Does Your website have a squeezy top? Is it designed and laid out with the ruthless goal of facilitating conversions, or is it series of compromises that barely accomplishes it’s true goal.
Find someone in your organization who isn’t part of the web development process, people in accounting, bookkeeping or HR usually make excellent test subjects. […]
I have been going to SEO conferences for many years, and it seems Neil Patel was at every one of them…always laughing, joking, and having a good time. I went from obscurity to being somewhat well known on the web from 2003 to 2005 and Neil did the same, but started about a year later. In addition to learning so much about social media, Neil shares tips on Pronet Advertising, runs ACS SEO, and created a start up named Crazy Egg. I asked him about his rapid accent and where he sees the future of social media heading.
True (and perhaps humbling story here)…a person I know said that they thought you were “the annoying kid at conferences,” and then about 6 months later the same person said that you were the unsung hero and up and coming star in the field of SEO…and they were following everything you did. What did you do that made such a big impact in such a short period of time?
Great story, but I am probably still the annoying kid at conferences. 
The main thing that took place in that short period of time was that I started leveraging social sites like Digg. When I started I was the highest ranked SEO on social sites like Digg and at one point I had a 75% success ratio.
The only other thing that happened in that period of time was that I started blogging and speaking at conferences. Once I started sharing my knowledge people started, somewhat, listening to what I had to say.
There is a lot of controversy in the online marketing space…with various marketers comparing who has a bigger penis (or, perhaps, who can act like a bigger penis) virtually every day. How did you get well known while avoiding much of the hollow self-promotional hype and conflict that is associated with so many other well known internet marketers?
My philosophy is that someone is always going to have a bigger penis than you, so might as well not try to compete and do the best you can do. Instead of getting involved with the self-promotional hype, I just concentrate on sharing my knowledge (similar to you), which I think helped with my personal brand.
And the main key to my success was that I let everything out. Because sooner or later others are going to know what you know, so might as well be the one to tell them.
Many bloggers have grown to (at least claim to) hate SEO. I go to lots of the top tech blogs and I see ACS logos on many of them. How did you build all those relationships and get that exposure? If I was just starting out in the SEO field today would that still be possible?
Bloggers in general don’t like paying for things and many of them believe that SEO is bullshit. So what I did was approach all the Technorati Top 100 bloggers and tell them that I could increase their traffic for free. And if I increased it drastically in return I would appreciate if they could place my company’s logo on their blog.
By offering this, they did not have much to lose. In today’s market it is probably more difficult to do this because most bloggers have already been approached. But either way, there is no harm in trying.
Have you ever had any linkbaits bomb, or worse yet, backfire? What are the lessons you learned the hard way when it comes to social media marketing?
I can’t recall of any linkbaits that have bombed or backfire. Some did not succeed, but none have really hurt my clients or me. The only thing that backfired for me was that people found out my Digg user name and started publicly bashing me that I was getting paid submissions from a lot of the Technorati Top 100 blogs. The funny thing about it was that those bloggers never paid me a cent and all the companies that did pay me never got called out.
With many people talking about gaming Digg it seems like they do not like people who create content that is targeted to their user’s interests. As a marketer, is it worth the effort to target Digg? Does my site’s general theme need to be aligned with that community?
It is definitely worth targeting Digg because it is a good place to obtain links. The trick with Digg is not to try and game the system, but instead to provide valuable content to the community. If your content is good enough you can still do somewhat well even if the community doesn’t like your sites theme.
For example, if I recall correctly your site made Digg for your Firefox extension. Even though they hate SEOs, you still got on the front page.
How do you come up with strategies for what topics to go after with linkbait? Roughly what is your success rate with launching linkbaits? How many links do your average linbaits get?
We come up with linkbait topics through brainstorming sessions. By passing ideas off to each other, sooner or later we come up with content ideas that can work. As for our success rate, we usually sit around the 50% mark with short linkbait pieces and around 80% with the in-depth pieces.
As for the average link count, it is around the 200 mark. This is probably a lot lower than the industry average, but in our count we don’t include links from the social networks. Also some search engines may show a certain blog is linking to your site 20 times, but we only count that as 1 link.
Do you target mainly social media sites with linkbait, or do you also pitch them to bloggers? If you pitch, how do you prevent it from backfiring?
We target bloggers as well as social sites. The best way to prevent this from backfiring is to first research a blogger you want to solicit. Make sure you truly understand the type of things they blog on because the last thing a blogger wants is to be approached to write on something that isn’t of their interest. After you have a list of bloggers that you want to hit up, then you want to write a tailored email (maybe with a bit of humor) to them. When doing this be honest as possible because people hate fake emails with tons of fluff.
Are most of your linkbait ideas temporal, or do they tend to have an evergreen aspect where they keep building links?
Most of our linkbaits have an evergreen aspect. Some are time sensitive, which means they stop building links after a while. But we prefer to create timeless linkbaits because this allows them to continually build links over time.
Is YouTube important? Do you have anyone you recommend for creating video content?
YouTube is very important in my opinion. If you are trying to brand your company, yourself, or just create buzz, you should consider YouTube. Billions of people visit YouTube and if you can get them to watch your video, that is effective marketing. Just think about how much companies spend on TV advertising. If you can get a video to the homepage of YouTube the effect can be much greater then any TV advertising, and it will be a lot cheaper.
Widgets have become popular in the SEO space recently. As more sites add social function will widgets continue to grow in popularity, or will they fade out? How important is it to integrate your site with social networks?
Widgets will continue to grow as long as the functions they add are useful. People like cool things such as social functions, but as they stop providing value people will remove them. The ones that do provide value will continue to grow.
I think it is very important to integrate your site with social networks because it turns your website into a community. This way you will be able to better understand your visitors and you will be able to get to know them on a personal level.
OpenSocial and other APIs are trying to help small sites bolt social aspects on to their sites. For a small company do you think it is more effective for them to blog, or create a community of sorts using something like Google Friend Connect or Ning? When do you prefer blogs? When do you prefer forums or social networks? When do you prefer not adding any social stuff but rather tapping into other social networks? What types of sites should have social aspects to them?
I think it is important for companies to do both, but I would first start off with a blog. Blogs have become common and more businesses are starting to use them. It is a great way to communicate to your client base as well as potential clients. And most importantly blogs are a tool that allows you to share your knowledge with the masses.
As for communities, it is usually effective to use them when you have tons of traffic or a large user base. If your company is just starting off, or if you are just starting a new site, it is probably not wise to make your site too social. The reason for this is because there will be very little use of your social features without a strong user base. And if you still want social features even if you are just starting out, I would leverage other social networks so you can tap into their user base.
When it comes to forums or social networks, I prefer forums when it comes to sharing knowledge between users. If you are trying to create interaction between users social networks do a better job.
Lastly, almost any site could use social features. But before you add them you need to make sure these features will benefit your users instead of just creating noise. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.
Do you ever see usage data and social voting taking the place of links as the backbone of Google’s relevancy algorithms? Or do you feel much of that data is already reflected in linkage data?
I think much of that data is already reflected in linkage data. If you think about the sites that people most use or the sites that people vote for on the social web, they are the ones that usually have thousands of links. The sites that don’t do well on the social web or are not often used, usually don’t contain tons of links.
You were ahead of the curve on the social media and linkbaiting stuff a few years back. Where are you looking now? What should online marketers really be looking out for in the next couple years? Where should we focus our efforts?
Currently I am looking at the social networks and analyzing their growth rate. Social networks are growing at an extremely high viral rate, and why shouldn’t normal sites also experience that growth rate. I think marketers should look at the social web and see how we can bring those same principles to the rest of the web.
Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Reddit and just the tip of the iceberg. If applications on Facebook can get a few hundred million pageviews, there is no reason why more websites can’t experience that traffic level. And more importantly as sites like Facebook grows they have a strong understanding of their user base, due to the data they are collecting. If we can collect Facebook type of data for all the sites on the web it will allow them to grow their traffic faster and more importantly increase their bottom line. I know this easier said than done, but hopefully it will happen sooner or later.
Thanks Neil!
Who is the best looking (Famous) SEO in the business ? Ok, I once did a post asking who are the women of seo and then got loads of stick. So this must be open to both the men and women of seo.
I’ll discount myself on the grounds, I did the post…(hehehe) Oh and […]
Lately there’s been quite a bit of brouhaha over a fairly popular bit of hoax marketing involving a teenager, stolen credit cards, and prostitutes. I’m no stranger to hoax marketing in fact I advocated it back in 2006 and have been debating it with Matt Cutts for at least as long. While I don’t expect […]
So I installed the Seesmic video comments plugin and am giving it try. if you’ve got an account and a webcam leave a comment. If you don’t head over to Seesmic and create one. You can get the plugin and try it on your blog as well.
Youtube may be the dominant player in online video […]
I was surfing around quite a bit today and came across many great blog posts that seem like they were meant to be more than blog posts. But there is too much content and not enough attention, so nobody cared. A marketer who has studied online marketing for nearly a decade got 0 comments and 0 inbound links for writing an 8 page blog post of quality content. Worse yet, the blog is about using content to build links, and the post shared link building tips.
If you are one off linkbaiting or publish nothing but hyped up linkbait garbage then blog posts are a good format for promotion because blogs make it easy to show social proof of value (via trackbacks and comments). But if your site is real and you aim to create a real brand your best content needs a permanent home, and should be set apart from your average blog post.
Blog posts are great for getting quick ideas out to the marketplace, but when you create something in depth it is usually better if you place it on another part of your site rather than making it a blog post. And if you find yourself spending 10 hours creating a piece of featured content then why not…
Average content with an aggressive launch and great marketing outperforms great content with no marketing.
I do not own too many .info domain names, but a couple of them that I do own have quite solid link profiles. In spite of this, on May 23rd all of my .info websites (including search-marketing.info) disappeared from Google’s search results. And then the next day it returned. It may have just been a ranking glitch, but many other webmasters had the same issue… their .info domain names simply disappeared from Google.
Why would such a thing happen?
Marcel Feenstra highlighted this issue on LockerGnome:
Filtering out all .info domains just because some of these domains are being abused is, of course, far too draconian a measure, and I don’t think it’s what Google intended. It would make much more sense if they filtered out, say, .info domains that had been registered less than a year ago and that didn’t have some minimum number of “trusted” backlinks.
Was the .info purge a glitch? Maybe, but Google never will accidentally filter out all .com domain names. This algorithmic tweak (especially when coupled with Matt Cutts’ prediction for 2008) shows an internal Google bias against .info domain names. While many .info domain names rank where they did just a few days ago, this does not bode well for the perceived value of .info domain names, especially for brand new domain names or parked pages.
Just one more example of how domain names play a big roll in SEO strategy.
Recently a fake story was highlighted in the mainstream media, and the SEO behind it also mentioned it on their site. The SEO space as a whole began debating the legitimacy of such tactics, and Matt Cutts even commented on the issue:
My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this:
“Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”
There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.
The irony of this statement, as Nick Wilsdon pointed out, was that not only did Fox News syndicate the fake story, but they got in trouble in the past for attributing fake quotes to John Kerry. A person coming up with a clever story to get a few inbound links is nowhere near as sleazy as lying to try to sway the public vote for presidency…but it is much easier for Matt to police the small and weak webmasters while turning a blind eye to similar (but worse) offenses from larger players.
Morals of the story:
If you want to understand how the mainstream media works I highly recommend investing 5 hours and $50 into the following 3 DVDs. As more time passes Google’s ad fueled business model will lead to them essentially replicating the flaws and biases of the mainstream media.
Michael VanDeMar highlights how a website lost an important page to duplication across a new not so important page, which was added to the Google index by Google filling out forms.
If you have limited PageRank and a Google accessible form or search box you may want to block them from indexing output URLs via a robots noindex meta tag or your robots.txt file.
I thought I would ask the team in house, what they hate to see or hear .. promoted by an email a few minutes ago and then a phone call a few seconds later..
Email : A project plan from xxxxx xxxxxxx will follow shortly – do you guys have MS Project?
ME : MS Project hmmmm […]
Moop is a brand new WordPress management application that gives its
users the ability to manage multiple weblogs using a single login and
interface. Use Moop to create and manage your blog posts, backup and
recover your posts and administer your blogs user accounts all in one
single application
what it does for me, well it allows my team here […]
Adsense in my eyes is the new espotting aff, remember the day when you did a search all you found was empty pages with just Spam listing…
Like these : http://www.ripondirectory.org.uk/travel-transport/bus-times/ ..
“Be the first in the Bus Times, Buses, Bus Timetables in Ripon, North Yorkshire Category ”
Come on.. Google you are haveing a laugh aren’t you […]
The X files have reopened in SEO land this last week or so, “the truth is out there somewhere” and it all started with a Fake Story and then another fake story. The news of hookers, a 13yold and a credit card has spread like wildfire around the net with extensive coverage from […]
Some just asked me to look as a favour to see if I could see any reason why the conversions on the site where so poor, I found this..
and YouTube and Gmail
You can guess No Conversion from Myspace,Youtube and very very little for Gmail. I’m all for people handling their own adwords accounts if they […]
I apologize for the liberal quoting of Matt Cutts comments over on sphinn, but I think it’s important to understand the ramifications of something like this:
“Where does Cutt’s and search engines stand on something like this?”
My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: “Google may respond negatively to other […]
Iv’e just had a call from my bank about a recent card application I made. The call went like this ” This is the Alliance and Leicester Bank, what’s your DOB”, “Your Mother’s maiden name” …..erm hang on a sec here, I raise the question ” How do I know you are my Bank?” … […]
I attended two days of PPC Summit in SF this week and extracted more knowledge than I can handle. The instructors really knew their stuff and it was only a $900 investment if you signed up early.
I feel that Internet marketers should learn SEO and PPC best practices and then be exceptional at one. When I made my e-commerce site live in 2005, I tried PPC for a few weeks and decided to focus on SEO instead. The idea of getting free traffic was too irresistible. Now that I’m familiar with white hat SEO, it was time to rekindle my short lived affair with PPC. I don’t like using these black/white hat labels but if you want a sustainable, organic business…you gotta go green :p
I noticed that bid prices are ridiculously high compared to 2005. If you want to compete, you MUST know your goals/objectives when launching a campaign. Will it be for increasing company revenue, profit, brand recognition and so forth. Then you need to recognize what the final conversion will be - a sale or lead (registration, white paper download, phone call).
Assuming you know how to get keywords and organize them into groups, the next step is to optimize your site for conversion. There isn’t a cookie cutter way to do this because we all have different objectives and market products/services from different verticals. However, it’s been proven that being relevant will give you an edge, independent of industry. Relevancy for PPC means putting keywords in tight ad groups, writing ads that are keyword specific and creating a landing page with a mixture of relevant keywords. Not only will this keep your target customer focused and lead them closer to a conversion, it will also increase your Google Quality Score. I am running a small test campaign and all my keywords are rated “Great”. This means I am paying less for a better position because my keywords and content are well aligned.
Another significant change from 2005 is the improved Google content network. It’s possible to make it work as long as you really know your customers, their behavior and your sales cycle. For my test campaign, I am paying $0.9-0.20 for quality keywords on search so I didn’t rush to market on the content network. There are many tools and analytics software available to help you test and optimize. One of my favorites is the free Google Adwords Editor. Adwords also allows you to run custom reports down to the keyword performance level.
What really knocked me off my chair is the over-the-top benefits Microsoft is offering Internet marketers. Their Excel 2007 Adcenter plug-in is by far the best free desktop application. Jorie Wateman, Lead Program Manager of Advertising announced that a plug-in will be available for Excel 2003 soon. Check out their free web based adCenter Labs program. There are many useful tools there including Detecting Online Commercial Intention, Product Classification, Keyword Group Detection and much more.
Did you know that their keyword research tool spiders LIVE DATA as opposed to cached data from Google and Yahoo? She also said that the tools they offer advertisers are the same tools they use in-house. This means total transparency for advertisers and no more “partial” data.
When a company has a lion’s share of the market (search) and other players like Microsoft are going the extra mile to attract advertisers, then I strongly suggest that you give them a try. If competition is healthy, it will be for the best interests of advertisers while improving the overall Internet user experience.
Google is a wonderful company because they know how to please their investors and stockholders. They also own Youtube which allows us to watch our favorite music videos from the 80’s and 90’s without paying for it. At first I thought Google was only bitter to spammers (sometimes deserved like the ones that promise top 10 results and the ones that promote useless garbage) but after reading blogs, forums and hearing out a few advertisers, I guess they can get disciplinary to paying customers too. So my advice is to closely monitor your campaigns and play by their rules. They change the rules constantly and it may be a major inconvenience but we have to be nimble and abide by the new ones.
Gordon Brown is to go on YouTube Question time. Hmmm, so I thought do a search in Google for “Gordon Brown”. No 3 slot brings up 10 Downing Street website. EEEK.
Has anyone checked out this site? With a view to the Government embracing technology, it’s not really speaking volumes of technological advancement. I have […]
Microsoft have taken the first step in showing us their direction with the innovative use of media and technology, meet Microsoft Advertising. This business to business brand incorporates not only technology solutions but an entire extended media feature set. Demographic information has always been a weighty advantage in the Microsoft pocket and this advertising […]
ok I’m all for free enterprise blah blah whatever turns you on, but I think sometimes people just need to be warned that :
a) Blog comments can lose all trust
b) If you don’t fix you comments your Posts will lose trust
c) Then you get all angry at Google, which will only make it worse.
so why […]