously not online. Make sure you know your potential clients, and where they are most likely to be searching to find you, if it isn’t online, then adjust to help them find you some other way.

The world continues to move online, and will continue to do so in an ever increasing pace, but not everyone is there yet. Marketing is the art of getting the firm’s message to potential clients, wherever they may be, even if it is offline. So getting your site’s SEO in line now will pay dividends in the future, but it may not be the end-all, be-all marketing home run you want it to be right now, especially if your future clients just aren’t online yet.

Add comment Visited 5646 times February 13th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Jumping on Keywords When they are Hot

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 30th, 2007

Recently a big story hit the news about Google modifying their algorithm to fix googlebombing. When news hit, my first instinct was to start buying PPC ads for classic googlebombing phrases, like miserable failure. It was a good instinct, as we got some decent traffic from our market audience who, just like me, needed to see it for themselves in the search results.

I wasn’t the only one that started advertising, as there was at least one other company that had an ad up on Google. And interestingly, Rand posted about predicting search queries over the weekend.

A very similar situation happened to me a few months ago after Aaron Wall posted about the keyword “trust rank” and how it wasn’t being utilized at all by PPC campaigns (can’t find the post, sorry Aaron). Being the thinker I am, I created a page about Trust Rank as well as Page Rank, and then created a simple PPC ad and put it up. Minutes later…traffic. Not a whole lot, but definitely traffic from our market audience.

Being able to predict search queries would be fantastic. However, I think being observant (reading blogs, talking with people, being attentive in your audience’s shoes) will keep you in the game and help you to catch search terms quicker than others. This not only applies to PPC, but also to blogging, where if you can get to your audience before other communities do, then you’re more likely to get further credit when they blog or comment.

3 comments Visited 5003 times January 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Starting Your SEO business: Tapping into Local Business with Local Search Tools

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 23rd, 2007

Two important things come together that make local business a great opportunity for finding SEO clients. First, there are tons of local search tools and directories (online) that are used by millions of people every day to find local shops and services. Second, most local businesses have no idea about most or all of these tools and directories. A good way to start or grow your SEO business right now is to approach local businesses with your expertise and know-how of these local search tools, and how to get them listed and start getting traffic.

Let’s go through local search engines and PPC together, to help you know what to say and do for your new clients.

Local Search Engines and Directories

As we discussed last week about getting new clients, the first place to start is to start a list of local businesses you want to approach. Pick businesses that would have a clientele that could potentially find them via search, and choose 5-12 of them. You’ll need to do some prep work for each one, including making a keyword list and checking rankings, as well as some investigation into their status (are they listed??) in the local search engines. You may want to provide a simple report that shows them some keywords, any rankings, and a list of local search engines and directories and a big NO if they don’t have a listing (my guess is most won’t, depends on your area of course). The next part is to educate your client.

By being listed in local search engines, a local business can easily be found through both local search and regular search (like google.com). Search engines like Google will often integrate local search into their search results. It is thought that 10-20% of searches actually use “local modifiers” such as a city, state, or region. Most of us are probably pretty computer savvy, but even for those less savvy, the search engines are becoming our address book, our yellow pages, and our map. If I want to find a plumber, it takes less time for me to get to Google and search for one, even if its just the phone number, than to pick up a phone book and thumb through it. Plus, I get a map and a website (if any) which is an extra step if you’re just hitting a phone book. Take the opportunity to get this into their heads, as more and more this is how everyone is going to find them.

The local search engine relationship chart can give you a good idea of who the main players are in local search. infoUSA and Acxiom are the two main sources for other local search engines, so having a listing with both of these companies is vital to local search exposure. You can also list individually with other local search engines (read on for links). Two companies make it easier to manage your information in these listings and also directly with local engines: Relevant Ads and Register Local. You can manage your listings separately for less, it just takes a bit more time.

Here are some quick links to a few of the main local engines:

Yahoo! local listing
Google local listing
TrueLocal local listing

Offering other Services

Just because you are doing SEO does not mean you can’t offer other services, such as web design, content writing, and PPC management. You may find that most of these local businesses have done nothing, so they are starting from scratch. If you can package multiple services together, not only do you have a more complete solution that maximizes your SEO strategy, but it’s almost like getting two clients for the sales work of getting one. If you don’t have other complementary skills, then you’ll want to make some business relationships with other trusted individuals or companies that provide such services. By offering multiple services you can offer a complete service that truly accomplishes the goals of SEO. Worst case is they just want to focus on one part of it right now.

Targeted Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Local businesses can benefit very quickly by a targeted PPC campaign. Even if you don’t do PPC (pay-per-click) advertising right now, it is something you can learn in a few days to a few weeks (not necessarily being a super expert in that short of time, but good enough to go on). PPC advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. Why? Because people use Google and Yahoo! as a dictionary, encyclopedia, white pages, yellow pages, and address book (and many more things). One of the features of PPC advertising is local market targeting. You can pick regions and cities where your ads should be displayed, to market your site just to those specific areas. This, coupled with an SEO strategy, will give a jump start to your new client to gaining the traffic, branding, and traction.

Local search is an exciting and growing area of search marketing, and now is a great opportunity to find companies, even in your own backyard, that are in need of SEO for their business.

For more reading, here’s a great article about local search.

8 comments Visited 10136 times January 23rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Building the Perfect Link, the Ultimate Guide

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 23rd, 2007

Small Business SEM has an excellent post titled Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link. This is a great read for anyone considering or getting into links. The guide walks you through all the various aspects and things to consider when link building. A snippet from the guide…

Fact #1: The competition for links is tough for any business, big or small. Confusing the issue is “link lingo” — inbound links, reciprocal links, sitewide links, paid links, text links, deep links … the list goes on and on. How’s a business owner to keep track of it all?

Fact #2: When you’re looking for links, quantity is one thing — but quality is better. Not all links are created equal. How can you tell which links are better than others?

That’s the idea behind this guide — to help you understand which links will help the most. To help you … Build the Perfect Link.

Look at the ultimate guide to building perfect links for more helpa and info. And good job building natural links with worthwhile content on building natural links!

1 comment Visited 5797 times January 23rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Free Links from MyBlogLog!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 22nd, 2007

Everyone’s always out looking for good quality backlinks (inbound links) at a great price, and what’s better than free? Hopefully MyBlogLog will patch this up quickly, but I just noticed that you can easily insert links into messages and rel=”nofollow” is not even added. Don’t try this, it’s spamming…get natural links. To do this (please don’t), just leave a message for Rafer (sorry man), or any other MyBlogLog member. Notice the spam already in there from the DJ guy.

For all the help we’re giving MyBlogLog (mybloglog flaw, missing mybloglog tools), you’d think we were getting paid (we’re not), or at least getting a free trip to Yahoo! HQ (not yet…).

UPDATE: Rafer just let me know they are already planning to fill this gap. No use trying it out, I’m sure old links will be updated because it’s all dynamic.

UPDATE: nofollow is now active, all sealed up. Good job MBL, very fast work. That is what we like!

4 comments Visited 6857 times January 22nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Quantcast.com – Better than Hitwise, Alexa, and Compete.com Combined?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 20th, 2007

Quantcast.com is a new “Open Internet Ratings Service” that I learned about from Paul Allen. It’s a free service that looks nice, runs quick, seems to have a good amount of data, but with questionable accuracy. Quantcast says this about their service:

Quantcast is the world’s first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of millions of web sites. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.

Their FAQ tells more about them, how they get their data (affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks), etc.

From a query, like techcrunch.com, you can view demographics (gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children in household), audience keywords, common audience (other sites these visitors go to, and “siteographics” which define as:

Quantcast’s Siteographics™ show other sites an audience frequents, which can reveal lifestyle and behavioral traits. The Siteographics section of a site’s profile shows other sites that the audience is likely to visit, and the index indicates how likely, where 100 is neutral. For example, an index of 300 would mean visitors are three times more likely to visit the correlated site than by random chance.

Quantcast.com also shows an estimate on unique visitors, and what kind of visitors they are (passers-by, regulars, and addicts). I would guess there are a lot more regulars and addicts than is being counted here.

Like alexa and compete.com you can compare estimated traffic to websites. I created a comparison between Hitwise, Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast, and results are interesting. It seems Quantcast.com is in quite a growth stage, Hitwise doesn’t show up on Quantcast’s graph, Alexa is pretty constant, and Compete.com had a spike at the end of last year. Interestingly the data for all of them except Quantcast is missing for the last month or so.

I ran the same comparison on Alexa (note, you can’t compare anything with alexa.com and they don’t even rank themselves…interesting):

Quantcast seems to have a lot of interesting features, all for free, and features that seem to combine features from all of the others. Is it better? Or are the estimates not very good? With a lot of SEO blogs, even popular ones (SEOmoz, TopRankBlog, MarketingPilgrim, SEOBook), Quantcast says “We have sparse data about [domain name]…”.

This will be an interesting tool to play with more and compare with the others. If you have some interesting comparisons, please comment below or blog them yourself!

3 comments Visited 14031 times January 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Google… You’re Not The Boss of Me!

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 19th, 2007

I ran into a buddy of mine the other day, and during our “catching up” conversation, the topic eventually turned to his manufacturing business, and I asked him if he felt his site contributed positively to his company’s strategic vision. He quickly began complaining about how they couldn’t figure out how to be ranked organically in Google, that Google requires them to pay to get on the first results page for their chosen keywords, and who does Google think they are anyway, etc. It was quite the emotional rant, and one I am afraid I hear and read quite often. These rants usually remind me of my niece who frequently tell her aunts and uncles “you’re not the boss of me!”

Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to discuss my view of my buddy’s Google opinion that day, so I thought I would take some time to address it here.

Fact is this; Google is the boss of us… if we want to rank high on their site. I frankly don’t have a problem with it, but many do. Google suggests how our sites should be optimized so they can best provide their clients (all those that come to Google to search) the most relevant search results. Google’s power to make these suggestions is provided by those of us that use Google to find what we are looking for, nothing more. Google did not put something in the water, nor are they blackmailing the president, the public simply liked the results obtained in the past, and continue to trust Google to deliver appropriate search results now. Google’s ability to guide our optimization efforts has been earned through the years and is presently sustained by a primarily satisfied public.

The ire aimed at Google for these optimization requirements/rules can be quite humorous at times, but it is hardly justifiable. Most (and hopefully none) of us would ever consider walking into Walmart and setting up a table in the front of the store to sell our products to Walmart customers as they pass by, and we wouldn’t expect Walmart to allow us this access to their customers. And even though most of us have no idea what is required to get a product approved for sale in Walmart, most of us would assume Walmart has a very systematic methodology in place to properly consider and approve new products. Additionally we would also assume Walmart is predictably careful when they determine where in a store a product will be physically positioned, as they want the product easily found by as many customers as possible. I have personally been through this Walmart process, it is quite an ordeal. I didn’t find it enjoyable, but we did it anyway to hopefully get a chance at Walmart’s clientele. Despite our best efforts, Walmart chose not to take on our product, and while we were disappointed, we didn’t then decide to circumvent the new product evaluation process and somehow sneak our product into their stores anyway, I doubt anyone would.

So, I say “so what” if Google asks us to jump through a few hoops? If we want the opportunity to sell to THEIR clients, much like Walmart, we should expect Google to require our sites to comply to their suggestions, so they can more easily position our sites properly, and facilitate the client/seller introduction. It is in our best interest to do so.

Now I will admit, if Google was the only game in town, then I would probably be on the ire gang band wagon, and suspicious of Google’s monopoly power over us, but with Yahoo, MSN and others also in the search game, each of the SEs are motivated to make their search results as relevant as possible, to rank our sites as high (or low) as they deserve, or run the risk of losing market share, or being forced out of the market completely. The requirements SEs place on our sites are simply the hoops SEO tools help us jump through, and as long as we are willing to do the work, then we can expect to see a trend of positive results in our rankings. No tricks, no shortcuts, just honest optimization, earning our position.

Those that don’t like what the SEs requests are probably going to be upset to discover you actually have to complete homework assignments to graduate from school, you have to register to vote, you have to file articles of organization to start a company, you have to use an iPod to listen to your iTunes library, and you have to put a postage stamp on a letter to get it to go anywhere, but that is unfortunately the tough world we find ourselves in… what an insufferable drag.

5 comments Visited 3782 times January 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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