Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools

Improve Your Pay-per-Click Advertising

There are many potential buyers perusing the Web each hour. As a businessperson, you need to confront them with your services and products. Search engines host billions of pages, so how will the buyer find you?

Pay-per-click advertising aligns browsers with your products/services via keywords. PPC advertising is a strategic way to enable buyers to find you.

Everything comes at a cost. Pay-per-click advertising can be costly. Advertisers pay according to the popularity of their keywords. How can you control your return on investment? Ideally, you want to lower your costs while attempting to higher the occurrences of buyers making an action towards buying. Consider the following:

Create a direction

As mentioned, pay-per-click advertising can be expensive, so it is necessary to establish goals and a direction for your particular campaign. Have numbers in mind regarding how much return you expect each month. PPC advertising can be an effective way to generate more revenue, but it may not work well for all businesses.

Developing a plan and establishing goals will help you gauge your accomplishments.

Measure

You must measure your performance regarding pay-per-click advertising regularly. This involves doing some research before embarking on your campaign. Find out what keywords are popular and relevant in regards to your products and services. Research the conversion rates for those words. Most likely, the higher the conversion rates, the higher the cost per click.

Analyze results by day, week, and month. Some companies have in house staff conducting the analysis and others outsource to pay-per-click services.

Where is the click going?

When a browser clicks on your PPC ad, where is it taking them? It is important to devote a lot of thought towards constructing efficient landing pages. Landing pages serve as the gateway between the browsers and your goods and products. The landing page needs to be enticing, easy to use, informative, and clearly highlights a call to action.

Back to the drawing board

Test different keywords continuously, leverage different search engines for advertising, and tweak your landing pages. It can become very frustrating; some days may prove successful and others will be disappointing. Continue to return to the drawing board until you find a formula that works for your company.

Address click fraud

There is no exact estimate regarding the occurrences of click fraud, yet we do know that it is a reality. There are options set in place for pay-per-click advertisers to keep the occurrences of click fraud to a minimum. Do not engage in pay-per-click advertising without addressing click fraud.

About the Author:
We at VendorSeek pride ourselves in bringing businesses together. Our process involves analytically assessing each request and finding the right dynamic that will ensure a successful business partnership.

Drive More Traffic to Your Site

Do you have a Web site? Are you satisfied with the amount of traffic coming to your site to purchase your products/services? Would you like to attract more customers? Yes, you would. It is highly likely there are scores of people out there that would like to add to your revenue in exchange for a desired product/service. The trick is to find a way for them to find you.

Consider the following:

Open sesame

Knowing the right keywords is an integral part of marketing your Web site. Until browsers find your site and become (hopefully) faithful customers, they will need to find your site through keyword searches.

Do your homework. Know which keywords are pertinent to your industry, goods, and services. Analyze the keywords of competitors and assess whether you can make yours more specific in order to have less competition in regards to the search results. Measure your traffic and the method in which browsers get to your site.

Some keywords may work more successfully, so continue to experiment and find what keywords bring the most traffic.

Optimization

Ideally, you want to rank high in the search engines. Search engine optimization services can help you rank higher organically. There are a number of things an SEO company can do for you to improve your rankings. Good SEO work takes time, but is highly effective.

Pay-per-click

PPC advertising is a good complement to search engine optimization. PPC advertising also relies heavily on keywords. Search engines will charge you a fee for every time a Web browser clicks on your hosted ad. PPC campaigns warrant diligent analysis. Coveted keywords will cost you more money, so it is important to make sure you are getting a good return on your investment for the ordeal.

The look

Web browsers are fickle. They know there are a variety of sites vying for their business. This means everything counts. Web browsers will judge your company and its products/services against the look and feel of your site. A poorly designed site will dissuade browsers from making a purchase. It is important to incorporate compelling calls to action on your Web site. You want your site to look great, but its main purpose is to make you money.

Use email

Most sites get information from their visitors in order to invite them back. Web browsers have millions of sites at their fingertips, so you need to prompt them to return to your site in order for them to make their visits habitual. Use emails to make browsers aware of sales, specials, etc.

Make partners

Ideally, you want your site to be found in as many places as possible. Businesses will often engage in affiliate partnerships. It entails paying other sites a portion of the revenue generated from advertising your products/services on their site. Many products and services complement those of other industries well, so it is easy to make partners as long as you exercise some creativity.

About the Author:
We at VendorSeek pride ourselves in bringing businesses together. Our process involves analytically assessing each request and finding the right dynamic that will ensure a successful business partnership.

Suggestions in Working with Your SEO Service Provider

Outsourcing is a popular decision with small to mid-sized companies. It affords the smaller establishments the opportunity to concentrate on their business while needed services are addressed by professionals. Vendors may engage in a variety of services, or focus on one; but nevertheless, you should place faith in their abilities. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Search engine optimization helps Web sites achieve higher rankings on the search engines. Understanding SEO practices takes time. Occasionally, a business will let their anxiety get the best of them and interrupt the progress of their search engine optimization campaign.

Keep the following suggestions in mind when working with your SEO service.

Change is inevitable

Search engine optimization is difficult to understand. Many factors involve and influence search rankings. Most likely, your SEO vendor will need to make changes on your site in order to benefit your rankings. This is unsettling to most because they may have had a Web design company build them a costly site, and they now are paying another service to modify the same site.

Rankings are contingent on many factors, and there is a great chance your site will need alteration. Do not be disturbed about SEOs making suggestions regarding changing the look and feel of your site.

Making updates

You may have the need to make changes on your site. You may want to add an article, upload graphics, insert company news, etc. This is great (SEO companies will encourage new content), but it is wise to let your search engine optimization company know what is occurring. There are several reasons to communicate with your vendor, but one of the major ones is to avoid doing things that would be counterproductive to your SEO campaign.

Relations with other sites

Linking is common practice on the Web. Sites will link out to other sites with pertinent information to supplement their own; and in return, sites will receive inbound links for the same reason. Rankings are influenced by links. Sites will often ask for link exchanges and an unknowing site owner may willingly accept. Be sure to alert your search engine optimization service before linking out or exchanging links. On the web, you will often be judged (by search engines and browsers) by the company you keep. Your SEO company will let you know if an exchange is a good move to make.

Be patient

Understand that legitimate SEO campaigns will take some time to generate results. Some SEOs will promise you first page rankings instantaneously. Stay away from vendors that promise immediate results. Yes, there are ways to get immediate results, but they are not completely legitimate, can get your site penalized by search engines, and tarnish your site’s credibility in the face of browsers.

Be patient with your search engine optimization company. Do not attempt to streamline the process by engaging in SEO practices yourself. The best way to assuage concerns is to be honest with your vendor and ask them for viable timelines.

Communicate

Communication is imperative in any business relationship. Keep regular contact with your SEO service provider. The more information you give them regarding the direction of your marketing campaign and your products/services, the better results you will get from your campaign.

About the Author:
We at VendorSeek pride ourselves in bringing businesses together. Our process involves analytically assessing each request and finding the right dynamic that will ensure a successful business partnership.

GET ATTENTION ON THE WEB -

Provide them with tools

What sort of tools would be pertinent and useful to use in relation to your site? Develop and implement tools on your Web site.

Make them think

Quizzes are popular with Web browsers. People like to be challenged and the information could be relatable to your industry.

Make them compete

Your site can host a contest promising some sort of award to the winners. This will generate buzz around your site from participants and non-participants.

Be the early bird

If your site works in a specific industry, be the first to deliver news, tips, and suggestions on particular topics germane to your field. Others in your line of work will link to you from their Web sites when they want to convey the news to their browsers.

Break news

Do some investigating and provide groundbreaking news yourself. Whether it be positive or a negative, people will want to know the truth and create buzz around your site.

The top ten…

Lists have been used in excess, but they still work. Derive a novel list on a particular category and wait for the links to come in.

Humor

We see it all the time with television commercials; companies use humor to attract attention. Do you have a clever cartoon, video, or article to post on your site? Mixing business with pleasure may attract more business.

Create a community

Affix a forum to your site. People like belonging to a community. People will peruse and link to your main site in conjunction with participating in your community gesture.

Take a side

Is there a hot topic developing or existing in your industry? Take a side on the matter. Voice your opinion. Others will be inspired to react whether they agree or disagree.

Educate the masses

It takes time and extreme effort, but providing the public with information can attract a lot of attention. Develop white papers, articles, charts, graphs, etc. that reflect industry related trends and information.

Give something away

People like receiving, and in the name of reciprocity, those who give also receive. Attempt to give something away on your site to browsers and members and then expect to get some traffic coming your way.

About the Author:
We at VendorSeek pride ourselves in bringing businesses together. Our process involves analytically assessing each request and finding the right dynamic that will ensure a successful business partnership.

SEO SEM Online Marketing - Forum

SEM Online Marketing - Forum
A Forum created for those interested in Online marketing... SEO and SEM

Top 20 SEO Tools

Top 20 SEO Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO)

is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices.

The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers", terms adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Vodka listings raise eyebrows

Google has had a longstanding policy against advertising liquor, along with guns and gambling. Frank Watson at SearchEngineWatch found it surprising, then, when a search for [vodka] brought back Google Shopping results.

The search brought back results from various vendors, along with prices. "Now that does seem like they are contradicting their own rules," writes Watson.

Oddly, similar results are not returned for other liquors like gin, rum, tequila, or whiskey. Likewise, searches for other banned products, like handguns or shotguns, brought back no Shopping results. Watson concedes it could be an oversight.

SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan weighed in on the issue, disagreeing that Google was violating its own policy because Shopping results are not the same as ads. On Sphinn, he comments:

[T]hat's not a "Google Checkout" box that's appear. It's Google Shopping results….Just like regular Google web search, you have paid and unpaid results in shopping…. You could argue that if Google wants to ban things in ads, they should ban the same things in editorial results. But Google's never claimed to be consistent here, when I've talked to them about it in the past. Some things they don't want ads for (some things they also by law can't take ads for), and that's it.

Glitch or not a glitch, hypocrisy or not, Sullivan makes a good case. It's still odd only [vodka] brings up anything.

Buyout The Best Sites, Beat Google

By David A. Utter - Thu, 05/15/2008 - 11:28am.

Mark Cuban suggests a new way to stop Google

Mark Cuban suggested Yahoo or Microsoft could payoff the top five sites for each of the top 25,000 queries on Google, have those sites leave the Google index for good, and bring Google's normal traffic for those sites into the rival fold.

Tech billionaire and NBA team owner Cuban must still be reeling from his Mavericks being ousted from the playoffs already. He's got a doozy of a post up on his always entertaining Blog Maverick site about beating Google the old fashioned way, by buying off their most valuable search results.

"How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted?" he asked. "A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average?"

Cuban's post included the suggestion these sites dump Google's publisher network in favor of the one operated by whoever buys them out, effectively recouping whatever investment the rival site made to get those sites out of Google's index and revenue stream.

Per site, it could be a lot. Financially, a Microsoft possesses the resources to pull this off, but the real issue isn't the sites, but the searchers who expect to find the best results for a top query when using Google.

John Battelle flatly stated "no one would do it," as far as selling out and leaving Google entirely. He suggested Cuban should try the strategy out, since he has the money to do it.

Inertia presents the real problem in getting people to switch search engines. They use Google out of habit, plus the idea that everyone "Googles" anyway. There's no motivation to switch. People would just treat the next batch of search results as the ones they want and click from there.

"Time to go back to the drawing board on beating Google," Andrew Parker said of Cuban's suggestion. Indeed, it seems it will take a lot more than money to overcome the inertia that keeps people tied to Google today.

Google Says You Can't Buy The Top Ad Spot

By David A. Utter - Tue, 05/27/2008 - 8:10am.

The ad clicker should benefit the most

Wealthy businesses and smaller operations all compete fairly when it comes to testing ad quality, and thus a placement at the top isn't a divine right for anyone.

Ad quality becomes a bigger issue in the coming weeks, as Google plans to subject advertisers to landing page load time assessments. Speedier pages, which will mean those without lots of plugged-in third-party content, will receive better ad quality scores.

Google's strategy considers quality as king of the advertising and visitor relationship. Relevant search results are no longer enough; it might be suggested that certain competing search engines would suit people as well as Google does for queries.

Better ad destinations make the organic search results look that much more valuable. Google's strategic shift from quantity to quality ads over the past few months means they believe the company makes more money from a single well-conforming ad than several less-pertinent ones. Google isn't about to leave money on the table, and neither should its clients.

The issue of ad quality appeared in a post at Google's Testing blog. Alex Icev wrote about the team and process involved with ranking the quality of search results, and how that transitioned into work on the advertising side.

"We needed to change a system that was predominately driven by human influence into one that (built) its merit based on feedback from the community," Icev said. He detailed a little of the process behind this, especially in the context of moving poor performers out of view:

The idea was that we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad's landing page was not relevant, or if users don't like an ad's content. We want to provide our users with absolutely the most relevant ads for their click.

Even though the big change to scoring ads based on concepts like landing page speed hits everyone, we think the bigger spenders have an advantage, and always will have, when it comes to bidding for certain lucrative keywords.

The most competitive keywords spur advertisers to improve their all-around page quality. When all other factors are equal, the bid spend makes the difference. Advertisers spend more, and Google profits. With luck, the visiting ad-clicker benefits the most.

10k ppc experiment part2

10k ppc experiment part2

This is a second and final post to my experiment with pay per click engines. This is mostly based on my theories and social engineering. Please make sure you do your own research before jumping into PPC. For a smarter approach to ppc check out graywolfs excellent series called Adsense Arbitrage:

• Automation and Button Pushing
• Keyword Selection

Final Target Acquisition:

So I feel somewhat comfortable with Adwords but I still felt that I could get more bang for my buck… well more buck for my buck to be technical. So I started doing some research more research. What is it that we are selling? Well in order for a Ringtones ad to “convert�? a user has to put in there phone number then they are text messaged a pin code they must enter into a site. This I a very nice 2 step process for a payout unlike some other things. Who is most likely to freely give out there phone number? Ya… your kids.

So we know we can already eliminate Nextel because they cant use any of the Ringtones offers were are doing. Now lets look at some further demographics of our targets. After doing a quick Google search we see that the average age of cellular phone users is 21. Also you can see that Verizon Wireless customers are very choosy and like to shop around. I attribute this to the fact the have the oldest userbase in the industry with an average user age of 25. In my mind this makes them not such a good target. The next highest age on average is Sprint with an average age of its users being 23. Sprint also has the 2nd most corporate clients behind Nextel which makes them (in my opinion) less likely to submit there phone number to a website for some “No Charge�? Ringtones.

So I am going to target Cingular and T-mobile users. Cingular in my opinion is the best demographic to target. They have an average age of 19 years old. T-Mobile is VERY close with an average age of 19.5.

Now I check this data with the data from my previous conversions:

Cingular: 38%
Tmobile: 34%
Sprint: 25%
Verizon 18%

This is just going off of my previous Adwords data this means that for every 10 Cingular people that are clicking on my ad I am converting 1.8 For Tmobile 1.7 and you can guess the rest.

So if the offer pays 15$ and I have an 18% conversion that means I am Grossing 2.70 cents per click. For 38% I am grossing 5.70 cents per click.

So now we have some numbers to work with. Lets move on before my head explodes.

Adwords: I run all offers on only the Google network. I do not run on any content network (ask.com earthlink. etc) I just find that I get a bad return on those. I am sure they work fine for other niches but for me its not doing it. For the most part with Adwords I set my bids and had a max budget of 300$/day. Fire and forget. I stayed strong on my Adwords bids. I have data that shows what I need to spend to convert so there really is no guesswork involved. If the bid goes up then I am not showing ads. If it comes down then my ads are in full effect.

CPM Targeting for the win… Here is a dirty secret. CPM target sites where the only good content is the AdSense ad. Here is the deal… with AdSense lets say it costs you 6$ to be #1 for Verizon Ringtones for search results… but ohh wait, what is this??Why it’s the #1 ORGANIC Google result for the phrase “Verizon Ringtones�? and it only costs me 10$ CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or roughly 1 cent per impression). Since this ad is really the only relevant content it converts REALLY WELL.

In general site targeting these sites is a really good investment. These guys only build these sites for 1 reason… to get AdSense clicks and the other dirty secret about them is they convert really well because the user gets exactly what they were searching for. The key to finding them is just searching on various search engines. Google for the most part does not feel these sites should get good organic listing but that does not mean that they are not making money off of MSN and Yahoo ranking these sites high. Make sure you search them also for these kinds of sites.

Yahoo Search Marketing:

Yahoo Search Marketing was quite a bit more fire and forget then Adwords. I did not have to write 80 million ads to get my quality score up and this was really pretty simple. I scraped about 15,000 terms up using overture inventory, Google suggest and some other tools around the net for anything related to “Ringtones�?. I went ahead and approved any bid that it said cause I was going to edit them later…. MISTAKE!!! I had stayed up all until 5am to get all these terms in and it said it would take up to 3-5 days to approve them… well crap. I am going to bed. Then I wake up and they were approved and I burned through about 1800$ DOH. Some clicks were as high as 8$!!! I did get some return on my investment but my first day of yahoo was a bummer due to my lack of foresight. I now have set my daily budget to 300$ and also adjusted all my approved bids to 13 cents. Amazingly enough I got a decent amount of traffic from this that was converting. I really like yahoos placement targeting where you can specify where you want to be placed. I choose to be in position 3 and while that made my average cost go up about 600% I also got a TON more exposure.

Over all I was surprised at the lack of features with Yahoo Search Marketing. I mean these guys have been doing this the longest right? (Formally known as overture) That’s what I thought anyway… I hate having to wait DAYS to see if my listings get approved… and also I found the editing of listings to really suck. If I wanted to change something even if it was the website address it almost always got denied… They defiantly have some improving to do.

MSN AdCenter:

Ok positives first… MSN is by far the cheapest place to buy clicks. You can get tons of good 5 cent clicks. Also the traffic seems to convert 3-4% better then any other PPC program I tested. Also with MSN I did not have to write assloads of ads. It was pretty much fire and forget.

The downsides to AdCenter:

* There is not much traffic… even for top phrases. I had set my budget on AdCenter to 300$/day and it never got close to that.

* Import/export really sucks… forget trying to mass import large-scale keyword lists. I ended up doing them about 100 at a time and that… sucked….

Adbrite:

Adbrite is really the true diamond in the ruff. You have to search for them a bit but you can find them pretty easy. I never paid more then 8 cents a click and got many clicks for around 2-3cents.

Adbrite is somewhat a different monster then the others. You pay on a time period based level for the most part so you want to encourage users to click on the ads as much as possible. Because it costs you the same. The goal for Adbrite is to get as many clicks as possible.

The Bottom Line:

Over all the 40k experiment turned out to be a really profitable experiment. I have tried not to focus too much on specific numbers because people always get so hung up on figures. In order to comply with the broad TOS seemed to be shared by most of these PPC engines I am not going to specifics. I will say that on the whole Adbrite performed by far the best bang for the buck. I will say that Adbrite performed the best profit wise and CPC wise. Also keep in mind that I only played in the Ringtones arena and my methodologies produce many different results then others.

In March using these 4 networks I budgeted $40,000.00 Of that $40,000.00 I was only able to spend $28,932.75 for a total gross return of $144,329.29 for the month of march from cj.com and azoogleads.com Ringtones affiliates. The last parting words I have is do your homework. Find out what you need to spend to make a profit then stand strong on your bids. I HIGHLY recommend not using any automated bidding software for PPC-> affiliate.

Good Luck!

Note: I was SUPER sick when trying to write this post and jacked up pretty good on cough meds. I will do follow up posts.

Written By: ShoeMoney

Organic SEO vs. PPC?

By Kara Ratliff - Tue, 11/06/2007 - 9:58am.

So, what’s it going to be? Spend the time and effort cultivating your organic search engine marketing plan or just offer up the cash and invest in a pay-per-click program? Which is better for you? Both?

Organic SEO vs. PPC?

It’s a question most, if not all; businesses will eventually have to ask themselves in the course of developing their Internet marketing strategies. Which alternative offers the best return on investment? Which one is more easily managed?

When you purchase visitors or "clicks" from a search engine, this is called "pay-per-click" (PPC) search engine advertising (or PPCSE). Pay-per-click search engine advertising allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by "bidding" (paying) for keywords related to your product or service.

On the upside… you’re free from the headaches and worry of trying to figure out what any given engine’s algorithm is up to and how it impacts your position. It’s scalable and controllable – you know exactly how much you’re spending and (ideally) have a good idea of what you’re getting in return. It’s also very fast. No waiting around here… just sign that check and watch your results.

On the downside, it costs several coins – sometimes quite a lot of them actually, to get really good results. The low hanging fruit of paid search has long since gone now that mainstream advertisers and Fortune 500s have jumped into the space. Paid campaigns are also not without their headaches. Coming up with effective keywords to bid on is a job in and of itself. Managing what you’re spending on what keywords, measuring their returns, adjusting your spends and playing the PPC game intelligently is a full time gig.

In the other corner we have "Organic" or "Natural" search engine optimization (SEO). Generally speaking, organic SEO consists of optimizing your web pages to enhance their position in the naturally occurring search results. Asking what goes into organic SEO is a lot like asking what goes into a Twinkie. You start with sorbic acid, which derives from natural gas. Ok really organic SEO consists of making sure the search engine spiders can crawl and understand what is on your web pages. Once they understand it, you need to make them like it more than all the other web pages with the same/similar information.

It’s about as easy as it sounds. In essence, you are just making sure your content on your page is in good shape and then start trying to move your pages up the results by doing things like cultivating inbound links from other sites. Inbound links dictate your "link popularity" so, by acquiring (ahem… however you do so) links that point to your web site. You can boost your rank in the search results.

That established, we decided to ask some of the experts which type of marketing most sites should be using: organic SEO or PPC? Executive Vice-President of SiteLab, Dana Todd, a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney Media Group, Inc. have both been there and done exactly this with both methods.

Jeremy felt like, as a rule of thumb, the majority of bloggers should generally use organic SEO because they aren’t really selling a product. For those companies and sites that are trying to sell a physical product, PPC has quicker results.

He said, "Whenever you have a physical good, that you know what it's worth and you know what that value is, then it's real easy to use Pay-Per-Click. You know exactly how much to spend to make money."

Dana Todd emphasized the fact that everybody can benefit from organic SEO. Dana says, “(each form of) Advertising has a completely different place in your media mix. We would never recommend, here at SiteLab, that you do one or the other; you always do them both wherever possible."

Jeremy and Dana both felt that neither method was sufficient by itself and indicated that everyone should look at trying both if at all possible. For some sites, depending on your goals, it often makes sense to allocate more or less resources to one form or the other. However, for most sites looking to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy, most any plan should include components of both.

To find out more details of the interview with Shoemoney and Dana Todd, you can watch the video and gain helpful tips of how to start and what to do when tackling marketing online.

About the author:
Kara Ratliff is a reporter/anchor for WebProNews.

CEO Says SEO A Waste Of Time

By Mike Sachoff - Tue, 02/27/2007 - 3:49pm.

Is search engine optimization a waste of time? According to one man in the UK it is.

Anthony Fallon, CEO of Warrington Web Works, a UK Web Publishing company says that search engine optimization is both a waste of time and money to businesses and he can support his argument with proof.

Fallon says that businesses who are using distribution technologies, such as RSS, writing content for the benefit of site visitors and the improvement in Google’s search technology means an end to jockeying for the top ten coveted positions in a search engine.

He asks the question, “Is this the end for the SEO Industry?”

Last week Fallon wrote an article called “SEO Mind Crime” for Warrington Web Works, a site he writes for to keep readers up to date on web 2.0 technologies.

In the article he weighs in on why SEO is a waste of time and money.

The idea for the article came from a meeting with a client.

The client had been quoted $29,000 for search engine optimization services from a competing company.

The competitor was guaranteeing a spot in the top ten of Google for three years for popular industry keywords in the natural search results.

“Not even Google can guarantee that!” says Anthony Fallon. “You can’t just tell business owners what a waste of money SEO is, you have to prove it. The SEO industry has all the statistics they need to bluff the money out of the coffers of any business.”

To prove that SEO is waste of time he told his readers as a test to search for his article “SEO Mind Crime” on Google over the next few days.

The article was posted on Wednesday and 24 hours later the article appeared at positions 3, 4 and 6 on Google’s first page.

This was out of 826,000 indexed pages and Fallon believes that is proof why SEO is no longer needed in Web 2.0.

“Web 2.0 it’s all about your visitor,” Anthony added. “The new distribution technologies like RSS will get your message out there without any magic or manipulation of search results. The quality of Google’s Search technology is really coming on in leaps and bounds. If businesses can get in front of their customers without stuffing their content with keywords, it has to be a good thing. As for the SEO Industry, good riddance I say.”

About the author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews.

SEO Does Have A Future

By Michael Gray - Fri, 05/09/2008 - 3:07pm.

Now Shoemoney is a friend of mine, but regarding his post SEO Has No Future today, I am forced to disagree with him. Not only does SEO have a future but judging by the number of SEO clients I am turning away, and the number of job offers I am receiving on weekly basis to take on in house positions, all during a shrinking economy and a recession, the future is looking pretty bright for SEO …

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created. Want to solve that problem require your designer read Designing With Web Standards before they give you a single markup or deck.

Until programmers and developers learn that cool widgety, pop-up, slide-out, spinning flaming skull javascript based mystery meat navigation is completely uncrawlable, and renders your website invisible to every search engine, and an SEO has to come in design a flat text based alternative navigation, SEO is alive and well. Until your programmers and developers learn that no matter how sexy the UI is, if your users and customers cant figure out what to do, SEO’s with a firm grasp on usability will always have a job. Want to solve that problem give everyone on your team a copy of Don’t make me Think by Steve Krug still relevant after 8 years.

Until CEO’s learn that flash websites with lots of eye candy and sizzle are great for entertainment, but don’t work because they break basic web functionality like the back button, an SEO is always going to be needed to bring things back down to earth. Want to help them really get the point, show him the flash website on an iPhone, then get them to read Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed and Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.

Until old school marketing people like Peter Sealey stop thinking of search engines and the company website as an afterthought and SEO is always going to need to convince executives this interweb thing isn’t just a flash in the pan. Until companies start to realize they are slowly losing the ability to control the message and need to embrace that customers can control what the internet says about you, an SEO is always going to have to use techniques to address reputation management problems. Want to fix that problem start handing out copies of Small Is the New Big by Seth Godin.

Until Advertising and Copyrighting departments learn that the medium is shifting from a top down model to a more conversational one to one model, an SEO is going to have talk about content. Until companies start to understand you have to be more than brochure ware and solve someone’s problem if you want people to use and link to your site, and SEO is going have direct content creation. Want to solve that problem reread the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Until Public Relations departments understand that a press release isn’t exciting or useful to anyone except journalists and reporters, an SEO is going to have to explain viral marketing. Until clueless people like Clive Thompson realize that fame, ego, and cold hard cash can motivate people, you are going to need an SEO aware social media consultant to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot. Want to fix the problem read Tipping Point, Made to Stick and Trendsspotting.

Until your legal department realizes being politically incorrect is really an asset, an SEO is going to have to explain the concept of appealing to the linkerati. Want to fix the problem get them to read The Big Moo.

Until Web 2.0 startup companies and Venture Capitalists start considering SEO as part of their business plan from the start, an SEO is going to have to save a company from shooting itself in the foot at every turn. Want to fix the problem get everyone to read the Dip.

Until everyone realizes that a good SEO is also part marketer and all they have to do is push the right buttons we are going to have these debates about SEO being dead or not. Until people realize just like good lawyers and bad lawyers there are good SEO’s and bad SEO’s it’s really just a semantics debate.

The question is are you learning anything from the debate? Are you learning how to get links from it, how to get attention, and how to turn them into billable accounts and hours? If you aren’t, and you are just in it for the drama, then you really aren’t an SEO, you’re an SEOFakester (&tm; sugarrae).

About the author:
Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org.

SEO Has No Future -

SEO Has No Future

I did a interview last night and was asked some really really good questions. One of which was what is the future of SEO?

My honest answer is there is no future in SEO. From my experiences I am seeing Google SERPS results strongly influenced by Google Toolbar data, Google User history, and Google Analytics data. Googles combination of SEO and social voting via toolbar/history/analytics will continue to sway more in the realm of social voting. I feel this technology will only get better. I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing. After all if you read the spam as defined by Matt Cutts (Google Lead Spam Engineer) he says:

“Web spam is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their Web site shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up,” - Matt Cutts

That is most SEO at its core. Sure you add title tags and meta descriptions but then you have to incentivize people to link to it. You are now seeing lots sites rank for stuff that have the goofiest URL structure, unoptimized title tags, and bad description tags.

Some of the best examples of how the Google algorithm is more favoring social voting (via above methods) are seen with the Google Sitelinks. I have had things show up on sitelinks that were completely noindex/nofollow and had no meta description or even on page content yet were the first item listed in my sitelinks… coincidently they were also the most trafficked item on my site.

So in my opinion there just is no future in current SEO for Google anyway. Its not going to happen overnight but it is happening.

Please keep in mind I am not a professional SEO and have never claimed to be. My opinions above are purely based on my experiences.