Archives for February 2007

Rand over at SEOMoz posted a set of salary estimates for SEO people. I understand the marketing value of having an “SEO Salary” post, but I don’t see the point for people working in SEO. If you have to argue about your salary level using outside references, you need Challenger Gray & Christmas or Robert Half or something based on data. But the article did remind me of the importance of staying aware of the real money in SEO work.

As I read, I see that Firm SEO work is quite different from Independent SEO or in-house SEO work. According to Rand’s descriptions, Firm SEO (like his SEO company) is a group of people working together on client projects, guided by an SEO Boss. Rand admits he hires inexperienced talent and the salaries he pays are “on the low side”. This is the opposite of what I do in my own SEO consulting, and what my better clients do with their competitive web and Internet projects. I am not an SEO Firm, so again this is perhaps highlighting yet another a different perspective of the unusual industry we call Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Steve Jobs once said something like “A people hire A people; B people hire C people” and I have always carried that around in my head. I often see it in action. The best people tend to want the best people to work for them. Less-than-the-best often hire people “lesser” than them, for what I suppose is a myriad of reasons. Please note I am not suggestng Rand is hiring people lesser than he is (nor am I sugesting that Rand might be an “A” person). I am simply saying that his description of Firm SEO is opposite of my SEO consulting experience, where the better clients seek out the best SEOs, the best web designers, the best developers, and the best marketers to work on projects. In fact, more times than not, my clients have experienced extreme frustration dealing with “agencies”. From advertising agencies to web design agencies, the expertise and dedication of the individuals assigned by that agency to the projects turns out to be significantly below the calibre of the leaders of that “agency”. Sometimes we collectively wonder if the agency actually has anyone at all of adequate calibre beyond the founder. Other times we know they do, but we wonder why those people are not available to our projects, even when price is not a barrier. Perhaps it is just an “agency” mentality?

So where is the real money in SEO? Well, like any business, the incoming revenue (client fees) has to cover expenses before the owners and shareholders can count profits. So the operational challenge of a business (including an SEO business) is to minimize expenses while maximizing revenues. The goal of an SEO Firm must be to optimize the productivity of internal people, measuring revenue as part of the success metric. The more those people are paid in salary, the more revenue needed to provide profits after expenses. Since most fee-for-service situations do not tie project revenue directly to the productivity of the workers on the project, the “sales” department must generate the revenue. Who is the sales department in your SEO firm?

Maybe it’s clear why there are so many “boiler room” SEO Firms out there cold-calling customers and selling sub-standard SEO services. They are simply maximizing revenues, while minimizing expenses by hiring minimally capable SEOs (or doing minimal work). What is the flip side of that coin? I think it’s people like me: independent SEO consultants hired to work with the best web designers and coders and marketers on projects where someone else is already hard at work maximizing revenues, and where that exact person (or team) has definitively determined they need SEO to help them maximize the revenues. I usually refer to that last aspect as “the business team working strategically with the SEO” because really that is what it is. it’s about maximizing revenue. It’s not about minimizing expenses. Minimizing expenses is a positive side effect of hiring the best people available for the job. The best people get the job done right, the first time, and most efficiently, especially when they are also working with best people (that “A” team thing).
The real money in SEO is in performance, whether that is the performance of the SEO (how much she gets done per hour billed) or the performance of the projects that the SEO optimizes (revenues generated via SEO efforts). The real money is in the very FACT that well-done search engine optimization generates revenues in excess of expenses. Revenues far enough in excess of the direct expenses (such as the SEO consultant’s fee) that the revenues also cover the indirect expenses (the project manager, the marketing team time, the designer time, etc) and still provide profit for the owners and shareholders. The independent SEO consultant needs to maximize his client’s performance to match or exceed his own performance, as part of the combination This is not always easy, and the topic of another post or two since there is much to be said about working with client-based teams, maximizing consulting efficiencies, and helping client-based teams compound their investment in outside SEO consulting (so that we can all share larger profits).

Maybe “Firm SEO” involves alot more middle-man communication stuff, which generates additional overhead (meetings, meeting minutes, changes to Statement-of -Work documents, clarifications of same, budget adjustments, etc) and all that additional overhead needs to be covered by the revenues generated by the actual SEO?
Rather than “what are SEO salaries” I think the question for people working in SEO is “how do I get REAL money by doing SEO?“. The answer is, you get real money by placing yourself into a pay for performance situation, and performing well. Most of us perform our best when we work with others who are good at what they do, or better than us at what we do. “A” people, according to Jobs. I look to hire the best I can when I need help, because it helps me be my very best for my client. It is almost always less expensive than alternatives when you balance the books at the end of the project.
One final comment since we are now discussing where the real money is in SEO. Every time I am engaged in a real world SEO project where past revenues from SEO efforts far exceeded costs, I have discovered new ways that prior SEOs used to keep a share of those revenues for themselves. Often the SEO before me was raking it in, and the client was now acting to bring some of that back to the client side or to eliminate risk identified with the SEO activities. Maybe SEO is not rocket science, but it is business, and where there is business there will be optimization. If you ask me, the profits flow to those doing the optimizing, every time. What varies is what aspect of the project they are optimizing.

In TheBeginning, the Internet was new and different, and “computer people” used it. Steve Chase spammed it and built AOL by getting us “computer people” to tell everybody else to go get an AOL account (so we didn’t have to help them “get online”). Eventually, the Internet became everything to those of us who knew how it worked (and therefore knew it would disintermediate 80% or more of the business world, eventually). And most would agree that in our modern world, whatever consumes commerce eventually consumes culture. Enter social media, where culture is being redefined as we speak.

If you still need convincing that the Internet is taking over *everything*, take a look at the recent re-naming of airports. A few years ago Newark Airport shed it’s hard-earned reputation as the worst airport in the history of mankind by renaming itself Liberty International Airport. Post-911 names like Liberty and Patriot showed promise in marketing land. SEO types would have said “keep the Newark part” for sure, or “add NY”. For whatever reason it is now Newark/Liberty International Airport and in my opinion, the new worst airport in the US. Were they to re-name it today, it would almost certainly be named New York Metro Airport, because of the Internet.

Naming Newsletter reports that Ontario California (40 miles from LA) is renaming to LA/Ontario International Airport. Palmdale California (60 miles from LA) is renaming to LA/Palmdale Regional Airport. Buffalo New York is now Buffalo Niagara International Airport (close to Niagara Falls destinations) and Savannah Georgia renamed to Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport because half of it’s passengers were heading to nearby (and much smaller) Hilton Head, with it’s much smaller regional airport. Stewart International Airport in Newburgh (a couple of hours north of New York City, but close to New York getaway destinations in the Hudson Valley) is becoming the New York Hudson Valley International Airport. Rockford (90 miles from Chicago) is now Chicago/Rockford International. Manchester (60 miles from Boston) is now Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (note the hyphen, not an underscore).

If you thought SEO could not get more extreme than it is in the travel industry, you probably didn’t recognize that SEO could extend outwards from the Internet and actually change culture to expand it’s market influence. Thought you were working a secretly profitable niche with those charming local place names on your travel affiliate site? BigSEO will change that, as it influences MySmallTown to rename to BigCityJunior for “marketing purposes”. There is no reason to artificially limit your SEO to the Internet. The Internet is becoming everything.

Some quotes from the report:

So now, if you search an Internet travel site for “Hilton Head” plus “airport”, the Savannah airport pops up as an option.

Before the switch, a telephone survey of people outside New England indicated the vast majority of flyers were unfamiliar with the Manchester name, particularly those who buy tickets online.

…the chairman of the local convention bureau told USA Today that changing the name of their airport has definitely helped to draw travelers.

Travel ticketing is now almost completely online, whether you do it yourself or pay an agent to do it. That means everything else associated with travel will eventually move online (where the buyers are), and so goes much of the cultural influence normally associated with travel.

I have been active in local search for years, and was recently interviewed by Michael Gray for his series on the future of local search. If the big search engines can’t get a handle on local search, what will happen? It’s a good question, but it might not remain a relevant question for very long as local morphs away from what it has been, market by market, in response to the absence of a local search utility. The impact on culture? It’s just beginning, but I bet it won’t be pretty.

Of all of my readers, I most enjoy Natasha Robinson. Honestly, I think it’s the name…. Natasha… that exotic beauty from Rocky And BullWinkle. Natasha Fatale is one of those overly-managed “properties” in cartoon world, so no graphic here, but she is described by her “manager” Classic Media as follows:

Natasha Fatale, the female counterpart to Boris Badenow, is a former Miss Transylvania and gives a whole new meaning to the word “vamp”. Although much of her younger life remains a secret, there is substantial evidence that Natasha is the only child of Axis Sally and Count Dracula. Besides her work with the infamous baddie Boris Badenow, Natasha has also had previous stints as a model for Charles Adams and popping out of cakes at embalmer’s stag parties.

So when Natasha comments, I read it for all the wrong reasons. Anyway, Natasha commented yesterday :

In trying to explain to an engineer why knowing what to do with the pages that you already have indexed in Google is more important than having all of the pages to the site indexed in Google I started to explain to him that there is basic SEO which everyone can learn from any forum, Google’s webmaster guidelines, etc and there there is Strategic SEO.

and of course she is correct. Strategic SEO is not the same as technical SEO. In fact, as I suspect she is learning, “strategic SEO” is not SEO at all but competitive webmastering, which uses SEO tactics. The same is true for “optimized SEM” and the newer “social media optimization”. They are tactics, which must be executed within a plan that has goals and objectives. Competitive Webmastering, too, will someday cease to exist when business finally wakes up to the fact that the Internet is everything, and we will just refer to all this clever competitive stuff as “business” once again.

But what “that girl from marketing” said above was interesting to me not because of the mention of competitive webmastering, but because of what she was preaching to that poor engineer. It’s not about more pages indexed any more.

Sorry to throw yet another monkey wrench into your SEO business model, but if you are still working to get your client’s sites fully indexed in Google (or worse, still paying an SEO “firm” to get all of your pages indexed), I’m sorry to hear of your continued inability to get SEO and the web. It doesn’t matter so much how many of your pages are indexed, but it matters which of your pages are indexed and whether or not they are indexed such that they appear in the right SERPs for your business objectives. Google started trimming it’s inclusion long ago. It’s not interested in more millions any more. Google wants quality.

Here are a few more things that your SEO “firm” may not have told you :

5 6 Things Your SEO Firm May Not Have Told You

1. Google figured out how to spider and index your dynamic pages long ago, including the duplicates, most of the the broken ones, and the ones buried deep in your CMS. You don’t need to change your URLs to get Google to spider and index your site. You may want to change your URLs for other reasons (that being based, of course, on a business strategy), but unless you’ve had strategic business planning meetings with your SEO, having your SEO convert your CMS to use “search engine friendly” URLs is probably not cost effective.
2. Nobody knows your money terms. Nobody. Not you, and not your SEO. The list of search terms that produce best for your web site is dependent upon overall Internet traffic patterns, your specific industry trends and events, and culture. At any given moment, the value of search terms can be estimated, the currently-working search terms can be identified, and new candidates for productive search terms can be identified. But which terms produce can only be known from actual experience or testing. Every keyword list is dynamic, and keyword list management is major part of the ongoing SEO efforts.
3. There is a new Supplemental Hell, and it’s called Zero Traffic Hell. Google is no longer labeling all of your low-value pages as “Supplemental”, but instead has decided to simply not refer visitors to those low value pages. So if you’re SEO firm is still showing you “see, it was in Supplemental before, but we pulled it out” then you probably need a new SEO firm. Check your logs. They are dying to tell you what your low value pages are.
4. Less is More, Sometimes. If your SEO firm is still saying “more pages = more traffic” then you probably should hire a competitive webmaster consultant to check on your SEO consultant. I think of it like a freight train. There’s an “engineer” driving the train, and then there’s an “engineer” setting the track signals that enable the trains to go where they need to go, at the right times. Which engineer is driving the train?  If your SEO is out there working to get your site to bring in traffic, who is setting the guidelines on exactly what traffic you actually want to garner? Your business needs traffic that does what you want it to do (e.g. buy something) and all other traffic is a cost for you, consuming bandwidth, occupying your SEO at an hourly rate, etc. Sometimes less is more. Google knows that.
5. Sometimes it is smart to simply STOP. This is a tough one for both the SEO “firm” and the client to accept, so I don’t expect it to change soon. Sometimes, the best thing to do is stop and wait. Stop and monitor the signs of change. Stop and measure. That’s not free time, off-the-books, but part of good SEO. Think of it like creative time: when an artists dreams, it is productive work. But nobody likes to pay an artist for the time she is dreaming, and so artists are basically poor for the most part and suffer under a sponsorship model. SEO firms tend to average the effort over time to come up with a reasonable hourly rate for work, that covers the crunch time and the dream time. The parallels continue to be remarkable…. art critics/seo experts,  art auctions/seo proposals, galleries/web design firms, etc etc etc. Anyway SEO is a creative endeavor more than a technical endeavor, even if your SEO firm doesn’t acknowledge that.
6. SEO changes daily. Another tough one, because it basically means yesterday’s proposal needs another change order. Seriously, folks, if you hold your SEO to a fixed contract you will get just that – a fixed performance. There is simply no way to specify an SEO engagement, and so we have what we have today: a whole bunch of dysfunctional SEO firms. I’m not saying it’s kismet, but you are far better off challenging your SEO team to achieve a monthly business objective than challenging them to meet a specification for work. Hard to put that into a contract? Yes. Hard to know what matters and what doesn’t? Yes. That’s why I believe in strategic consulting, and that’s why I advise everyone who hires and SEO form to also hire an expensive, independent, capable competitive webmaster to keep an eye on the project and advise the business team on how to move on beyond the SEO work – in parallel. Not to work with the SEOs, but to work with the business team on the next steps, while keeping an eye on SEO progress from the business perspective. It’s the right way to do it, but almost nobody does it that way.

There is so much debate about SEO today, I kind of wonder why so many SEO thinkers are not busier with their SEO. It might be because they are comfortably at the top of the SERPs, unchallenged and therefore idle. It may also be because they are SEO Salespeople, and their SEO staffs are full-up with work so they have nothing better to do than blog about SEO. Or, it could be something else.

Anyway reading some of this stuff I got to thinking there is an aweful lot of mis-understanding about what is and is not SEO these days. As I wondered, I wrote down some of my wonderings….

Is it SEO if …. everybody is doing it? I mean, titles are important, and SEOs optimize titles, but doesn’t everyone know that and isn’t every good webmaster writing good page titles?

Is it SEO if …. every web design firm offers it in their service bundles? You’d be hard pressed to find a web design firm today that doesn’t list SEO as one of their offerings. Doesn’t that make SEO an aspect of web design?

Is it SEO if …. just a wee bit gets you to the top of an otherwise non-competitive SERP? Like, if someone named Antwon Jinderspoolster makes a few links and pops to the top of Google for his own name, is that SEO? (gotta love that phentermine spam)

Is it SEO if …. you paid for traffic? I don’t mean paid for SEO services, I mean paid for links, or paid for PPC traffic. Tough call here, because beer can be used as currency in some local markets. I’m just sayin’s all…

Is it SEO if …. it yields top rankings for keywords that nobody cares about? Consider the case of an SEO “firm” signing a client to a contract that guaranteed a first place showing in Google. After the contract was signed, they set out to determine what phrase would be the guarantee phrase, and it was something along the lines of “rust under the left side bumper bolt“. And that was a one year contract for SEO services. Yes, they met the contracted requirements. No the year is not up yet.

Is it SEO if …. someone says it is? Or isn’t?

I don’t follow blogging much. It doesn’t really matter in the real world, actually. But I understand there is an “A” list of bloggers who promote each other, refer to each other, and help maintain the notion of exclusivity in the blogging portion of the web. I can’t profess to know who is “A” list and who is not, so you’ll have to forgive me if Zoli Erdos is not “A” list because even though he says he’s not, and he says he’s a “regular” blogger, he does sound like one when he cautions us that if we all link to each other, we’ll ruin Technorati.

Zoli Erdos is complaining that someone is out to mess with Technorati’s link analysis and may even cause Technorati to “collapse”. He seems to think a meme going around is a trick, or something one of those SEO types thought up. He suggests that getting a whole mess of inbound links may not be such a good thing if everybody else got them, too. He asks bloggers to stop and think before joining the 2000 Bloggers meme…. I suppose for the good of the blog o’ sphere? 

Now if that don’t win Irony of the Day. Just minutes before the stroke of a new day, no less.

I ask, what good is a Technorati that can’t handle the organic web?  We’ve been here before with Google. Sure, it would be great for Google if we all followed the Google Guidelines, but why should I restrain my innovative spirit so Googlers can amass fortunes in advertising revenue from my content? Let Google adapt and earn all that money. Google may be encouraging increased use of the Internet, but webmasters are building the web. The only thing that will keep Technorati from collapsing is innovation, and I’ve heard they haven’t been doing that very well lately. Will we blame Technorati’s failure on SEO’s too? 

Responsible linking? Webmasters, link away, cause it’s a web. Link anywhere you want, for any reason you want. Link with descriptive anchor text or “click here” or “read this” if you like.  Send your exit traffic to Disney or the White House or Taliban.edu, it’s up to you. Whatever you want to do… this is your chance. YOU are the publisher. YOU are the editor. YOU make the rules, and YOU don’t have to answer to ANYBODY. And that is especially true for blogs. Pheh. Listen to me. Espousing free speech and unrestricted publishing just like those silly bloggers used to back in the day. Go figure.

Google, the Greatest Search Engine of All Time, has ramped up it’s exploitation of insider knowledge, and increased it’s personalization of the Google results. If you have a Google account, you will see a set of search results that has probably been “adjusted” just for YOU. Not everyone likes this idea.

A combination of actions taken by the Big G over the past year or so presume to increase Google’s knowledge of YOU, and modify the search engines results pages (SERPs) that Google gives YOU when it thinks it is YOU typing at the keyboard. This is of serious interest to people who make a living influencing how Google sets up its SERPs, and so if you want to read more detail you can read about it here and here. It’s presented a small enhancement by Google here. But that’s only a small part of the story.

As a search person (working in search engine optimization – SEO –  for competitive purposes), I have long proclaimed a perspective I gained from the hacking community and my engineering training. Basically, where there is trust, there is an exploit. If you need to find a system weakness (either because you are designing a system to work well, seeking to understand how a system might fail, or looking to exploit weaknesses in a system), you simply examine how and where assumptions are made. Where does that system place trust? If you are an advanced person working in this area, you also seek to know WHY that trust has been granted (because that reveals the operating weakness in the system…the weakness that itself has been “trusted”, if you will).

Google has decided to trust it’s a-priori knowledge of YOU, in order to personalize YOUR search results. It has decided that it can use past knowledge about YOU to predict YOUR intent at the time of a search. The Google engineering team also has some plan in place for Google to LEARN as it goes, so as to improve it’s GUESS about YOU over time.  They describe it like this:

Keep in mind that personalization is subtle; at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you’ll see it. For example, I (Sep) am an avid Miami Dolphins fan (no joke). Searching for [dolphins] gives me info about my favorite football team, while a marine biologist colleague gets more information about her salt-water friends.

I think this is a fatal error for Google the search engine.

I know that what Google thinks is true about me, is largely untrue. I don’t need to explain why I believe that, because I also believe Google will never reveal what it thinks it knows about users (and uses to personalize their SERPs). There can be no debate on accuracy without some transparency of data. The mismatch of “personalization” will cause the Google SERPs to become one the one hand homogenized (I always get a sanitized SERP, which is a form of censorship) and on the other hand wildly un-useful (I searched to learn something new, not recall something from memory). Homogenized SERPs are boring and disappointing. I don’t want a search engine to be a directory… I want it to be a tool for exploration of “what’s out there”. Most importantly, I want to GROW with every query. I want to LEARN from what I see. I want to get VALUE out of my use of Google.

You can argue that as a professional my situation is an outlier; that I am not a typical user. I suggest that I am a typical search engine user. But these days not all Google users are search engine users. A large percentage of the audience of Googlers these days are not actually searchers but Internet users. Many have come to the search engine via hijack… they entered their URL into the wrong box. Google corrupted the Mozilla Foundation and got a Google search box placed front and center on the start page of the Firefox browser… and many, many people use it as a location bar, not aware it is actually search box. Or they Google because it is interesting and effective (not just effective). They get rewarded when they use Google, because they gain a bit more awareness along the way to the answer (any advanced SEO can tell you about dominating a SERP and using the ancillary positions to influence the overall user awareness of the topic searched).  Is it any surprise that research shows Googlers only click on page one results? A large number were not searching, but given a search results page will click through to what they actually wanted and Google takes credit for the referral. Worse, Google also records it as an indicator of intent and desire for that user, saving that “knowledge” for use later in “personalized results”.

The same has been done by Yahoo! with Flock and just about every toolbar distributor. It is also enhanced by the new IE and Firefox, because those browsers now send all malformed URLs over to a search engine. Even a slightly malformed URL in IE7 results in a search: the other day I entered google.com in the IE7 location bar and got a Yahoo! search results page for Google.com (because I had not included the “www”?) Of course the first entry in the SERP was www.Google.com. They have hijacked a whole helluvalot of users, passed then through search engines, proclaimed a vast increase in the amount of people who “get to a site through search engines”. That has given them economic power (via purported influence). Now they have a problem… they can’t actually have a search engine if so many of their users are not actually searching buy simply going somewhere. A search engine gets in the way. So what’s it going to be? Google the search engine, or Google the directory? Or maybe Google the portal?

Personalized SERPs won’t work for the long haul. They won’t support the core search engine user base, and they won’t support the “we are the best search engine” business model. If nothing else, Google’s move to personalized SERPs will open an opportunity for the next true search engine to emerge and serve the market of actual “searchers”. Were Google to achieve a broad enough adoption of personalization (it requires a Google account), I think Google would become a portal (instead of a search engine) like AOL or Yahoo or the old MSN.

And let’s not forget that search isn’t a profitable business. Google monetized the search experience via advertising only because it moved in with something new and a huge near monopoly on “searcher” traffic (largely understood to be Internet traffic). Increased personalization means increased portalization, and Google is really monetizing a portal and not a search engine. Take away advertising on “search” related properties (referring to AdSense partners as search partners because so many survive on search referred traffic) and Google doesn’t have profits, either.

Cloudy picture? For sure. Google has too much influence right now, and for now Google can do whatever the hell it wants. The only thing that suffers is the user.

And that brings me to my conclusion. Sadly, the audience is largely unaware of how the media influences their access to information, and thus their beliefs, but they suspect it is possible. When Google censors the SERPs via “personalization”, it does so without obligation because it has found a way to simply let the user’s own actions determine (algorithmic-ly?) that censorship step. Not getting the whole picture? well, it’s because you didn’t turn off personalization, and something you did in the past must have caused the algorithm to show you these search results instead. Get that word out and pretty soon anyone capable of turning off cookies  will turn off their Google accounts much of the time. A headline or two about how “what you see may not be what your neighbor sees” will cause many of your neighbors to second guess their Googling. And remember the thing about trust? Google is trusting that what it sees you do when logged in to your Google account, defines who you are and can be used to censor what you see in your “personalized” SERPs. I know that will never work.
Let’s assume this program advances. Google and Yahoo! have betrayed users by hijacking the browser location bar, encouraging toolbar installations, and now presenting censorship as a form of enhancement. Advanced users already know this. Intermediate users will increasingly dis-trust Google, preventing such personalization efforts from increasing quality enough to be noticed. Casual users (yesterday’s AOL user) will love Google as it shows them what they wanted to see. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader: How will Google be as the new AOL, and what happens in Internet world when someone tries to lock up the users inside a closed system?