Seasoned Marketer

One of my pet peeves is so called SEO experts who don’t even know HTML or CSS.  It’s really hard to be an SEO guru and not even know the language. SEO, for those that don’t know, stands for Search Engine Optimization.  It’s a set of rules and guidelines that webmasters use to help rank better in the search engines.

About 3 or 4 years ago, I met this well known SEO consultant and she and I were working on the same project for a large local business.  And it quickly became obvious that she knew little to nothing about real SEO.   And the president of the company would tell me things like “she was hostile towards you and trying to damage your reputation behind your back”.  So she was a lovely person.  No, not really.

Anyhow, I had to laugh because I simply couldn’t work with someone who had no clue about the basics, like HTML and Title Tags and using relative positioning to help with spider flow.  She had no clue.  And was totally wrong about what she did say was important about SEO.

Her solution was to outsource everything, to just simply move domains (that had pre-existing page rank) and eliminate feeder sites.  It was literally a fiasco and for whatever reason (ego mostly) the company thought she knew what she was doing.

I ended up quitting very early on, because it’s no fun to work with an idiot.  Sincerely.  If you’re going to do something, at least know the basics.  And if you’re going to do it professionally, you better know more than that or at least be in the process of learning.

And more specifically, if you’re going to do SEO for a living, then at least take the time to learn HTML and CSS.  It will serve you well.  Perhaps, and I know this is a radical idea, but just perhaps you might even want to have built your own website first.  Maybe even get some personal results?  I know it’s a crazy idea, but hey, one can only dream.

Hmmmm….this is interesting.  A human powered search engine called Blekko.  Given $24 million in Venture capital, its been in development for 3 years.  And one of the investors was the same guy who created Netscape.  At first glance, it seems to be an effort to make a more ‘social’ search engine.

Having checked it out just now, it does have some nice reserach tools.  But my first impression is that there is much room for abuse and mis-use.  In an ideal world, this might be a viable option.  But in the real world, not sure it’s going to fly.

Right now, Google is the big dog.  Then Yahoo and Bing joined forces.  And there have been many other search engines that have come and gone.  And even if it does start to catch on, it will take some time before it can compete with the other 3 powerhouses.

Having said that, it does have some interesting tools.  Especially for researching and breaking down / reverse anlyzing sites.  For example, with one click you can get a lot of data about the site besides just the content. 

Case in point, you can click the adsense button of a searched site and see all the sites that is using that adsense code.  That can be used by a saavy marketer to figure out how people are making money and from which sites.  It also, in my opinion, removes some of the privacy of the adsense publisher at the same time.  Mixed feelings about that one.

But you can click the SEO button and see the people linking to the site, the cache data, the IP address, check for any duplicate content, etc.  Alot of these features are already available in Google and other search engines.

However, the tag feature means that if you like the site, you can ‘tag’ it and that will help the site climb in the rankings.  Kinda of a popularity contest.  There is also a spam button, should you think the site is spammy.  And this is where the potential for abuse comes into play.  For example, spamming your competitors site just to be vindictive.  Or getting a bunch of friends to ‘tag’ your site.  Or to take out ads on other search engines to help ‘tag’ your site.  Incentive rewards, so to speak.

So we’ll see.  I will probably use it to do some research on a variety of sites.  And that’ll be a good test to see how the results are.  I am not sure how much the average user will benefit from knowing the IP, or SEO, or Adsense of a particular site.  Useful info for marketers for sure, but doubtful it’s helpful at all to the every day web surfer.

I guess time will tell…

My friend, who is President of a MIS company, thinks I am crazy for doing so much SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  And he thinks that PPC is better and just plain ol faster, cause you can just buy it.

And my response after several years of testing shows time and time again that it’s worth taking the time to do SEO. And for several reasons.  But the primary reasons is just sheer volume of traffic.

For those of you who don’t know what PPC and SEO are, they are 2 different ways to get visitors to your site.  PPC stands for Pay Per Click andthat means exactly like what it sounds.  You can literally buy traffic and you ‘pay per click’, meaning you pay each time someone clicks on your ads.  And over the years that has gotten more and more expensive to do.

SEO is all about designing your site both for visitors and search engines and then getting links back to your site that help with your rankings in the major search engines. 

For example, on a Google search results page, the PPC (also called sponsored listings) is found on the right hand side of the page and all the results on the left hand side of the page is called “organic’ or natural “FREE” traffic and is usually a result of a well orchestrated SEO effort, particularly if we are talking about highly competitive search terms.  You’re not going to rank #1 for Viagra by accident.

So is PPC better than Organic SEO’d traffic?  Not in my opinion.  But it’s also a bit like apples and oranges.  With PPC you know that if you bid ‘x’ amount of dollars you’ll get ranked in the top 2 spots in the sponsored results listings.  But that usually requires a good chunk of change to drive any volume of traffic to your site.

SEO, once you have worked your way up into the top 10 results, you’ll get a constant stream of traffic for little to no money.  It doesn’t cost anyone money when people click on the left hand side results (unless those sites have hired someone to do SEO for them or have joined a bunch of expensive directories or have purchased links, etc.).  Which is often times the case.

The down side to SEO is that it’s highly competitive but can drive tons more traffic than PPC and can save you money.  The down side to PPC is that it’s expensive, but at least it’s predictable (meaning you can just buy the results / traffic you want - IF you can afford to).

So my recommendation is… to do BOTH.  Buy PPC in the beginning of your SEO efforts to test traffic and while you are waiting for all of your hard earned SEO efforts to pay off.  You can also use that PPC data to help you determine what and where your SEO efforts should be placed.

That’s all for now, see you next time!