Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) concern themselves with monetization. Monetization can include AdSense, but usually the SEO is not too concerned with AdSense because AdSense pays so little. However, once the webmaster is dedicated to monetizing with AdSense, a whole genre of SEO kicks into gear. A Made For AdSense (MFA) site is a very unique beast, and can be quite profitable. Google even gives training classes for optimizing sites for AdSense. One of the popular MFA topics these days is free ringtones.

I’m pretty tired of seeing so many otherwise intelligent people say that if you want to SEO get a standard blog platform and write good titles, use keywords, etc. At least one high-profile failed ex-SEO even tells bloggers they don’t need SEO (and then tells them to do all that SEO stuff on their blogs).

I’m not one to give away free advice when that advice provides a competitive advantage. That is dumb, and if you think anyone is doing that you just don’t see the other angle from which they are approaching the issue (raising their own profile because their tactics no longer work and they need business, or seeking clients because they like to do client work more than they like to do SEO, or priming the market for a tool that makes it easy to do an otherwise unprofitable task, or perhaps misleading the masses to preserve a competitive edge, etc). I especially don’t give away good advice to people I don’t respect.

That said I will say this: Google knows you’re a blogger.

If that doesn’t bother you, go ahead and continue relying on your blogging platform to get you rank. Go ahead building sites that are exactly the same as everyone else’s, and expecting to rank above them (huh?) It’ a content game… oh, wait a sec, it’s a popularity game, no… it’s a search-engine-friendly-platform game, or is it… no, wait… yeah. That’s right. Blogging is all about ego and popularity, and Google knows that. Google is playing that game. Google knows you’re a blog because it is trivial to see a blog when compared to a “regular” web site.

Agan, if that doesn’t worry you, you are not an SEO and you are not competitive. That’s ok, because if you are making money off of bloggers who don’t get it, you want that to be the case. If they “got it”, they wouldn’t follow you, would they? Remember that prior point about misleading the masses…

Go ahead, search for something. Look for the blogs. Look hard, and you too, will see the pattern. Search something else…look for the blogs. Uh huh. See?

Now if you run dozens of test sites across the major CMS platforms (like I do) and even more blogs and “regular websites” and watch them in the Google and Yahoo! SERPs, you would have known this already. But would you have done anything about it? Not if you’re a blogger. For bloggers, it’s all about the blog, and ME, and MY FRIENDS, and MY TRAFFIC.

Take a look at that blog traffic. Does it convert for anything except satisfying your ego and causing clicks on AdSense? Not really. It is so-calld “long tail” stuff that converts for the low-value opportunities in contextual advertising and affiliate sales. It is *not* the traffic that converts for brick and mortar retail products and high-ticket items. Search Google for “new BMW” or “BMW seat covers” or “BMW accessories” and you don’t see blogs. Some people say that’s because those searches are competitive and use real hard-core seo that is “spammy”. Bah. Look at them and you’ll see that’s not true. Work in that niche and you’ll see it’s not so competitive. Google has it under control. Those are profitable commercial searches. Bloggers don’t get those.

Can you get around the controls? Sure. Blog incessantly on popular gadgets or incessantly and in-depth on a very specific aspect of a niche (high end audio, for example) and the combination of trendiness and depth of content will overcome much of the control imposed by Google…until there is strong competition. But is that cost effective? Not usually. It takes a ton of work, a half dozen or more substantial content items per day, and significant audience management. And perhaps even a better question, once you have all that investment in keeping up on that front, will the blog platform be holding you back? Sure it will. You should see most successful blog networks re-deploying on custom code bases pretty soon for that reason.

Google knows you’re a blog, so if you think bloggers don’t need SEO it just means you think bloggers only need blog traffic, whatever that is. Since Google defines that, you’re a pawn in the search game, no? That’s not SEO.

Mark Cuban asks for ideas on getting people to go see a movie in his post “The Movie Business Challenge“. I have some ideas, but they are not brilliant ideas. They are basic concepts of business. I think his assumption that people don’t want to go see movies is flawed. They do. Or at least I want to go to movies. And my family does. And most of my friends do. So why don’t we?

Well, partly because the movies suck. But I even want to go to a sucky movie sometimes, for the fun of it. I sat almost half way through Lara Croft: Tomb Raider because I really really really needed to escape from my environment for a few hours and just immerse myself in something different.  That movie was truly aweful. Lucky for me after I left that theatre I wandered into School of Rock and caught almost the whole thing. That was a good movie.

Mark Cuban asks:

How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.

You do that by making it safe, for one. I can’t send my kids to the movies because it’s not safe for them to go alone (even together).  If it were safe and the movies were good, they’d go often. OFTEN.

You also can do that by making it respectful. To offer me a fountain coke for $6 is to disrespect me. Ditto for an $8 box of popcorn. And a theatre that is not much bigger than my home theater? With seemingly uncontrolled audio levels and air conditioning? Or how about when the movie next door bleeds into your movie… completely inexcusable business practices.

And while we are  on the topic of respect, how about the 20-30 minutes of commercials? And the product placements! Tody’s theaters seat so few comfortably, you have to arrive early to get a decent seat and then sit through all that nonsense. You know you’re being nickel and dimed. Nobody likes that. It’s disrespectful.
So sorry about the lack of originality Mark but I honestly believe you simply need to improve the movie theater if you want movie goers. We stand in long lines on opening night because we want to BE THERE, sharing the limelight of opening night, seeing neighbors further back in the line, and telling stories the next day about the new movie we saw last night. After that, wait for the DVD. Going to the movie theater is simply not a fulfilling entertainment experience.

I have lectured more than one person on Google specificity this year, but I can only suppose I’m not a good lecturer because nobody wants to believe me. Read my lips: Google wants to pigeon hole your page. Accept it, find the trust, and exploit it. A fool with conviction is an easier mark than a fool on the fence.

So today I noticed Google sending me traffic for a composite query “Christine Dolce video caps”. I used to call it “latent semantic imaging” but nowadays I just call it Google nonsense. Look how hard Google is working to satisfy this very specific user query “Christine Dolce video caps“:

johnon.comThese screen caps are from a proxy out of the US East Coast. … Christine Dolce nude no photo and no video. Christine Dolce Nude no photograph …
www.johnon.com/define/christine-dolce-naked - 31k - Jul 26, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

That’s SERP 1, item #3 after #2 was indented. So the second most relevant result was created by Google out of the context of my page. Clever Google edited the content to create that nice snippet that genuinely appears to be about Christine Dolce video caps on my site.

We’ve had this debate before ealier this year. Someone said we SEOs no longer deceive Google, but instead deceive users (via baiting and such) and it’s the users that convince Google of the relevance. I call BS. Lookie here… Google is so keen on specificity it will even fabricate a snippet to achieve the appearance of a relevant result (and then serve it up at the top of the SERPs as well).

Needless to say this shit doesn’t convert. It’s good for no one but MFA publishers and porn sites.

On the web you get to pick your audience. If you are brick & mortar, and you move online, your audience is defined for you. But Internet pure-plays like, oh, say a blogger self-help site, get to pick their audience. Look at the blogger community as a pie, and grab a slice.

So do you want to go after the nicey-nicey bloggers? The newbies? The upper-crusty bloggers? Or maybe the nasty, cult-like ones. Your choice. Pick your poison. And if you have a personality that matches your selected audience, you should do well in serving them.

One caveat that comes to mind today though, is that it is pretty damn hard to hide your true self when you blog. The more you hide it, the less credible you are for your audience. Nobody likes a poser. They’ll rat you out eventually.

What if you don’t hide it, but try and keep it under wraps? Like, pretend you hate bloggers, but want to monetize an audience of bloggers? Pretend you built out a web site to cater to bloggers, and you try and keep your true dislike for them under wraps. I say that will never work.

Every time you slip and reveal a wee bit of that negativity, someone in your audience will identify with that and give you some positive feedback..some positive reinforcement for it. “Dude, you are right about that”. Since most everyone else in the community let that little error of negativity slip (while noting it for the record for later re-evaluation of their trust in you, by the way), the only feedback you got was a reinforcement for the negativity. That stuff starts to work on you. We all need reinforcement.

Over time I guarantee your audience will devolve into an audience of like-minded people. The positive ones will move on, because they pick up on the bad vibe and prefer not to experience it. The others, the ones like you, will come back for more of themselves. More external validation. And there you have it. You reap what you sow.

In a flip of the words, look at the hit count for mentions of suicide on MySpace:

Google shows 29.1 million pages for site:myspace.com
Google shows 1.86 million of those include the word “suicide”
If you remove “goth” you still get 1.75 million, so that’s not it.
Adding “depressed” didn’t do much to the count (62,000), nor really did “depression“

SEO Audits. I wonder, are they any good?

I am sometimes asked to do audits, but I have declined. Something about the idea bothers me. I can certainly see how SEO Audits could be good for the SEO, but are they good for the typical seo audit requesting customer? Who asks for audits, anyway?

When I start a new project I do an “analysis” that might be considered similar to an audit, but it is not. I don’t go over an exhaustive checklist of standards, and I don’t have a template report. I do just what I say I do ( I as in me, John Andrews, the SEO himself. Not an assistant. Not a traineee. Not an overseas SEO service clerk).

One may wonder, is that efficient? Hell yes. I know what the current trends are, where the gotcha’s are, and I really don’t have much time for petty details so I will not waste your dollars checking your keyword density. If it’s spammy, it’s spammy.

I’ll cut right to the meat of the issue, review your site as if it were something I had just purchased and want to SEO. And then I will write it up with lower-cost clerical assistance.

To do analysis I have to check the SERPs where you expect to compete, and no trainee can do that as fast nor as well as an experienced SEO. I doubt very much an SEO firm can produce a meaningful or powerful “standard research form” for a trainee to fill out and an “SEO” to review. Things change too fast. No doubt they can produce volumes of checklists, of course.

I call my report an SEO Opinion. Not an SEO Audit, but an SEO Opinion. Not an “expert opinion” either. That’s another one of those things that rub me the wrong way…loose use of the expert moniker. You’re an expert if someone *else* says you are, not if you say you are or someone you pay says you are.

I conduct SEO analyses and I produce a deliverable called an SEO Opinion. And I get paid for that. So what do you think? Which is better, and SEO Opinion or an SEO Audit? Do you do SEO Audits? Are they good? For what? What about those free ones (free as in still-requires-a-backlink, LOL). Any good?

If you are an SEO and you offer audits, put your link into a comment right here and I’ll add it to the list. And if you look closely, you’ll notice that Ben has posted some good comments to this blog:

• SEO Audits by Ben
• SEO Audits by Stephan
• SEO Audits BeyondMetrix

*** edited for quality

A PR guy says “this is not SEO. Really. It’s not SEO. Nope.” What does that tell you?

I have been interested in the cross roads of PR (public relations) and SEO for some time, but I have not seen a decent move from the PR guys lately so I wondered if they were capable. I mean, the Ad guys failed at “getting” the web. Oh sure SEO-PR got it long ago (and even got the domain name), but they are really PR guys. Whenever I heard Greg Jarboe speak he was like SEO is really PR…SEO is PR..if you are an SEO, you need to understand PR because SEO is PR. Personally, I’m more thinking that PR today has to include a lot of SEO.

So now I see promotional campaigns from Connors Communications (a PR firm) about a new service called HITTail. Since my audience is mostly SEO folk, I can simply say that Connors has decided to take one piece of SEO and hit the less sophisticated clients over the head with it, over and over and over again until sign up. That piece of SEO is referrer mining.

The more interesting facet of this is how a PR firm is staking a claim in the SEO world. As I have mentioned before, the PR folks seem to have a problem with commitment. On the web site, Connors first goes to great lengths to try and distance itself from SEO. I quote from the web site (and I am not quoting everything.. just enough to make my point):

“HitTailing is Not SEO”
“HitTailing is like search engine optimization without the trouble.”
“HitTailing is NOT Tweaked Out Super-SEO”
“HitTailing Co-Exists Happily with Professional SEO”
“HitTailing is no threat to that special brand of hyper-competitive, popular keyword SEO that thrives on tweaking densities and HTML tags.”

Umm, clue to the HitTail guys: SEO is not really concerned much with densities this millennium.

A little further down the page, they say:

“We are definitely positioning it as SEO for the masses of mainstream marketing departments who have yet to venture into the natural search arena.”

which leaves me more than a bit conflicted. But then, I was not part of the “beta”, which apparently went out to “professional SEO firms”. I suspect that the Professional SEOs that worked with HittTail were more of the boiler room type than the independent metrics-driven consultant type. I guess because of the way Connors dances around the edges of the clear overlap of HitTail and SEO:

“Yet, we are completely disclosing that HitTailing doesn’t solve the greater SEO problems that may plague your site. It only defers the discussion while you get some of the benefit in the short term through blogging, which you should be doing anyway. In short, we are attempting to precondition the marketing departments of the world to be receptive to the greater SEO “fix”, because they will be in a better position to see the value.”

So I guess the message is HitTail is *not* a threat to the SEO industry, but actual helps it by priming the pump! I see. Now for PR guys this “SEO Page” on the HitTail web site is really getting conversational the further down the page I read…more like a blog than a web page. And it ends with further evidence that these PR guys may not be too comfortable stepping into the wild and wacky world of SEO:

“Our original intent was to disclose everything we know about SEO, and have dubbed the “Connors Magic Bullet,” so that the mechanical best practices aspect of the discussion becomes assumed and fades into the background. But we have since thought better of this, because this is the role of the Professional SEO Industry. These factors are in constant, slow “continental drift” and it is not a wise use of our resources to keep the documentation up to date. We’d rather improve the HitTailing process, and let the SEO profession and search-savvy blog software deal with SEO drift.”

Wow. It almost sounds as if they are intimidated. Ooh… did the Black Hats threaten to bomb the HitTrack client sites out of the SERPs? Oh I’m just kidding. They would never do that! But I do suspect they were intimidated by the speed with which the real SEO world adapts. I do suspect that they got solid, factual, and specific advice from those large SEO firms, only to discover that there was sounder, more factual, and conflicting advice from other SEO firms a day later. I know, it makes my head spin sometimes, too.

After watching the demo and reading the web pages I see HitTrack as a user-friendly introduction to referrer mining, with instructions on how to use that with your blogging efforts to get more traffic volume right now. It’s a decent message, and it will increase traffic, but I think it is in over it’s head here. Just as do-it-yourself SEO almost always leads to trouble, this, too can lead a marketer down the wrong path in search of traffic. More traffic does not mean better results.

The key to good SEO is the quality and reliability of the traffic, coupled with organic search penetration and related momentum that can come from carefully-managed organic SEO efforts (including referrer mining). Unless HitTrack can add some serious intelligence to it’s algorithms for highlighting the keywords culled from referrer logs, following their advice may hinder the SEO momentum, and may broaden the traffic such that ROI suffers. I’m not sure the PR guys understand the importance of characterizing traffic. It’s one of the harder concepts to clear with most SEO clients. I guess people are just comfortable with percentages, and playing the odds. Too bad real SEO is not usually about playing the odds (in my opinion, it hasn’t been since the AltaVista days).

HitTail bills itself as “A Practical Alternative to Paying for Search Hits“. It claims to be able to help reduce the costs of buying traffic through PPC, and emphasizes the value of “natural” search engine referral traffic. HitTrack sells itself on the popularity of SEO. Plain and Simple, HitTrack is a PR firm’s initial shot at SEO, covered with layer after layer of disclaimer that appears to me to be classic “PR” intended to defer critique from real SEOs and avoid comparisons to SEO, while capitalizing on the negative image SEO has in certain circles (like skittish corporate marketing departments that hire PR firms). Guys, this is an SEO page. Really. And it needs to be corrected.

I can’t help but want to critique Connor’s “Magic Bullet” SEO when given the chance. Like when they say:

We’ve never measured a keyword density in developing the app, yet regularly score top-10 positions on important keywords that convert. But HitTailing is no threat to that special brand of hyper-competitive, popular keyword SEO that thrives on tweaking densities and HTML tags. HitTailing works best where tweaks matter least.

But I won’t. Instead, I welcome the PR guys to SEO. Watch out for the shovels, and bring your hip boots. It’s gonna get pretty deep in here.

Note: I started this with a link to Mike Levin’s Bio on Connors. He’s an SEO, hired on in 2004 to bring SEO to Connor’s PR business. His bio includes:

Mike Levin has been involved with Search Engine Optimization since the late 90s. Inspired by the notion that Search Engine Optimization and Public Relations are founded on the same underlying principles, Mike joined Connors Communications, a New York based PR firm, in 2004. Since that time he has continuously promoted the merger of traditional public relations with organic SEO, bringing ideas, original tools and industry experience to Connors’ SEO team. By combining his grasp of SEO tactics and his unique blend of information design with Connors Communications’ 20 years of PR experience, Mike has helped build Connors into a leader in joining the two distinct, but inter-related fields.

I was asked for an example of a non-MySpace person doing a good job using MySpace for marketing. I looked around. I saw plenty of bad MySpace pages. They sort of look like Web1.0 pages in a Web2.0 world…stiff, stodgy, unstyled. And then I found someone had a Suicide Girl as her MySpace friend. Wow. Cool. I wonder if they loaded each one of the Suicide Girls onto separate MySpace pages, cross-linked them all, plastering the pages with ads for the Suicide Girls membership site? That’s what I would have done. Let’s face it, these girls look exactly like prototypical MySpacers (+15 years).

Well, they did one anyway. Not a bad job at all. 9,218 “friends” including a handful of promotional ones like “Subscribe to Suicide Girls Videos” and “Become a Suicide Girls photographer“. I’m sure it’s doing a fab job or raising awareness of the SG perversion amongst the MySpace teens, and I have little doubt those SG ads convert. Of course the subject matter fits into MySpace fairly naturally, but we know SG is actually old so this qualifies as an effective use of MySpace.

‘Nuff said.