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Will the SEO Bubble Burst?

On May 2, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Being in the in the SEO industry for quite a while I have seen the industry speed up and grow extremely fast over the last five years and absolutely explode over just the last few years. Recently some are starting to understand that SEO is really a marketing approach and not a science project geared [...]

Being in the in the SEO industry for quite a while I have seen the industry speed up and grow extremely fast over the last five years and absolutely explode over just the last few years. Recently some are starting to understand that SEO is really a marketing approach and not a science project geared towards just achieving search engine rankings. It is good that some businesses are starting to realize that this is the right approach that everyone should be taking and shifting their focus, but many are still clueless, dumping hundreds of articles and press releases per month, taking spammy approaches just to fill in the search engine results. What happens to all those companies that have been taking a science project approach and only worrying about rankings when Google and Bing drop the hammer on the SEO bubble? Will it ever happen? Who knows, people used to laugh when they heard the real estate industry would implode. Who’s laughing now?

The search engines are clearly changing and I still see businesses everyday taking this horrendous approach to their SEO simply to achieve rankings. Google has come out and has clearly stated that personalized search will be making much more of an impact in the near future. When someone is logged into their Google account personalized search has already started taking shape. You can even read more about how personalized search works directly on Google’s official webmaster blog. I think the problem is that most people have a hard time changing and the search engine marketing industry is very fast changing and fast moving industry that can quickly leave people behind if they don’t pay attention to what is going on around them. SEO companies pop up over night with inexperienced individuals make shotty promises and performing subpar search engine marketing techniques just adding to that bubble. As this continues that bubble keeps building and eventually sites like Google are going to drop the hammer on the whole search engine optimization industry. I can see the similarities between the SEO industry and the real estate industry clearly. The greed and the money symbols in some people’s eyes are inflating this industry leading it to it’s demise. The worst part about it is that many of us professionals are left with a tarnished image from all the bad apples. Too many businesses out there have already been burned leaving it very difficult for the ones that do it right to really get the credibility they deserve and to pass on their experience and industry knowledge to their Clients. I guess with every tool comes abuse it is just unfortunate to see it have gotten to this point.

Eventually this bubble is going to pop, where will you be when it happens? Will you have changed your ways and your techniques to cushion the blow? Or are you going to be scrambling around and trying to find out how to adapt at the 11th hour? It will be too late at that point. Like everything in life, what comes up must come down sooner or later and the search engines are getting ready for a much needed clean up. This clean up will happen sooner than later piercing through the bubble and showering the industry with some upset individuals and firms. The problem stems from a lack of knowledge and not enough outside the box thinking. Outside the box thinking like how to put together a nice solid link bait campaign and not figuring out how to control the search results with a not so news worthy press release. Google is dropping a very large algorithm change towards the middle of 2010 which I strongly believe could be the first stages of not only speeding up the efficiency but eliminating the trash that makes its way into search results.

This could very well be the very first attempt to shifting people’s focus away from just rankings and shifting it over to simply marketing their business online the right way. The search engine industry is just getting started but it is growing very very quickly. Unfortunately there needs to be a shift in focus and I think we are starting to see that now. Customers don’t become customers by bumping into one of your hundred articles that you released in one day. They become customers by trusting online brands over time.

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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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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.

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Are you a Marketing SEO or a Technical SEO?

On January 26, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

There are many different ways to achieve good quality search engine optimization results online. When SEO was first introduced about ten years ago the approach was a very technical one. It came down to things looking like a science project rather than true marketing. Over the years there has been a slow transition. The search [...]

There are many different ways to achieve good quality search engine optimization results online. When SEO was first introduced about ten years ago the approach was a very technical one. It came down to things looking like a science project rather than true marketing. Over the years there has been a slow transition. The search engines where never supposed to be manipulated by a mathematical approach in order to get things to rank well. As the transition occurs it will be important to figure out what type of SEO you are. Do you like to market a business and build it through a variety of online marketing approaches or do you like to take a much more technical approach with your links?

Whichever approach you chose it is important to realize that the search engines are constantly evolving and moving away from a technical approach. As they grow their focus on offering the cleanest and most relevant information this will only become stronger. The search engines are already showing signs of rewarding those who market a business with the means of growing a business through a variety of quality online marketing and branding efforts rather than just putting a number value on how many links one can achieve. A technical approach is what the search engines are really trying to move away from. If you are an online marketer the search engines want to see you build rankings from building your brand online not through finding loop holes. Things like online PR announcing newsworthy topics and positioning yourself as an industry expert through proactive article marketing. Things a real business would do to market themselves if the internet never existed. Search engines want to see a heavy focus on social media marketing as well. Social media marketing takes time with a quality approach so no fly by night who wants to generate a specific number of links is going to take their time to actually communicate with their audience online through a series of conversations. The technical SEO approach has a shelf life that will soon expire. Those ridiculous promises of thousand of directories or “article blasters” will soon be a thing of the past.

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SEO Should Not Look Like Science Project

On November 27, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Often times I get phone calls from potential clients that start off telling me how they are looking for search engine optimization services and begin to ask for certain requirements on the strategy side of things. There is nothing wrong with that except that some of the requests look more like a recipe for a [...]

Often times I get phone calls from potential clients that start off telling me how they are looking for search engine optimization services and begin to ask for certain requirements on the strategy side of things. There is nothing wrong with that except that some of the requests look more like a recipe for a science project than actually online marketing efforts to help grow a business.

Since when did building a business online go from a traditional marketing mind set to a formula? Yes the search engines run on a mathematical algorithm but approaching the process of building an online business through quantitative efforts is not exactly the best approach. What if you hire a search engine optimization expert and they make the strategy look like a giant science project with no actual marketing elements? Sure you might get some keyword rankings but if your website has not one conversion marketing aspect on it corrected all the rankings in the world will not get your site to convert well or even at all. Major announcements have come out recently regarding significant changes in the ways that search results pull information and I can bet that this type of science project approach to search engine optimization is going to go away very soon. Since the day the search engines where introduced to the public the engineers have been working hard to clean up search results and get rid of websites that take scientific approaches like this. Long term search engine optimization is about creating in bound marketing efforts with quality content. Having well campaigned viral marketing efforts sweep through an industry like a giant wave or have well written articles, so well written that every online magazine and blog just has to write about it. This is what search marketing is all about, not how many PR3 links you can get in one month.

The definition of SEO is partially the fault of the search engines. Certain changes are consistently being made making everyone shift their focuses in other directions. It fundamentally starts at the search engine so if they allow it what else can you really do but follow the path that has been paved. This is the reason why so many businesses are just worried about rankings which is a horrible way to approach your online business. If your search engine marketing strategy for your company looks like something out of a chemistry class I think it might be time to rethink your plan a little bit. Some of the best SEO approaches have a strong emphasis and marketing and branding. Those three elements combined can go much farther than just rankings.

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