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How to Break Into the SEO Clique

On March 4, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting excepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry [...]

If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting excepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry since day one and think they are the all mighty of the industry. The SEO industry leaders have become a tough group of individuals to become friendly with and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. All the “gurus” at the top that think they know every about everything seem to feel that they run this industry like they own it. The SEO industry is kind of like an open source program that should be treated like a group effort. There is plenty of business to go around. Lots of businesses out there that need help promoting themselves in the online space. People need to participate, communicate and get involved to make it a better place for everyone. One person tries something that works well they write about and things spread leading to better online marketing efforts.

I have been actively working in the internet marketing industry for over 12 years, have built Brick Marketing for 5 years successfully and have helped hundreds of clients in the field of SEO yet my educational comments that I leave on certain search engine marketing blogs get deleted, why do you think this happens? Leaving all names aside a certain someone contacted me not too long ago and asked me to stop commenting on a certain blog. Yes, I left a comment on each blog very frequently but isn’t that the whole purpose of starting a blog. These where all well written comments that where generated with real thought process adding to the overall message the blog post was trying to convey. Isn’t the whole idea of a blog to get the community interacting in your conversation? Since when is it bad to leave an educated comment on someone’s blog? Even if the frequency was high it shouldn’t really matter. I have seen this occur with other websites as well. I have seen the tone of this click with others trying to make a name for themselves in the industry and I often see a certain nastiness resonating in the tone of a variety of online discussions. Don’t get me wrong I understand this is a tough industry and if you spend some time in it you get beat up a little but that doesn’t mean you have to be nasty to your colleagues and peers around you especially if they own and operate a successful search engine marketing firm. I apologize if I have not visited you at the trade shows and stroked your ego like many people do. Is it that I don’t kiss the asses of every individual in the “cool group”?

There is plenty of room in the school yard for everyone to get along. Is it because I am a threat to them or the industry? Sometimes I feel like this industry is a lot like high school all over again. You got your cool kids that think they are too good for everyone else and you got everyone else trying to shine in front of their eyes. I by no means want to break into the “cool” click and become one of those has to have their ass kissed by everyone else.

Why is it so hard for people in this industry to come together and work as a team? I understand that everyone is trying to grow their own business but there is no reason why so many internet marketing professionals have to have such a cold shoulder towards each other. We are all in the same game and we do the best we can to provide our clients with great service.

If you are an internet marketer or SEO person do you feel like our industry is heading in this direction as well? Please leave your comments and any related experiences or stories below!

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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An SEO Recipe is a Recipe for Disaster

On March 1, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

I saw a funny forum post this morning about a person asking the community in a an online marketing for the best SEO recipe. That person is already dead in the water right from the start. Let’s take a step back and emphasize how important taking a marketing approach really is when conducting a search [...]

I saw a funny forum post this morning about a person asking the community in a an online marketing for the best SEO recipe. That person is already dead in the water right from the start. Let’s take a step back and emphasize how important taking a marketing approach really is when conducting a search engine optimization campaign for your business or website. When you start off asking for a recipe for your search engine optimization program, you are really setting yourself up for disaster. Your search engine optimization should never look like a science project.

The search engines have been evolving since their birth many years ago. When they first came on the scene, instantly many highly technical “marketers” started manipulating the algorithm to get web pages to appear high up in search results. Search engines really dislike it when people do this. Over time they have consistently tweaked and changed their algorithm to get these people to stop manipulating the system to get their bogus web pages to rank. Some have disappeared and some have evolved to find new loop holes in the system. Remember that rankings alone do not generate business. Rankings are just one factor out of a basket filled with other marketing factors that should be utilized as well. Online shoppers are changing drastically. Over the last few years during the economic down turn many people have realized that they need to change their shopping behaviors. Many have already made the change in slowing down spending affecting the way people market their businesses. Making many technical sweeping changes to get your website to rank is not the answer you need. Online customers want to bump in your pay per click ad, they want to see you communicating with your audience online, they want to see you branding yourself and making at attempt to be visible in front of them in many different ways before they decide to call you or pull out their credit card to make a purchase on your website.

The evolution of the search engine and the relationship it has with online customers is rapidly evolving. You should not be looking for an SEO “recipe” but rather an SEO internet marketing plan to help grow your business. SEO and marketing together are very powerful. They create many multiple quality pathways and links pointing to your website that can really generate a great deal of targeted traffic to any website.

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Important Reminders About Keyword Research

On February 28, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Depending on what type of website or business you have you will most likely be conducting different types of keyword research during the initial onsite search engine optimization process. If you have a smaller service based business with ten pages on your website you will take a different approach than if you have an ecommerce [...]

Depending on what type of website or business you have you will most likely be conducting different types of keyword research during the initial onsite search engine optimization process. If you have a smaller service based business with ten pages on your website you will take a different approach than if you have an ecommerce site that has a thousand pages. Either way, I recommend that you use a professional keyword research tool, such as Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker.

When conducting keyword research for an ecommerce website you have to take into account all your categories and products. Don’t assume the search volume is going to be generic across the board. There will be many different types of branded keywords along with category based keywords that you will come up with. The goal is to not overwhelm yourself. If you are relatively new to the search engine optimization industry take things slow at first. Start with all your high level pages and maybe category pages and make a column for each URL in your spreadsheet. Now start conducting keyword research while thinking really hard what a person would type to make it to that specific page. If you are feeling good about it you can include all your product pages as well and get it all done in one swipe. Get ready for very large lists of keywords though. Don’t be surprised if some pages generate thousands and thousands of keywords. It will take some time to really sift through all of them and chose the cream of the crop. Remember that you should never target more than 5 keywords per page so if you see a page is generating hundreds and thousands of keywords and you feel confident with what you already have will work feel free to move onto the next one page.

Keyword research is a very important step when optimizing a website. Don’t worry though because if you find out later on that you missed a really good phrase or word to target you can easily introduce into the website at that point in time. In fact, I typically recommend keyword research is completed (after the onsite optimization is completed) every 1 to 2 years. This is because of the long term nature of SEO and also this will give you enough time to gather data about the keywords that you have incorporated on your website.

Some industries keywords change all the time because of new industry buzz terms springing up frequently. Imagine what those websites must have to go through. For the most part though once you optimize a website you don’t have to do it again unless you change your content or find that there are new buzz words in your industry that have made their way into search volume.

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Bing Gets Serious About Link Building

On February 25, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

I think one of the best things I have ever heard a webmaster blog from a major search engine say is to build your website like a brand. Bing’s exact words state: “Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content”
To many people out there get all [...]

I think one of the best things I have ever heard a webmaster blog from a major search engine say is to build your website like a brand. Bing’s exact words state: “Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content”

To many people out there get all antsy to have their internet marketing look like a recipe. If it looks like a recipe it is a recipe for disaster. Bing’s official webmaster blog states that it is very important and vital to treat your website like a brand. How would a brand build its image? If you take that step you will build your business the right way rather than just go after rankings. Rankings are important but they are not the only and final goal you should be worried about for your internet marketing campaign. Building business is the most important aspect to your SEO campaign. Bing also recommends taking an approach that really utilizes a robust social marketing element into your daily routine. Link building is very vital to the success of a website but unfortunately it is important to do it in a way that allows your business to grow and not just your rankings. Bing also refers to going “unnatural” in the search engines which states that an unnatural approach is one that blatantly attempts to manipulate the system in order to achieve higher rankings.

Bing’s exact words go as follows:
” So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you’re trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site’s content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms.”

Bing hasn’t been the first search engine to come out with this type of best practice’s guide. Google has been doing it for years now just not many people want to follow it. When the top two search engines in the world layout a best practices guide on how you should conduct your search engine optimization efforts it is time to listen.

Please take a look at the Bing Webmaster Post that talks about link building and SEM, it is a great read:
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/11/20/link-building-for-smart-webmasters-no-dummies-here-sem-101.aspx

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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Matt Cutts Speaks About Cross Linking Your Websites

On February 23, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

In this video Matt Cutts discusses how important it is to understand the value of interlinking your websites properly if you have multiple websites on your server.
Here is the video that Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the cross linking question:

Often times people think that just because they have a few websites that placing links [...]

In this video Matt Cutts discusses how important it is to understand the value of interlinking your websites properly if you have multiple websites on your server.

Here is the video that Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the cross linking question:

Often times people think that just because they have a few websites that placing links on all of them will help them with their link building efforts when most likely it will negatively impact their search engine results. Cross linking websites works when information is relative and beneficial to the user. If you cross link websites simply to manipulate search engine results to gain rankings the search engines they are going to pick up on that very quickly and penalize your website. Once your website is penalized it could takes months to get it back to where it once was. Matt Cutts states that if the websites are under the same corporate umbrella and they make sense to link to each other than there shouldn’t be a problem. You want to keep in mind that this like any other online marketing effort requires a tasteful approach and abusing it will results in serious ramifications from the search engines.

Always take a tasteful approach to your search engine optimization and internet marketing and keep in mind the user experience. If you over “SEO” you’re online efforts and your user experience starts to diminish you will not get any of the conversion you where hoping to get so it is very important to keep this in mind.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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Do Not Worry About PageRank

On February 22, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer [...]

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer it correctly.

For many years Google pagerank was the sought out factor for many people diving into search engine optimization. Over the years it has been severely abused as people seek out science project like marketing campaigns only to increase page rank. News flash, rankings alone don’t grow a business and the search engines are really starting to evolve and change the way that they rank websites. They are tweaking and modifying search engines to only reward those who take a natural approach to building their business. An approach that builds over time with heavy branding and marketing elements rather than pouncing on loop holes to achieve rankings in search engines. Internet marketing company HubSpot based out of Boston MA had this to say about Google page rank: “Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.”

Basically what HubSpot is saying is that businesses and websites should be focusing on building their brand and their business and not worrying about what the Google pagerank of their website is. At the end of the day page rank does not offer any value. You can’t track where your page rank comes from or why it is even there. It has almost become a distraction for website owners that have lost focus on what it really means to market your business online. Even Google has removed any mention of pagerank from their guidelines.

A recent Q&A session on one of Google’s forums had this to say:
“Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

When Google comes out and says it than you better believe that it is true in every possible way. You can read more about Google’s view point on page rank on the Google webmaster forum. I given touched on the subject of Google PageRank sculpting as a waste of time a few months ago as well.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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Is Page Load Time Going To Be More Important?

On February 18, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going [...]

Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going to be a large factor for website rankings. Matt Cutts from Google has said that as it will be important it will not be a major factor yet. Matt describes it in a little more detail in the video below:

Google’s ultimate continuous goal with or without any search engine updates is to increase the speed and efficiency of the search engines which is always a very important aspect of anything technical and online. You really can’t blame Google for wanting to make their search engines highly efficient and lighting quick. After all it is all about the user experience when it comes to using a search engine and if over time the results take longer and longer to appear people will eventually be turned off. Is the search engine optimization industry just getting paranoid? Maybe a little bit but at the end of the day it is still really important to have a very quick and efficient website regardless of what Google says will be a ranking factor.

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Ride the Visitor Wave When it Happens

On February 17, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

The SEO industry is still in its infancy stage whether you want to admit it or not. The search engines are very young and sites like Google are just starting to get things right in the sense of really understanding how to catalog and display search data for users. Some websites come and go in [...]

The SEO industry is still in its infancy stage whether you want to admit it or not. The search engines are very young and sites like Google are just starting to get things right in the sense of really understanding how to catalog and display search data for users. Some websites come and go in short burst of energy and some stick around for the long haul. The same goes with various marketing efforts.

It is important to never avoid a marketing effort simply because you think it will not stick around for long. I still hear people say that Twitter is short winded and it will only be here for just a few years. Even if it is shouldn’t you be there trying to scoop up new business while you can? Everything in life is evolving including the business world. The internet has created a fast moving platform for people to express themselves and to communicate on. Regardless of an efforts life cycle you should always be using it to market yourself. In today’s marketplace there is no time or room for denial. Websites and marketing efforts move in large sweeping motions so it is important to take advantage of any new or existing marketing effort you can incorporate into your business plan.

5 Years ago MySpace was the big dog in the industry. Now the numbers have been steadily declining for about the last 24 months while websites like Facebook and Twitter have seen explosive growth leaping frogging the competition almost overnight. During the height of the MySpace era lots of businesses made a great deal of money and grew their business marketing themselves in that specific online community. Now the demographic has really shifted away as they continue to lose more users but that doesn’t mean that MySpace should have been avoided all together. If nobody used it years ago many of those businesses would not have made the revenues they did if they chose to avoid it all together. The point is many online communication vehicles are always changing so it is important to hop on now than to regret later you didn’t even show up for the party.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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Matt Cutt’s View on Changing Your Hosting

On February 16, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

For all of those businesses large and small who might be worried their rankings will simply tank just from changing their hosting company can now sleep at night. Coming from Matt Cutt’s mouth he claims that changing your hosting company will not affect your SEO in any sort of way. This is assuming that you [...]

For all of those businesses large and small who might be worried their rankings will simply tank just from changing their hosting company can now sleep at night. Coming from Matt Cutt’s mouth he claims that changing your hosting company will not affect your SEO in any sort of way. This is assuming that you are moving to a quality hosting company and not to a server that is jammed up with other spammy websites. Changing a hosting provider can be a very scary moment for many businesses especially when your entire livelihood depends on your website. Any problems could put your sales for that day or week in a very tricky and dangerous situation.

Here is the video from Matt Cutts about Changing Your Hosting:

Always try moving your website to a quality hosting company. It might not directly reflect your rankings but you never want your company website to share a server with a handful of websites that might have slightly frowned upon services. If one of those website carries a virus onto the server the server could ultimately go down for some period of time.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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Win an Online Olympic Gold Medal

On February 14, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Having a successful online search engine optimization campaign is a lot like trying to win an Olympic gold medal. Nobody wakes up one day and says that they want to join the Olympics and it happens by the end of the week. SEO works the same way in the sense that things take time to [...]

Having a successful online search engine optimization campaign is a lot like trying to win an Olympic gold medal. Nobody wakes up one day and says that they want to join the Olympics and it happens by the end of the week. SEO works the same way in the sense that things take time to build and grow and patience and good hard work is what it takes to have a successful search engine optimization mindset and approach.

Below are some of the most important similarities between an Olympic gold athlete and a successful SEO campaign:
• Both require having a solid plan in place.
• Both require hard work and dedication.
• Both require patience.
• Both require outside the box thinking.
• Both require early mornings and late nights.
• Both require having a vision.
• Both require great sacrifice.
• Both require knowledge and education.
• Both require a competitive edge.
• Both require awareness.

Search engine marketing is not a fly by night marketing effort and neither is training for the Olympics. You have to have solid plan in place and the ability to put in hard work and dedication to get the job done right. If you want your website to be visible and highly trafficked you need to be able to apply some outside the box thinking to achieve your goals. Building an online brand doesn’t happen by the end of the week or even by the end of the month. The best approach is to put a plan in place that you continuously expand upon. Write it down! Visualizing your vision will allow things to move with much less friction. Constantly update your plan of attack. Research new areas you want to be visible and make it happen. Most importantly you must stick to it.

These are all similarities that are relevant across not just Olympic athletes and internet marketers but anyone trying to make a name for themselves in any industry. As an aspiring internet marketer we could all take a page out of an Olympic athlete’s playbook.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

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