The “Secrets” to Search Engine Optimization-ummm..relationships and authenticity

I have about had it with people looking for SEO techniques and e-commerce gimmicks. When you don’t know them, you tend to think that there are some magical potions that you can drink to take you to the top. Much like every other venture in life, these fables of gimmicks often lead people to die of old age searching for the fountain of youth…

Everyone wants the “easy way” when the “right way” is, well, right in front of our noses…

IT (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) IS NOT ABOUT LINKS! It is about the relationships behind those links. To TRULY succeed on the net, you need to be willing to be creative, develop long lasting relationships in your industry, and to work HARD to protect your online reputation–or pay someone to do it for you. It is that simple. Really.

SEO guys can teach you principles in doing that effectively and efficiently, but I swear that is how it works.

IT is ALSO NOT ABOUT GIMMICKS  ! It is about you being authentically YOU. If your online persona and your offline persona are in synch,  (and assuming that you do quality work), it will show and you will drive business. If people think you are a poser in real life then they will think you are a poser online.

Good search engine marketing doesn’t change who you are. It just promotes it in a very efficient and near real time manner.

Here’s to being who you are, working hard, being creative and getting ahead! (Some things never change…even with new media!)

Follow up on Joint Ventures…

On other thought I just had on joint ventures…

Far better to start small…and build.

Why? Well, what you will find is that over time your partners in any given venture will either solidify behind you and it will be a good thing or it won’t. This is NOT based on the success of the project. It is based on the character of the individuals and their shared vision. Simple as that.

If you start small with a new partner, it is EASY to assess their character in a non threatening way. The trust level can be built to the point where it is strong enough to withstand even the toughest of circumstances. You get to a point where these folks are like family. They are battle tested friends.

While I don’t normally disclose the people that I do business with, i thought today would be a good time for an exception. And a case study…Ryan Ward, Wayne Long and I first met online via Real Estate Webmasters a while back. While I was at the RE/MAX International Convention, we met and decided to try our hand at building an online real estate investing forum.

Has it been perfect? NOPE. Far from it. Have we learned? Absolutely. As we have grown more used to how each other operates in this small, but growing, environment, we have become far more comfortable with each other to try other bigger things. While we haven’t done any of those bigger things, I think it is SAFE to say that if we did, we would do well with them.

Start small. Be patient. Build into bigger ideas. The relationships formed last much longer than one deal.

Possible ventures

What makes a good search engine marketing venture is the same thing that makes and other type of joint venture work. Mostly it consists of the following:

• Complimentary and Synergistic skills–Do have the ability to promote your product or service, but need an online “partn er” to help push the product or drive traffic to a site?
• Complimentary Values–Do you have similar business values?
• Are you willing to exchange potentially a larger sum of money in the future for a small startup cost and little to no risk in the present?
• A product or service that lends itsself to online marketing–Does your product generate enough trackable revenue that can be measure DIRECTLY from the online channel to be able to compensate the Search Engine marketer for their time and effort?

If you answer is YES to the above questions, or you’d like to explore Search Engine Marketing joint ventures further, please feel free to give me a call today.

a Webpage by any other name…(even post or category)

Dave Smith and Greg Swann are two of my favorite people that I have never met in person (yet). Why? Because they are into some of the things that I am into. They are some of the best bloggers around. They can write far better than I and I like people that I aspire to be like. They are thinkers. They like to teach and inform, not just broadcast on the net. They are REALTORS. And they like to learn and experiment on their respective labs on the web.

A starting point:

“A house is just a place for your stuff. That’s why your “stuff” is “stuff” and everyone else’s “stuff” is “crap”.

–George Carlin

“A blog has places for you to put your stuff. They are webpages. Whether they are called pages or posts or even categories, a webage by any other name still ranks the same in Google if identically constructed.”

–Eric Blackwell
Just over two months ago Greg put a blog together as an experiment to test the search engine characteristics of a Wordpress blog constructed out of pages rather than posts. Essentially this challenges my position stated above. One of these characteristics was how many of the pages would stay fully indexed in Google as opposed to slipping to their supplemental index. Would this be better than a blog constructed of posts? Was / Is there an appreciable difference? This was and is a concern to bloggers in that their individual posts slipping into the supplemental (can) affect the amount of exposure that a post gets on the web.

Greg’s results as reported earlier today on the RealEstateBlogLab are impressive.  With essentially pages only and no posts, Greg recorded just 6 pages slipping to the supplementals. More impressively, the pages that were there were ones that you’d expect to find in the supplemental index.

Now me, being the hands on search engine “figure it outer” guy that I am, I have to look at experiments like this and offer some explanations and present them to the rest of the blogging world for their comment. Here goes:

The key to this experiment lies in the question Why. Why did the pages stay indexed? Why do posts slip into the supplemental index? Here are some hopefully enlightening answers:

1) Greg’s test blog was constructed with many of the pages essentially linking to each other.  If you look down the right hand column of the blog, you will see MANY of the posts (errr….pages) there on every page. This “interlinking” is not veiwed by Google as an incestuous thing. It is simply good navigation. It is esentially providing many more inbound internal links to EACH post.

Here’s a truly ugly sketch of it….

2) In a typical blog construction with posts (errr…posts) you would not have near the interlinking that this blog has. This is because posts are typically arranged in a heirarchy (errr…categories–grin).

What interlinking does is SPREAD the link love between webpages and the only (errr…easiest) way for Google to decide which pages belong in the main index is how much respect they have on the web as expressed by link love (internal OR external).

The takeaway: When constructing a blog, set it up so that there is the maximum opportunity for interlinking to occur. Given the same amount of links from the outside, your posts and pages will get more exposure this way. It also provides your reader with easier navigation. Win-win.

Takeaway #2: Get links to pages either from external or internal sources to keep them in the main index.

Great job on the experiment guys. Please feel free to comment on this…

Joint Search Engine Marketing Ventures-How they work.

Many times an entrepreneur has a product or service that is VERY well suited to being martketing over the web. Yet they are not able to do one of the following:

a) Cash flow the expense of a world class search marketing camapign as they bootstrap other expenses of R&D and basic start up.

b) Take the risk of doing an online campaign since if it doesn’t produce the results they want, they will not have the ability cashflow wise to take on a full marketing campaign in more traditional channels.

We are all about helping you with this. If we like your product or service (and you are locally based or locally focused!) we can do your entire online marketing package at NO out of pocket expense to you!  We can and do take ALL of the marketing risk in some cases and create a true partnership with you to make it happen!

It does require more effort. And we do expect to be compensated for the risk. However, this may be the perfect path for you to get your online marketing plan going right away Call us at 812 786-2053 today and leave me a message. I will be happy to discuss it with you.

Internal Linking and Search Engine Optimization – Final Thoughts

Ok, so your thinking to yourself. “Great, now one more thing to worry about–making sure all of the link juice internally is going to the right place.” It is actually easier than it sounds and is not as complex. There are some real estate sites out there (which I won’t out, but will be happy to share with you if you drop me a line.) that are adding mass  quantities of pages that have a sentence or two of text and about 100 internal links to other pages on their site…

What is the reason for this?? You guessed it! SPAMMIN and JAMMIN. Do I agree with this approach? NO. Why? Because it does not pass my test for defensibility:

1) Does it enhance (or at least not DETRACT from) the user experience?

2) Does it utilize techniques that Google and other search engines are rewarding? (Deeds, not words here!)

3) Is this linking technique something that major search engines are trying to screen sites for in order to penalize or devalue this technique? (How do you know? –Research!) How far off do I think they are from accomplishing that? How big of a priority is it to them?

4) Is it (the linking method)  a natural part of the core of the web?

There are a few other questions that I ask myself as well, but i won’t go into them here yet.

Bottom line: Putting pages with essentially a keyword loaded sentence or two plus 100 internal links fails Question 1 right off the bat in that it detracts severely from a user’s experience.

The right way to do it is to think of all of the NATURAL and DEFENSIBLE interlinking that you can put into your site. Sitemaps on every page. Links between posts. WELL designed navigation. Links back to the home page FROM every page.

Finding World class strategies for doing this is what I am about. Happy to consult with you and provide you with some REAL answers for your site in this regard.