Negative SEO vs Sabotage

Just about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized. A person can say “not me” but how do they operate optimally in both the short term and long term if they never operate near limits or thresholds? But now that Google has begun actively penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles & tightening these thresholds, competitors have been giving one another shoves. Some of the most widely highlighted examples of crappy SEO were not attempts at SEO, but intentional competitive sabotage.

Why Many SEO Thought Leaders Remain Ignorant About SEO

Recently there have been numerous claims that negative SEO doesn’t work made by people who should know better.

Many of them don’t know any better though, due to a combination of being naive, trusting public relations messaging as being the truth, and a general lack of recent experience on smaller sites.

If someone only…

• does consulting for large corporate clients
• works in house at a big company
• publishes a site about SEO and doesn’t build & market sites in competitive areas

… it is easy to bleat on about how negative SEO isn’t generally possible except for weak sites. Sites that (allegedly) deserve to be hit & must (obviously) lack quality to be so weak.

The Risk of Labeling “Spam”

As highlighted above, some of the most frequently & widely cited spam examples were not examples of spam, but examples of competitive sabotage. Thus anyone who recommends highlighting “spam” can potentially hose businesses that did nothing wrong.

Why Many SEO Consultants Pretend Success & Cheer Brand

Most sites focused on search typically write a syndication of Google fluff public relations and/or are doing cloaked sales pieces claiming that the death of spammers is great because they and their clients keep becoming more successful. Its all fake it until you make it / fake it until you too are driven out of the ecosystem & pretend things are always getting better even when signs point the other direction. This is done for a variety of reasons:

• not wanting to lose access to Google
• signaling you have experience working with big brands
• wanting to signal that you are a safe play in the marketplace

Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

Marketers Sell Whatever Google Promotes

It is far easier to get paid to do nothing than it is to get paid to fight against the waves of the ocean.

So long as Google keeps feeding macro-parasites trying to kill off smaller & independent players you can expect a lot of consultants to push themselves as being a good fit for the big brands that Google is explicitly designing their algorithms around promoting. However this trend won’t last forever. Many of those bigger sites are becoming ad networks & at some point Google will see that competitive threat for what it is. They will then decide “the user” would like a bit more diversity in the results & to see more smaller sites rank.

Most Businesses Must be Small

Much like wealth, business distributions follow power laws & most businesses are small in scale. Sure “build brand” is a nice cure all, but building a strong brand requires scale. Not all businesses have the margins required to build brands. And businesses take time to grow.

Quality vs Scale

Scale & quality are not the same thing. Some businesses are intentionally kept small because their owners feel scale requires compromising on quality. Remember the Olive Garden review that went viral, or what the biggest banks did to the global economy a few years ago?

Most Big Companies Start Off Small

Since going public in 1987, Fastenal has been the fastest growing public company. The company was started by a guy who was sorting bolts and nuts in his basement. Now that they are worth $13 billion they are virtually untouchable, but if 30 years ago online was a big sales channel & someone negative SEOed him his business could have been toast.

Big businesses come from small businesses, as does most innovation. However, if the underlying market is absurdly unstable that retards investment in growth and innovation in companies like Fastenal:

The Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the “grand opening” weekend, and the first month’s sales totaled $157.

One of the biggest failures of modern societies is the self-serving myth of too big to fail.

An ugly website or a very un-professionally designed website, makes your website visitor feel that he is or she is not dealing with a professional.  So yes, it is true, a nice competent designed website is important.

However, if you have the most beautiful website in the world.  The most functional and wonderful to browse website in the world, it does you no good if it doesn’t rank well in Google.

What do I mean by “doesn’t rank well in Google”?

Let me explain. Let’s say you have a business.  For this article we’ll say it’s a carpet business.

When somebody is looking for new carpet, 92% of Australians online will open Google and type in something that they hope will bring them to a website that will solve their problem.

In this case, they will be searched using words like

• discount carpet
• fully laid carpet. or perhaps
• cheap carpet fully laid.

Once they click Google search button, Google will give them a list of what it thinks are the 10 best websites for the word they used.

Unless you’ve had the use of expert SEO services, or are unless you have had somebody on board who can get you top search engine results, your website won’t be in that top 10 of Google results

In fact it’ll more than likely be 10, 50, 100 or more pages back from the front page of results.

And the person doing the searching will only find your competition.

The news is not all bad.  With expert SEO services your problem can be solved.  Our best SEO services will help Google learn about your website, appreciate its value, and reward it by ranking higher and higher until your website is sitting right up there in the top 10 of Google.

Our expert SEO services will encourage higher traffic flow to your website and this increases how visible you are on the Internet. It’s tactics like this which dominate your opposition and bring your web pages to the top 10 search results in Google

Our SEO services involve a set, a complete package of detailed research, market analysis and SEO optimisation techniques which all combine to get you more customers by bringing more people to your website.

But are they were written in the your website pages, built properly?

One of the crucial things is we must make sure your website pages are built properly.

We run keyword research, we run a website analysis, we check your competitors and then we run the business analysis.  After that, we check your title tag optimisation, meta tag optimisation, anchor text optimisation, image optimisation and put it all together.

What’s the next step?

Once we have your web page set up properly, we have a very effective monthly SEO program, which combines all our expert SEO services into one efficient monthly package, working week after week to bring your web page and closer and closer to the top 10 in Google.

Our professional search engine services combine with the fact we know what we’re doing, we own the latest software and most progressive search engine tools, we are hard-working and truly care about your result.

We truly care about bringing you more customers.

And we get your page to land top 10 in Google.

So it’s clear. You need expert SEO services, you need more customers . . . and you need to land top 10 in Google to get them. We make it happen for you.

There are loads of SEO strategies that you can apply, whether you want to naturally optimize your website through circulating your content throughout the web or by acquiring paid advertisement services. There are also tips that you can use to maximize the potential of your campaign and get better results.

Apparently, there are also tips that most online marketers might have overlooked. Such appear to be really helpful but are usually ignored by marketers because they tend to focus on more popular tactics.

Now, let’s take a good look at them on how they function so you can apply such tips directly to your SEO campaign.

1. First is the main website where all the links lead the people into. Obviously, all the marketing efforts will eventually boil down to the impression of a visitor upon seeing your site.

If people find your site interesting with all the presented information useful, you can easily gain their trust and persuade them to support your business. On the other hand, if visitors find your site confusing, they will most likely go back to their previous page, thus wasting all your marketing efforts.

With this, you must make sure that your site is impressive and professional-looking. Develop the site’s content, design and layout, images, and navigation so your visitors will enjoy exploring your website.

2. Although the quality of the content is the most important factor in SEO, having relevant and interesting images will add character to the content. By presenting unique images, you can instantly hook the online users to check your content.

3. Using analytics is also important as they provide detailed assessment on your campaign. With this tool, you will know the strong and weak points of your campaign in order to address the problems and develop room for improvement.

Another great thing in using the analytics tool is that is gives you a glimpse on the performance of your competitor. Now, you can find ways on how to overpower your business rivals.

4. And lastly, don’t ignore blog comments as such also give an impression to the new page visitors. Avoid allowing comment posts that are irrelevant and are obviously spamming.

Proper comment moderation is the key here. It is important that the comments present are actual feedback from readers and it will be better to have both positive and negative comments so you won’t appear biased.

Still, there are other helpful SEO tips out there waiting to be discussed to have a fair share in the campaign. Just don’t hesitate to explore.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/small-business/smallbiz-marketing/embrace-mobile-marketing-retailers-urged-20111209-1om55.html#ixzz1gOOQieNQ

Well here’s one that will work every time: Gift Vouchers.

Gift Vouchers work every time

Gift Vouchers have been with us for decades, and yet very few businesses make use of their full power.

• They work on the premise that everyone likes something for free. Even when they may well know in their mind that there’s nothing for free. Ever.
• It doesn’t matter. Because emotionally we are all geared to reach for something that is free.
• If your business is the only one in your sector offering something for free, you’ll have an edge.

These days, being in business for x years, being ‘professional’, offering ‘expert’ services and all the other stuff people say in their ads is taken for granted by your target market.

In fact, most of the things people use to describe why people should deal with them, and not the competition, is boring, passe and is the bare minimum anyone in business should be offering.

• But then . . . give away something for free, and you’re onto something.

Here are seven golden reasons why using Gift Vouchers in your business is a very smart tactic to adopt

1. It’s a great idea for people who need to give a gift to someone, but don’t know what to buy.
2. It’s great as a gift recipient — at least you got something which lets you choose what you want, instead of getting something worse than useless to you.
3. Vouchers are a way of encouraging return business. They can also be used as a loyalty reward with high perceived value
4. Voucher users almost always spend more than just the value of the voucher. If they get a $100 item with a $50 voucher, you’ve added $50 to your cash income
5. Vouchers can be used instead of cash for refunds and for crediting an amount to a customer.
6. Research has shown that only 95% of vouchers are redeemed. This gives you a 5% shot in the arm.
7. Redeeming a voucher often means new customers. If someone who has never been to your business gets one of your vouchers, he’s a new customer, and someone you can wow with awesome service to have them returning again and again.

How to use Gift Vouchers

There are lots of ways to use vouchers. Here are just a few.

1. Join up with someone in your industry, but not direct competition to you. You might service cars, so team up with a car detailer. He gives a voucher for your business, you give away vouchers for his. This needs to be carefully structured so as to ensure mutual benefit.

2. Pay a discounted price for vouchers to someone else’s business in exchange for the promotional benefits they will get from your advertising. For example, the same car service centre in point 1 might buy $100 vouchers from the detail business, but only pay $50 each for them since your advertising campaign will benefit the detailer’s business as well.

3. Buy vouchers from high profile businesses. Offer a $50 Bunnings, Myer or Office Works voucher bundled with a set package for your business. Something like “Book in for a service between now and the end of the month and we will give you a $50 Bunnings voucher, FREE “.

Whichever way you go, never forget your *Conditions Apply. And publish them on your website where people can see them. This covers you against that dreary type who is always looking for something for nothing.

It’s not the fact that web designers tend to be bad at SEO that’s the problem – in fact I’m glad they are otherwise there would be no work for people like me. The problem starts when they claim that they do understand it, partly in order to secure the work.

And for the record, whilst I wholeheartedly appreciate that there is a distinction between designers and developers, I have found each are guilty protagonists, so I apologize if I use these terms interchangeably. If pushed I would also say that your average Mac user knows far less about SEO than your average PC user (and take from that what you wish), but as I am about to explain, having a little knowledge could well be worse than having none at all.

Web Designers’ Views on SEO

Generally, when you ask a web designer what he or she knows about SEO – if their sun-starved faces don’t completely go blank – they may talk about title tags, pretty URLs and maybe even a sitemap.

What’s for certain is that they won’t discuss anything other than the on-site technical aspects of their websites.

That’s fine – these are important parts of optimization and many designers don’t even get that far. I’ll go further and say thank goodness that the days of frames are long gone whilst the irony of not a single Flash website showing up in Google for the phrase “Flash website” isn’t lost on an SEO.

So, let’s consider a typical scenario. Along comes your average relatively clueless client to a web designer studio and they (or their sales team) go through the sales process, show them how great their existing clients’ websites look and demonstrate their excellent hosting plans as the client nods along enthusiastically to the sales patter.

Five minutes before the sales meeting closes, the clients ask about this SEO they’ve read so much about. The design team issues a final gush about how all their sites are search engine friendly and will easily be found by the spiders and what’s more, they even install Google analytics for free! And so the deal is done.

Six months down the line and sales on the client’s site are lackluster, traffic is low and the return on investment is negligible. Along comes an SEO, and before he can even say “Your site has canonicalization problems and no call to action”, the client’s defences are up. He’s already “had SEO done” and it didn’t’ work – anyway, he’s now spending his marketing budget on Yell.com and an advert in the local press.

Thank you, Mr Web Designer – another potential client gone, another website without a marketing plan and another detractor of SEO as a profession.

SEOs’ Views on Web Design

Let’s flip this around and ask an SEO about Web Design and – if they even find the time away from their ridiculous workload to answer –  they may talk about HTML, headers, bodies and footers and maybe a bit about PHP or CSS. Ask them if they can also provide a website and they would have no hesitation in referring you to someone else who knows better – probably someone they are connected to through a LinkedIn account.

In the same way a car mechanic might be a dab hand at making a vehicle go faster, he wouldn’t for one second assume he’s also best suited to then race it. Web designers have to detach what they do from anything to do with what a contemporary SEO would do.

Web designers are hurting the search marketing industry at the very source. When clients whose understanding is only as good as the person who is telling them think that SEO is what web designers do, we’re at the bottom of a big uphill battle.

This is the fundamental problem – web designers are the gatekeepers. They are client’s first port of call and because their work is what the client sees and understands, it is they who influence the site’s design and functionality.

It’s generally up to the SEO to then clean up the mess and rectify the oversights the developers and clients between themselves have left. This is never good news – just as no mother likes to hear that their children are ugly, no web designer likes to be told their site needs changing.

Why SEO Comes First

The following list skims the surface of what a good SEO will do for their client. Immediately, it is clear that our responsibilities go way beyond onsite optimization and whilst the term SEO remains, our role and scope is considerably wider ranging. If there is a web developer out there who considers all of these aspects, then good on you – but I doubt you have time to do all this as well as design websites.

• Site Accessibility
• Keyword Research
• Content Creation/Strategy
• Link Acquisition
• Social Media
• Pay Per Click
• Search Protocols
• Community Involvement
• Local Search

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

Two parts of what an SEO provides are largely ignored by web designers, much to the disaffection of their clients: Keyword Research and Traffic Acquisition.

Keyword research should be the starting point of any web build. If you do not know what your prospective customers are looking for, how do you know what words the site should be optimised for? Formula One designers consider the tracks their cars are going to go around before they build the cars. Fisherman consider what fish they are after before they choose the nets they use. Why wouldn’t a website be built and optimized for the words they need to target?

The second and most important part of SEO which web designers fail to recognise is how the site is going to generate traffic. How and why should the site you are building get traffic and make sales? Pretty images and compliant code doesn’t get you very far.

Web developers rarely consider the strategy of how to make this happen: whether the solution is ultimately through content marketing via a blog, attracting inbound links through link bait or integrating a solid social media strategy, making these decisions before the site is built makes a huge difference to any website’s ROI.

Separation of Responsibility

Each party cannot be expert across the other’s discipline. It is important that each party has an understanding of the other.

What Web Designers need to concede and explain to clients is that whilst their sites may be search engine friendly, they are not offering SEO.

To claim anything else undermines our fledgling profession and misleads clients. We have enough bad SEOs doing that already!

Back to Link Building Basics

Writing by Brick Marketing in Link Building

The second phase of an SEO campaign, after on-site optimization, is ongoing link building. Links from quality websites establish trust with the search engines. What’s important to recognize is that there is a right way to build links, and a wrong way to build links. Sometimes a website owner can get so wrapped up in it, that they can take a link building strategy to the extreme and enter a gray or black hat area. Because it’s good to get a refresher every once in awhile, let’s take a look at some of the most popular link building strategies and outline what should and shouldn’t be done.

Article Marketing
While it once was acceptable to write one article and post it on hundreds of article sites, the Google Panda update nipped that practice in the bud. When it comes to writing articles for link building purposes, focus on quality rather than quantity. Write for end users, not the search engines and instead of posting on hundreds of low quality article sites, find one good niche industry site that accepts guest submissions and post it there. Not only will it help your link building, but it will also improve traffic since the audience is more relevant.

Directory Submission
Some SEOs are eliminating this tactic from their link building strategy completely because directory links hold far less value than they used to. However, as part of a diverse link building strategy, there is still a place for directory submission. The key is to find the right directories to submit to. Instead of wasting your time submitting a site to twenty low quality directories that barely get any traffic and probably aren’t even U.S. based, spend your time researching a few niche industry directories that target audience members actually visit to find the product or service that you offer.

Blog Commenting
Blog comments are a great source of links, but you need to be commenting on the right blogs and you need to be commenting the right way. Writing “Nice post!” on any old blog isn’t going to get you too far. In fact, it will probably just get you sent to the spam folder. Spend time researching industry blogs and industry related blogs and leave thoughtful comments that contribute to the conversation. Blog commenting isn’t just about getting a link, it’s about building your personal or professional brand across numerous websites.

Press Release Distribution
Submitting a press release with keyword anchor text links is only beneficial for SEO purposes if it gets picked up by numerous sites and the only way that will happen is if the press release actually shares newsworthy information that is interesting. Don’t try and pass an article off as news. If you don’t have anything new to share, just hold off on writing a press release until you do.

You might wonder what landing page actually means. To give a simple definition among many, we can say that it is a page which is designed to attract and convince visitors to take the action desired by the owner. This action can mean to buy something right away, to subscribe for a free newsletter, to call the number on your screen and so on.

It can happen that your website is not selling any product online, but just promoting a regular physical shop, or if on the contrary it has so much to offer that you cannot put in one page. In these cases we recommend running a strong SEO campaign so all pages of the site can eventually make it for a landing page.

It is important that visitors spend as much time as possible on your site so they get familiar with your products and services, because the longer they stay the closer they are to make a conversion. This can be achieved in several ways.

A good way to do it is to insert squeeze boxes besides the content where the visitors can either insert their email or link to your contact page. To make it even easier you can have the actual contact form inside the squeeze boxes so the visitors don’t have to leave the page to fill in the information.

Making good headlines on all the pages is another point to keep in mind. It is not only your home pages that should generate sales so use the potential of each page and choose attractive headlines that could convince your visitors to buy.

How you write your texts is also of great importance. The message you send has to be clear, concise and appealing for the visitors. Do not use long texts unnecessarily and keep things simple. If you must lay down an explanation that cannot be made short it’s ok to make a long text as well, but apply the same principle of keeping ideas easy to follow and easy to understand.

Call for action whenever you have the possibility. Remember that sometime the little thing matter most. Make yourself available for your visitors at all times, by having your contact information at hand for them in the header or footer of your pages, so they don’t have to navigate away to look for your contact details if they need to talk to you.

It is very important to keep in mind that the purpose of each page is to turn the visitors into buyers. So when you think you got the trick how to do this use it on all the pages of your website.

Just like when you start a business, when you make a website you have a goal in mind. Whether you want the visitors to make an online purchase, dial a number or click on a link, you should make sure that all your pages are designed to convince your visitors to take the desired action. Think of each page as a landing page will bring you closer to success.

Why do we need top search engine results?

Top search engine results are vital to bring people to your website.  Without people coming to your website, you can’t get more customers.  Therefore, you won’t be getting any new business from your website.

Step one: Keyword Research

The quest for top search engine results begins with effective keyword research.

Without effective keyword research you might work hard and optimise your web page for the wrong search terms and find out all your hard work leads to no new customers for your business.

In order for our keyword research to end up bringing you more customers, we run your industry through sophisticated software, and we’ve find out what search terms people are using that when a look for what you do.

For example, if people are looking for some new carpet at a fair price, they will use search terms like “discount carpet” or “cheap carpet fully laid” or perhaps “cheap carpet installed”.  Once we know what people are using to search for what you do, we then know what words to optimise your web pages for.

Step two: On page optimisation

Next we make sure your web page is built exactly the way Search Engines want it to be built. This includes getting all aspects of your page right.  It starts with the actual filename of your page on your website, and also includes making all the right things are in place up in what’s called the header section of your web page — the part you can’t see from your browser, but which Search Engines can see when they search.

Once that’s done we then work on the part of your web page that people in the real world can see when they click on your webpage.  Top search engine results mean that the content on your pages needs to be formatted and structured in exactly the way Search Engines want it to be.

This is because no matter what anyone thinks there is only one reason, Search Engines make a profit, and that is to provide you accurate results whenever you search the internet.

For example, Google knows your page contains valuable information because it has checklist of criteria by which it makes its judgement.  The more items you get ticked off on their list, the higher they will place you in their search engine results.

Step three: Off page optimisation

Once we are certain your web page conforms exactly to what Search Engines want, we then make sure other people find out about your website and we get them to link back to whichever of your web pages they like.

Broadly speaking, this is called off page optimisation, and it involves increasing the popularity of your website in the eyes of Search Engines.

When other websites link to one of your web pages, these are called back links, and they are one of the things Search Engines use to judge how helpful the information on your page will be, to someone who lands there.

Simply put, back links are a little bit like “votes” for how good your webpage is.  The more votes you get, the more Search Engines can see that people love you — and the higher your page will rank in the search engine results.

There are many more things that we do to help your webpage get top search engine results. You can find out more by contacting us, either using our handy contact form or by calling us direct 1800 990 832 or 0414955743. Remember more visitors to your webpage, mean more customers to your business.

How long will users stay on a Web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same:

• Not very long.

The average page visit lasts a little less than a minute.

As users rush through Web pages, they have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don’t). So, unless your writing is extraordinarily clear and focused, little of what you say on your website will get through to customers.

However, while users are always in a hurry on the Web, the time they spend on individual page visits varies widely: sometimes people bounce away immediately, other times they linger for far longer than a minute. Given this, the average is not the most fruitful way of analyzing user behaviors. Users are human beings — their behaviors are highly variable and are not captured fully by a single number.

Leaving Web Pages: The Weibull Hazard Function

New research by Chao Liu and colleagues from Microsoft Research collected data from 205,873 different Web pages for which they had captured upwards of 10,000 visits each. These guys crunched a lot of data.

The result: the time users spend on a Web page follows a Weibull distribution.

Weibull is a reliability-engineering concept that’s used to analyze the time-to-failure for components. The model’s hazard function indicates the probability that a component will fail at time t, given that it has worked fine up until time t

.

So, after replacing a spare part in a piece of equipment, Weibull analysis predicts when you’ll have to replace it again. It also lets you conduct risk analysis beyond simplistic mean-time to failure. And, if you own a lot of equipment, you can use aggregate analysis to, say, manage your spare parts inventory.

Of course, when analyzing Web visits, we simply replace “component failure” with “user leaving the page.” In their research paper, Liu and colleagues provide intensive statistical analysis to show that the Weibull model closely matches users’ empirically observed behavior.

According to earlier research, there are 2 different kinds of Weibull distributions:

• Positive aging: The longer the component has been in service, the more likely it is to fail. In other words, the hazard function increases for larger values of t. This makes intuitive sense, because the longer stuff is used, the more it wears down. Thus, something that has been in use for a long time will be approaching its breaking point.
• Negative aging: The longer the component has been in service, the less likely it is to fail. Here, the hazard function decreases for larger values of t. This makes sense when individual components vary in quality: poorly made components usually fail early, so anything that has been in service for a long time is likely to be particularly robust and will usually survive even longer.

Negative Aging: Leave Quick or Stay Long

The researchers discovered that 99% of Web pages have a negative aging effect. In human–computer interaction (HCI) research, it’s extremely rare to get this strong a finding, and Liu and colleagues should be credited with discovering a major new insight.

Why negative aging? Because Web pages are indeed of highly variable quality. Users know this and spend their initial time on a page in ruthless triage to discard the dross. It’s rare for people to linger on Web pages, but when users do decide that a page is valuable, they may stay for a bit.

The following chart shows the hazard function — that is, the likelihood of leaving — for the median Weibull parameters fitted across the scientists’ humongous dataset:

It’s clear from the chart that the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users’ decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most Web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

If the Web page survives this first — extremely harsh — 10-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they’re still highly likely to leave during the subsequent 20 seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first 30 seconds.

So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll say much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.

So, roughly speaking, there are 2 cases here:

• bad pages, which get the chop in a few seconds; and
• good pages, which might be allocated a few minutes.

Note: “good” vs. “bad” is a decision that each individual user makeswithin those first few seconds of arriving. The design implications are clear:

• To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.