CC Image Couch Potato by Shawn Allen
As a SEO turned business blogger I noticed that the main difference between old school SEO and new school SEO is the level and focus of activity/time spent working on your site or blog. I say site or blog as formerly you had only a site and now you most often have a blog (on top of a site). The time spent on different activities like
changed considerably.
“He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone.” I admit reading or rather scanning the “confidential” Twitter documents obtained by Techcrunch from a hacker and published in excerpts. Of course I was curious. On the other hand:
Was this whole Techcrunch Twitter hacked scandal worth it?
Are we wiser now? Has humanity gained some new insights? Did Techcrunch prevent a corrupt president from breaking the law?
Recently a large part of the SEO industry, or rather the advanced SEOs got fooled by a cat blogger who happens to work for Google. What happened? Let me explain in depth:
So called PageRank sculpting has been a bizarre practice of the SEO industry. It was about selectively hurting your website in order to push other parts of it.
PageRank sculpting was based on the assumption that if you have a hypothetical website of 10 pages each of it having one point of authority (Google PageRank) you end up having more of it on the remaining pages if you cripple some of them by stopping the flow of PageRank to to some pages.
For a few months now my work consists mainly of business blogging. I do less and less conventional client SEO work like keyword research or link building. This is quite a change as I’ve been a full time search engine optimizer and SEO consultant for several years in a row. Thus I still get SEO related inquiries and offers.
By now many people know what SEO is about, at least superficially. This is often more of an issue than a help though. Some people have some distorted preconceptions as what SEO is about and how it works.
This week an inquiry was about link building for a travel website. I won’t disclose which site or destination it was about but it’s one of the most popular and very competitive ones. The email asked for link building and ended with the sentence “let’s start with 50 links”.
This week the number of newsworthy items about and on Twitter was so overwhelming that I I solely focused this Twitter Friday on Twitter and SEO.
We have witnessed at least 4 major Twitter SEO developments this week that mattered most from our industry perspective:
Over the past two years I collected quite a few PDF and other downloads about social media in general, blogging, social media marketing and SEO.
While blogs offer quick tips and overviews ebooks and white papers have the necessary depth to cover more intricate topics.
Ebooks are particularly apt for the quite abstract concepts of social media marketing and SEO. That’s why I compiled this list of 25 free social media marketing and SEO ebooks, white papers plus other downloads.
These downloads stem from highly respectable sources and are free as agencies and specialists tend to promote themselves showing off their expertise for for free to gain recognition as experts. So this is a win to win situation for the sides, you the reader as well as the authors.
Recently there is an enormous amount of social media marketing advice floating around the blogosphere. Much of it is repetitive, much is obsolete, much is quite useless for most business owners. It’s simply social media marketing confusion.
Stop it, stop reading all that.
You don’t have to be a prophet to foresee what’s coming up in 2009 and beyond. Why? Most of the future web trends are already unfolding. For others the foundations are laid by hardware, web infrastructure and the broader economy.
Many SEO practitioners still apply optimisation techniques like in 1999. Back then popular belief was that it was perfectly enough to lure Internet users to a website with whatever means it takes and then everything else would would work fine. Things like readability were far off the SEO agenda.
For a few years now the SEO industry focuses on conversions, that is converting a website visitor to a client through web design for ROI. In order to achieve that the foremost task is to keep the visitor on the page in the first place.
When potential SEO clients approach me my first question always is “how old is your domain?”. Then the second question is “how long has it been indexed?” Most people don’t know how important that is and I prepare them for my answer to their first and second question:
How much does SEO of my site cost and how long does it take to see success?
My answer always is: It depends! Whenever I tell them the truth (it might take a year or longer) they never call me again. Well it’s just the dark part of the truth. Once you know you have a new site and all SEO experts know that Google does not like new domains, we can adapt our keyword research and thus aim for goals that can be reached within a shorter time frame.
The solution to overcome the problem of the so called Google sandbox (Google not allowing new sites to rank for competitive terms) is focusing on modifiers. While a new site will rarely be able to compete in a crowded niche it can immediately fight for keyword phrases and keyword combinations that are neither the most competitive terms nor long tail (very specific or unusual) phrases.
Keyword modifiers to optimise new websites for can be (as I refer to keywords I will write everything in lowercase like search users do):
A city or region
Even with Google Local/Maps getting more popular people will still look for local businesses like in the traditional Google results.
A verb that signifies the searcher’s demand
It’s incredible how many people really add verbs like “buy” instead of the noun “shop”. Also “rent” is popular.
A noun that signifies the searcher’s demand
An adjective that specifies the demand
A noun that specifies the demand
A term that specifies the target audience
This can apply also to students, women, seniors or whatever demographic group you want to reach.
Brand or product plus alternative
I see a lot of searches like that where people know only one brand but don’t want to stick with it.
Entering the market late means you’re a “mom and pop shop” opening in the vicinity of a huge WalMart or Tesco store so you can’t compete by offering exactly what the huge chain offers. You got specialise and be different.
Choose several of these modifiers, the most apt ones for your business and start optimising for them right away. Using modifiers brings SEO results much quicker. Later on you still can rank for the most competitive terms.
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