I compete in many different markets on the web, and many of those are less-than serious. Much of the Internet is like real estate - you take a domain name and either develop it or hold it. I liken the non-serious web sites that I have on valuable domain names to what are called “tax payers” in the real estate market. A “tax payer” is a business or building that is put up to cover the property taxes associated with the property while you hold on to it for investment value. You don’t care to make it a big successful enterprise, but you need it to at least cover proerty taxes which tend to rise as a property’s value increases. Common “tax payers” are inexpensive strip malls, Self-Storage facilities, and pay parking lots. (For the record, I am not in the “parked domain” business).

I use my “tax payers” as tests of various SEO methods as well. Often that involves writing, because let’s face it Google has been quite the consumer of pop literature / pulpless fiction these past few years. Oddly, I find myself competiting is some Asian-oriented markets, where not surprisingly English is a second language. That means I find myself competitng for the top spots in markets where my primary competitors are non-English speaking, Asian webmasters.

I get to see the worst of the SEO world on these sites. I check them every few days for the entertainment value. SPAM taken to new heights. Image spam, then keyword spam, then both, combined. Link spam, more link spam, and then 20 or 30 pages of 302 redirects to my site (WTF?). One day I found 5 web pages full of live links to my site’s pages, all direct and with good anchor text. What was that, exactly? Thanks for the link love.

Often the methods are good ones, and they work for a day or two before the competing page disappears. I saw an image last week sliced into 40 pieces, each with prime alt and title attributes. Shot right to #1. For a day. I see plenty of pictures of pretty women on industrial products pages, just like those calendars Dad brought home from the construction sites back in the seventies. I see my own images hotlinked, which of course I play with to further the entertainment. At one point it got so funny I created an “about dot com” page to talk about it, and took the second spot away with that. It has to hurt, no?

Today I placed a large half-page banner ad on one of my site’s home page, saying “Thanks for playing. Try again sometime. And if you need a real SEO, call me” with a URL for my contact page. Why not? If they are working so hard to be #1 and I am the only thing in the way, I can make it easier. I really can.

The reality is not that content is king, per se, but that the knobs are tuned way high for semantics right now. If you don’t have a strong *American* English content tweaker involved in your site, you will not rank in a competitive SERP or in almost any local SERP, except perhaps by chance.

Another inquiry, another proposal, another SEO client. And in between those three lies 15 hours of studying the search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO is one large part of the competitive Internet, but not all of it. The SEO toolset, however, supports most of what we do when we get competitive. SEO tools are not just for SEO. They are for searching, gathering competitive intelligence, teaching and training. SEO’s drive the development of tools. They provide the knowledge base for understanding what the tools do. What they show. How they can be interpreted. We owe a lot to a small handful of really good SEOs for the tools we use every day.
But I think the number one activity of competitive development is studying the SERPs. Sadly, that is also one area where many clients have spent very little time. They spend more time in analytics reports than in the SERPs. Why? Because Analytics companies are marketers. They make their reports look like meaningful data. Did you ever spend an hour clicking around inside of Webtrends Enterprise? What a waste of time, yet we all do it on occasion. Why? There’s an excellent SEO lesson in there…one that Markus Frind would be all to happy to tell you.

SERPs look like what they are : results sets. Clients feel inept at search. And why not? They can’t find anything, so naturally they will feel they are not expert searchers. But the real issue is what you get, not what you wanted to get when you entered a query. Because what you get is what everyone else gets, too. That’s reality.

Is that clear? Go ahead and search for your company name. What comes up? I don’t care if you don’t come up, or you come up third, or whatever. I care about what comes up first. Who is it? Why did they come up first? That is where the gold lies. And I spend my time looking at that, not your web pages. And so should you. Only after you understand the market can you compete.

I do recognize that many people don’t know what to look for in the SERPs, or how to examine them. Recognition of that means progress. Should I help with that? You tell me.

I am thinking it might be good for me to present here, in this blog, specific steps for understanding the SERPs. Simple yet effective ways to look closely at what matters when you run a query against Google or Yahoo!. Basic but important stuff that should be checked each and every time, for specific clues. What do you think? Let me know if that is a good idea and I will consider it. I have plenty to say on the topic.

Sometimes the most obvious competitive tactic goes unexecuted, and sometimes it’s because while we know it would be good for us, we don’t appreciate just how good for us it could be. Enter the “about dot com” page.

If you have a .com site, you need to have an About site. It’s a separate website, unconnected to your .com site, but which is all “about” your .com site. Ever look at those About.com web pages that rank everywhere for everything? They are aggregators, sure, and lately they have gotten very spammy, but the concept has been good for many years and continues to be good: a page about another site, which links to it as well as to related resources, which also happen to link to your sites.

Now before you go SEO theoretical on me, let me say that yes, this is a doorway approach and yes this is a classic Bruce Clay third-party doorway approach and yes I know he trademarked a name for an intricate version of the process and yes About.com builds authority pages and yes, overloading on internal anchor text is passe’ and yes it is great that we both agree about how spammy About.com has gotten lately. That said, here me out about the need for every one of your competitive websites to have an About Dot Com website.

Create a disconnected site and post content on it that describes your main website. Find a way to discuss the topics that are currently on your dot com, as if you were reporting on it in a trade magazine. Link to it as appropriate, using your SEO savvy, but also link to the supporting materials for those topics, located on (non-competing) authority sites and popular topical sites. Make the site all “about” your main site. Make sure that every worthy link out there to your main site has a mention on your about site, and a link.

Yes, you can have a “the making of…” site to do this, like one of those DVDs on the making of Star Wars. It’s rich content, all about Star Wars, yet is it a “doorway” to Star Wars? No. It is solidly semantic content all it’s own, worthy of an audience that also just happens to have a very sincere interest in Star Wars (hint hint).

Yes, a “corporate blog” was supposed to be one of these. It’s a blog not simply because “every company has to have a blog these days” but because blog software makes it easy for corporate marketers to publish “about” content, link to relevant resources (especially their own .com site hint hint hint) and make use of syndication tools that would otherwise take 2 years and 750 pages of specifications to build. A corporate blog is an “about dot com” site and should be managed as such. Why anyone would put a corporate blog in a sub folder of the primary domain is beyond my comprehension. It belongs on a separate domain, or… here comes the brainstorm boys and girls, a subdomain known as “about”.

You don’t have to take my suggestion literally, but you can. If you sell an SEO book you probably wish you were lucky smart enough to get a domain like, say, www.seobook.com. That would be a website full of information and sales pitches for your seo ebook. Stuff like subscribe to the SEO book, read testimonials about the great SEO book, etc. How about adding a website at about.seobook.com, and putting a blog there which chronicles the development of, selling of, revisions of, feedback on, and experiences of producing the seo book? A blog, if you will, about seobook.com.

Google will view about.seobook.com as a separate domain from seobook.com. The content will be semantically similar in almost every way to seobook.com, yet unique and more comprehensive. The out linking on seobook.com is crafted, I assume, around selling the seo book. Because of that constraint, it is not easy to do many things which semantically make great SEO sense - like linking to a competitor’s ebook about SEO. Why tempt your potentials with a link to the next best thing? Yet even my new SEO recruit can list 10 ways to write content about the competitors product without endorsing it (he proved it during his interview). Such content may be too risky to publish on the main commercial website (which is being optimized and tracked for conversion rates and such) but certainly it’s content worthy of the about domain, where it will gain some Google love for the comprehensiveness it brings into the site. And… since there are all those clever mentions of the seobook.com website in there, the traffic will surely flow.

How will the user view about.seobook.com? Well, look at it:

about.seobook.com

I suggest that the domain name itself will not only attract attention to the main website www.seobook.com naturally by visual brand reference, but will also attract existing seobook.com lovers because, well, it’s more good stuff. It will attract existing www.seobook.com haters, too, who are looking for validation of their hate of www.seobook.com (or for more to hate about seobook.com). It will attract diligent consumers who have been reading through all of the seo book websites out there, and have seobook.com on their short list of candidates. Conversly, it will attract diligent consumers who have been reading through all of the seo book websites out there, and have stricken seobook.com off of their short list of candidates. Do you see where I’m going here? Another shot at the prospect, and almost everybody captured by the organic SEO effort fits the profile of prospect.

I think the word “about” is beautiful. In common understanding, it includes “in”, even though “in” and “about” are mutually exclusive by definition (you can’t be “about” and still be “inside” yet we are all “up and about the house” every day, aren’t we?). About means all over, when it comes to information. If something is All About Christine Dolce that means it has dedicated itself to one topic: Christine Dolce. If it is Everything About Christine Dolce, it means it doesn’t have to be only about Christine Dolce, but it does try and include everything that is out there on the topic of Chistine Dolce. About is magic.

Consider johnon.com. What if you saw about.johnon.com in the SERPs? Okay, I admit that didn’t work because you and I are sooooo jaded by our experiences with spammy About.com pages. We right away think it must be some odd manipulation by the About.com people. But try and separate yourself from that belief system for a minute. It says it’s extra, additional, related, ancillary and or supplemental information on the same great content you have come to expect from www.johnon.com. Mission accomplished. Oh, and I might point out that the bigger the About.com brand, the better this works. Just IMHO.

Now I will offer an SEO prize to whomever posts the best Internet search for about subdomains like about.seobook.com and about.johnon.com in the comments here. I haven’t looked, but I doubt there are many today. What does that say about there being one in your niche? And if there were many… let’s say there were tons of them, what would that mean for the success of yours when it appears in the SERPs? Exactly.

About dot com. Another great idea? Let’s consider it a mental warm up… not just a use of subdomains, not just a doorway, and not just a corporate blog. It’s a perspective, and folks, in SEO world, just like the real world, perspective is everything.

You don’t need a web site any more

These days, everybody needs SEO. Why? Because they need traffic, and the only traffic many business web sites get these days is the traffic that the search engines send to them. And of the search engines sending that traffic, Google sends the most by far. So the thinking is, if you want your web site to work for you, you need to get into Google and get those Google referrals. The businesses have tried that on their own and failed, so now they need a specialist. A “search engine optimizer” or SEO.

That is certainly one way to think. As a consultant providing SEO services to small businesses, I could whole heartedly agree. Hire me. It’ll solve your problems. In fact, everybody should hire me, and then everybody will have the #1 spot on Google, right?

Of course not.

But this sort of hyperbolic thinking can be enlightening. If everyone wants to appear first in Google for a search phrase that matches their target consumer audience (whatever it is, for-profit or not) then really all they seek is an *appearance* at the top of the Google search results (the SERP) for that search query. They don’t seek a web site, but an “ad” at the top of the Google results page. So why do they even have web sites? Conventional thinking is that the “ad” clicks through to a “page” that is on a web site. I honestly believe that the only reason the “sponsored listings” on Google look different from the indexed web pages is because it would be legally questionable for Google to do that right now. If Google could toss aside that constraint, the ads would look exactly like the rest of the web pages listed on the Google results page.
Exaggerating this line of thought further, *if* Google provided a big enough advertisement at the top of the search results, would that replace the need for a separate business web site? Hmm… some have suggested the web has evolved to the point where web pages are ads, and each page serves the business separate from the rest of a web site. Eventually some businesses would want to bring the traffic deep into their complex web sites, sure, but not all businesses. In fact, not *most* businesses. If you look at today’s web, the vast majority of business web sites are not the type that need deep user interaction. They need to extend an invitation to call, write, order, submit, sign up, comment, etc. Some singular action that is ‘the transaction”. And that might be provided by a large Google “ad” at the top of the SERP, if it was big enough and “HTML-y” enough.

Consider Pay Per Click contextual ads. They are placed at the top of the SERP, and induce a call to action. Limited in size to a few lines, they usually link to a web page somewhere because you can’t fit the whole sales pitch and order form into that little PPC ad. Due to the constraints of size, the call to action became “click thru to the rest of the story”. But how many of those businesses spending money every month on PPC ads would be fully served by a single web-page-sized interactive document behind the PPC ad? Hosted by Google? AJAX allows that to happen, doesn’t it? Urchin/Analytics? AdSense/AdWords tracking?

Today’s contextual advertising is expensive. Each click costs money, and there is a strong desire… NEED actually, for those referrals to “convert” to a sale or commerce activity. Some SEOs suggest that every “landing page” needs to be optimized for that singular “call to action” in order to increase “return on advertising spend” and “return on investment”. In other words, to make a profit after accounting for the costs of that web site and all those web pages. So if that is true, and those optimized landing pages result in sales, who needed a whole web site? They needed (and got) a single landing page that closed the deal. Hosted by Google.

BUT, those PPC fees (costs) were supposedly bid up on a market basis. So the costs should be tracking the…. costs, right? I mean, if the plan is to maximize ROI or ROAS, and a significant portion of the costs to be recovered came from producing the web sites and PPC campaigns (including handling the orders etc.) then the market should suggest that PPC bid prices level out right around where the costs are… minus the Google share. And if that were to happen, we competitive webmasters would need to reduce those costs in order to increase our profits (noting we can’t put any pressure on Google to reduce it’s share because, well, Google has a monopoly there). And Google, to increase it’s profits, needs to GROW outwards and consume more of the profits, by adding value… which is the same as reducing expenses on the client side. Are you with me?

So Google should host your landing page, and you may not need a web site at all.

Google has just announced (tomorrow morning, actually) they will provide web site building tools/services for small businesses. I have no further information yet, but the above scenario is interesting to me. What if Google extends the contextual ad business to handle the whole process, from ad serving in-context through conversion on a Google-hosted landing page? Those of you “in the biz” know what I’m talking about…the follow up on Writely, urchin, WHOIS, Toolbar, etc. The Grand Finale. Cyberdyne. Self awareness. Well, maybe not self awareness (yet).

Of course I don’t believe the above scenario, and I hope you don’t. but is should SCARE YOU. In the end, following this sort of “optimization” process, Google would simply assume *all* costs and become Amazon.com…. and you all would be “out of business” as they say. Of course my hyperbolic scenario completely ignores disruptive innovation that even I would be pursuing left and right if the scenario did try and play out. And we all know that Amazon has been around for years, and successful by almost all counts, and yet we still don’t buy everything from Amazon (yet). Why is that? is it possible that we might someday buy everything from Amazoogle? Think seriously about the theoretical consequences of this scenario, and you may realize why many SEOs (myself included) warn web masters very seriously about telling TheGoogle about your web sites and businesses (your stats, your secondary supporting domains, your conversion rates). Why do you share competitive data with a competitor?

One of the more interesting aspects of my work is competitive intelligence. Who is competing in the market, using what tactics, and with what success? When limited to online activities, CI shows you what they *have been* doing, not what they may be doing now. However, as I learned quite well during my 10 years working with neuropsychologists, past behavior is indicative of future performance when it comes to humans. People will do what they’ve done before.

So when I see an SEO in his late forties with a new yacht, I am desperate to examine his web properties and PR image. Where did he find his success, yes, but more importantly is his success built upon a foundation of outdated websites and a circa 2001 online business model? or even better, *one* outdated website in one vertical?

What are the odds that a comfortable #1 spot holder with a family of teenagers and a world-capable yacht will rise to a modern day SEO challenge to his top spots?

One argument is he has the funds to kick into gear and hire the best staff to retain that top spot in the face of a threat. True. But that human behavior thing suggests that he did not hire the best and brightest on the way up. In fact, it appears he kept things very close to his chest (including profits). Odds are very strng that he would do as he has done before, having been reinforced for the behavior with a yacht.

Another argument is that he will sell his holdings rather than fight, even if he doesn’t act until he is #3 and #4 in the SERPs having lost the top placement to my challenge. I accept that possibility, but it has nothing to do with me as competing SEO. All that does is further distract him from meeting the competitive challenge, or further underline this as an opportunity for me. A perfectly ripe pear hanging from a tree branch must be picked or it will rot. Someone has to eat it.

Modern day SEO can overcome many current top placeholders in the SERPs. I have had clients approach me after they watched their business lose the top spots to a newcomer over more than a year’s time. What were they doing for that year? You got it: watching their properties drop from the #1 spots, and watching the new guy get energized with his success as he rose to the top. What they see now is a new guy at the top, but they don’t see what he is doing now. What he did before is indicative of what he will continue to do - challenge the incumbants, compete, and dominate. What will they do now, after watching themselves get overrun for a year?

It’s not a pretty picture. I encourage them to hire some quality SEO talent and get out of the way as much as possible.

I wrote this post because I have always viewed SEO as a form of competitive webmastering, while many webmasters consider SEO as a set of tricks to rank in search engines. Webmasters don’t need to hire SEOs. Business owners should hire SEOs to out perform other webmasters.

Over at MightyHitter we see how Google’s predictive advertising causes Chinese language ads to show up on (his?)  English language blog. I am willing to bet that Chinese character ads perform better than English character ads on an English website with a Chinese audience. Go Google.

That Google is serving ads based on the context of the pages that link to you is not news (ever hear of “relevant” inbound links?). It’s a well known competitive technique — spam your enemy’s site with inbound links from inappropriate content sites to stir the stew. But the fact that Chinese character ads are “invisible” to non-Chinese readers is interesting. I repeat… the ads are invisible. Niiiiiiiiiice! We’ve finally found a way to serve ads on pages that do not distract our audience! Oh, and the spammers could fill your leaderboards with ads that nobody can read. Hmmmmm…