What is the current and future state of SEO as you see it?
I read so many blogs and hear so many podcasts that say "SEO is dead" or soon will be. Do you think there is any truth to these arguments? Or does SEO just get a bad rap because there are so many people who illegitimately claim to know so much about it, but aren’t successful? I work for a large agency mainly on PPC stuff but am thinking about learning more about SEO, just don’t know much about where it’s going.
My insights about SEO, I agree that it’s future is becoming cloudy and stormy because many site’s owner nowadays uses a blackhat approach for getting higher ranking position in SERP, in short they are cheating just to display a high ranking of their sites without following the legal optimization procedure. I’ve read one article on the internet that says like this, read the whole story from the link below:
SEO School Bus First Exam: Who Needs Links Anyway?
A little story to share with you for the Seo School Bus. I have a friend with a website that posts 5 days a week. I was reading his most recent post, when I wanted to check how many links he had coming into his website (it showed around 2400). I quickly sent him a text saying, “You have 2400 incoming links for your site”. He said, “How did you see that?”. Which brings me to a SEO tool that you should be using. SEO for Firefox, while a great resource for education, can help you learn SEO as you’re using it. If you’re not using FireFox this might give you a reason. I won’t than go into to much depth of how this tool works, (there are plenty out there) my suggestion would be to play around with it first.
First thing to look at will be the options of the tool where you will find what kind of info you want to know about a website. You can set any of the options to automatic, hide, or on-demand. You may hide one that I may have automatic, and you might ask: “Which ones do you have hidden, automatic or on-demand?” I don’t want to push my bias onto you, because then you won’t do any research on your own to understand why it’s important.
I’m now in the habit of right clicking on every website and using my “look up this page” option. I could spend hours looking at where websites are getting their links from, from looking at the press releases that have been written to directories they have submitted to. If you can get why they have that link and how its helping them you will be able to convert this into learning SEO techniques for your site. We will revisit this tool often and touch on various aspects of what the information can do for the Seo School Bus students.
The <a href=”http://www.seoschoolbus.com”>Seo School Bus</a> has and will have plenty of ways to learn SEO, but just like school you will have to do some homework: setting SEO goals. Feel free to e-mail me your goals and I will give you some of my recommendations.
mark J
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-school-bus-first-exam-who-needs-links-anyway-727476.html
SEO ROI & the Conversion Rate Dilemma
What do legitimate search engine optimization firms charge? Like most things involving the Web, prices are all over the place but if the price is extremely low you can be assured that the quality of the service will match the price.
If you do a search for SEO pricing from reliable search engine firms you will find that although prices vary greatly fees of $2,500 per month on an annual contract ($30,000 per year) are not uncommon. Of course some firms will charge less and others will charge a great deal more depending on where they are located, the size and condition of your website, and exactly what services you want them to provide.
Are SEO Costs Worth the Investment?
So what do you get for your $30k ante? Legitimate SEO companies will provide things like target market analysis, keyword analysis, content massaging, code modifications, link implementation strategy, and metric analysis.
And what happens when Google changes their algorithms? Well you guessed it. You have to ante-up again and the addiction continues. Search engine optimization has become the crack-cocaine of Web-based businesses.
Keep in mind search engine optimization’s main goal is to increase your visibility and ranking in search engines which assumes more traffic to your website; but the leap from visibility to traffic to sales conversion is higher than you think. The assumption that better search engine visibility and more traffic automatically generates more sales is faulty logic.
Even if increased search engine visibility produces more traffic to your site and even if your website contains genuine content; if the presentation of that content doesn’t engage the viewer quickly and if it doesn’t hold the visitor’s attention for two to three minutes with a compelling and even entertaining presentation, then your chances of converting that visitor to a customer are minimal.
How Much New Traffic Is Needed to Pay for SEO?
Let’s say your search engine tactics actually work and they not only increase your search engine ranking but also drive tons of traffic to your site. With realistic conversion rates at about 2-3%, how much traffic do you have to bring in to actually pay for the SEO expertise.
Based on a $30K annual investment in SEO and a 20% Net Profit you must generate $150,000 in new sales just to pay the SEO fees. And at a 3% conversion rate and an average sale amount of $100 per transaction that translates into 50,000 unique new visitors per year to your site just to pay for your SEO strategy, and you still haven’t added one cent to your bottom line. You can do the math.
SEO Investment Break-Even Formula
SEO Generated Unique Traffic Break-even = SEO Cost / Conversion Rate x Average Sale x Net Profit Percentage.
Determining Your Conversion Rate
Every business has a different Average Sales Amount and generally speaking it is safe to assume the higher the Selling Price the lower the Conversion Rate. In order to figure out what your Conversion Rate is you have to do a little more calculation. Lets say a company brings in a total of $150,000 in Web-Sales and attracts 25,000 Unique Visitors per year and has an Average Sale Price of $395.95; their Conversion Rate would be 1.5%. What’s your Conversion Rate?
Conversion Rate = [(Total Web Sales / Unique Web Traffic) / Average Sales Price] x 100
To test the formula, we can check the original example where we have a given Conversion Rate of 3% to see if we arrive at the same rate:
CR = [(150,000/50,000)/100] x 100]
Conversion Rate = 3%
The Meaning of It All
After calculating your own numbers, different readers will come to different conclusions. People seem to be mesmerized by complex statistics and bean counter analysis but the hidden meaning behind all the number crunching and mathematical machinations seems clear: if you want to make more money from your website the trick is not where you appear on a search engine or even how many unique visitors you attract to your site, but rather how many of these visitors you convert into customers. If you have a marketing budget it should be spent on conversions; and conversions are not the primary concern of search engine optimization. What you really want is a strategy that will increase conversions.
How Do You Increase Conversions
MarketingExperiments is a research group lead by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin that studies and analyzes these kinds of Web-related issues. In a recent study entitled “Optimizing Your Landing Pages”, they came up with a formula for determining conversion probability. Here’s the copyrighted MarketingExperiments formula: Conversion Probability = 4(Level of Motivational Matching) + 3(Clarity of the Value Proposition) + 2(Effectiveness of the Incentive – Level of Sales Friction) – 2(Conversion Process Anxiety).
I already have a headache, but here’s how they explain it in more digestible terms: “… the highest performing Landing Pages are those that match exactly the Motivation of the customer. After Motivation, the clarity with which you express the Value Proposition is the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from you or not.”(c) Copyright 2007 MarketingExperiments, LLC, You can visit the MarketingExperiments website for more details on their research.
I prefer an even simpler approach to increasing conversions: feature a website presentation that resonates with the needs of a qualified audience and compels action by providing a solution to those needs. Repurpose that presentation in affordable and no cost venues that drives even more meaningful qualified traffic to your site. Easy to say but hard to do, or is it?
What you need to determine is exactly what needs your audience craves and how best to engage their attention long enough to deliver a story that positions your offering as the missing ingredient required to fulfill their desire and ambition.
The Answer and The Future
The answer to delivering this kind of presentation on your website is video that features professional presenters delivering focused, well-crafted messages that motivate action and embed in your visitors’ memory. If done right, these videos will resonate with the emotional and psychological factors that trigger human desire and motivation. Like it or not, it is the future of Web-marketing.
Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines understand that the Web has become a far more sophisticated delivery platform than it used to be. Methods are in place to delivery not only video, audio, and multimedia, but also to index and tag it for relevance. For when all is said and done, search engines are in the relevance business. If they can’t deliver relevant, meaningful results they are out of business, and no search engine optimization trick, scheme or formula is going to stand in their way.
Those who truly understand the shifting momentum of this reality are already adapting to this new Web-video paradigm – the question is are you?
Jerry Bader
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-roi-the-conversion-rate-dilemma-338081.html
What is a Grey Hat SEO technique???
They say it is a combination of black hat and white hat technique…but how it will be done????
Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO. I’m not keyword stuffing, I’m thinking. If gray hat is so widely accepted as a popular tactic than why are there no good articles on what it is and how to do it? Maybe, and this is just one theory, its fuckin’ impossible to write about. It’s just too damn much of a gray area in the industry (pun intended). Well, we’ll see about that. 
So what exactly is Gray Hat SEO? Most define it as a site that uses questionable tactics? I think thats an excellent analysis, because the number one rule to gray hat is to be questionable. In fact the more you can get a trained eye to scratch their head wondering if your site is black hat or white the better. If you can fool the average visitor than you more than likely will fool a SE bot. In my opinion the best way to do this is to have an innate eye for structure.
In designing a structure for your gray hat site the best way to go about it is to steal a structure from a site that couldn’t possibly be banned. Let’s take Digg.com for example. Digg is setup in various primary categories where each contains news related stories. Each news story consists of a title with the link to the original article and a small, 255 character or so description. Each news story is accompanied by some user contributed content. Upon a indifferent perspective this is a very questionable structure. The content itself is very short and aren’t organized like a standardized article would be, the user contributed content is always very short and dispersed. Not to mention there is an enlarged lack of control over length of and quality of the user contributed “comments.” However the structure gives us some possibilities. We know that since Digg, Reddit and other social sites of the likeness are authoritative and standardized in the industry than naturally the search engine antispam algorithms couldn’t possibly automatically consider it of bad taste or a possibility of being considered a black hat site. This gives us a huge opportunity for a possible gray hat site.
Okay so the next step would logically be to figure out our content sources. Sticking with the Digg.com example we know that they get their content sources from large and small news related stories, mostly technology but that can excused for whatever niche we decide to target. This is a great place to start because Google has already been quoted as saying news related stories can’t be counted as duplicate content because they are so widely syndicated. It only makes sense. So getting news stories are easy. In fact it can be done by scraping lots of popular news RSS feeds. If we’re attempting to duplicate the Digg structure than we don’t need the entire articles despite what we’ve come to believe about SEO. We only need the partial story along with a title and then pad it with some user contributed content.
Where are we going to get some user contributed content? In this particular example I can’t think of a better place than the place we’re ripping off the structure from. We might as well pad each article with scraped user comments from Digg itself. So we can take the titles of each news piece and remove all the common words such as: “why”,”but”,”I”,”a”,”about”,”an”,”are”,”as”,”at”,”be”,”by”,”com”,”de”,”en”,”for”,”from”,”how”,”in”,”is”,”it”,”la”,”of”,”on”,”or”,”that”,”the”,”this”,”to”,”was”,”what”,”when”,”where”,”who”,”will”,”with”,”the”,”www”,”and”,”or”,”if”,”but” and any various others we find that aren’t commonly associated with the article subject. Then we can do a search on Digg and scrape several comments from the results, change up the usernames and make it all look unique. Hell if we wanted we could even markov some user submitted content in the middle of the scraped user content. Naturally not every user contributed content will match the topic exactly but who’s to say it’s not real? Once again as long as you remain “questionable” who can possibly deny you rankings? “Wow great article.”, “I pee’d in your pool.” <- users always submit this kind of shit, search engines are used to it and are more than well adapted to handle it. I realize this goes against the long preached world of “poison words” and such, but with the evolving net of social networking it directly conflicts with the true nature of the web and thus must be compensated for. Remember, its not what content you have, it’s how you use it. If it helps think about it like this. If you took all the comments on Youtube(which is the majority of their actual text based content) and truncated it all together in paragraph markers, how fast would you get banned? In no time, right. However when clones of places like Youtube organize it under headings of Comments and heavily break it up, somehow it all becomes legit. Take a moment to think about that.
More on this in a later post…
So now that we got our two elements of a successful gray hat site we can cook ‘em up together. We can even create a little mock voting and submission system. It doesn’t even have to work properly just as long as upon inspection it all looks legit. It’s all 100% autogenerated of course but as long as it’s laid out cleanly and correctly there’s no reason why we can’t generate hundreds of thousands of pages of stolen content while keeping visitors and the SE’s none the wiser. There’s no doubt we can do this exact technique for just about any authority site on the web. Let’s jump back to our Youtube example for a moment. Youtube isn’t the first nor the last video site on the web. As far as actual text based content goes it obviously takes a large piece of the brown cake. So how does it get away with it, and all it’s pages rank and do well while your clean and lengthy white hat articles struggle? Some would argue links are the answer. Well not all video content sites have tons of links but they can still survive and don’t get immediately banned for spammy content, but we’ll humor the notion anyway. So let’s get some links.
Gray hat sites frequently have an advantage over black hat sites in link building because since they can pass human check their links, more often than not, will tend to stick more. So of course the first place I would go is to attempt trackback pings on all these stories. If my link ends up on a few authoritative news sites, great, on a few blogs, just as well. Since it’s all legit and not only can we pass human check with our essentially black hat site as well as actually linking to them then there’s no good reason the links won’t have a high success rate. Which leads me to a bit of custom comment spam. Might as well find blog posts talking about related stuff to each story and leave something like, “I saw an interesting story related to this on www.blahblah.com/story123.” Sure why not, between just those two simple and common black hat techniques we somehow ended up with plenty of white hat links. Thats the beauty of gray hat. If you can at least get people to question whether or not your site is legit than you stand a very good chance of succeeding.
So essentially what we’re trying to do is play around within the margins between the pros of black hat and white hat till we can find a happy medium that is both acceptable to other webmasters and the search engine antispam algorithms, but how would an advanced Blue Hatter spin all this? Very good question. I personally would take a look at my potential competition. Since I’m taking these articles from other sources, they are the originals I am the linking to copy, naturally they will beat me out in all the SERPS. I can still drive traffic off their coattails perhaps by utilizing a few techniques to improve my CTR in the organics. However I’m still not ever going to reach my full traffic potential with the current gray hat setup. This is mostly due to my article titles being the exact same. I might have better luck if I can change up the titles and monetize on the surfers who search for slightly different variations to the topic. Let’s say for instance that one of the titles is, “Hilton’s Chiwawa Caught Snorting Coke In Background of Sex Video.” Alright so when I import my titles I can do a simple replacement algorithm to swap any instances of “Hilton” without the Paris for “Paris Hilton.” Or “Congressman Paul” for “Congressman Ron Paul.” If I wanted to capitalize on these possible search variations on a mass scale I could easily incorporate a thesaurus and swap out nouns for instance. Rock becomes Stone…etc. etc. IMDB also has a huge database of celebrity names I could possibly use for the example above. It’s all pretty endless and can get quite in depth, but I know if I do it right it’ll pay off big time. I may even get lucky and hit pay dirt with a big story coming out where everyone searches for something similar but not quite the same as the original headlines.
And that is how you be a gray hat
Search Engine Marketing Tips Must be at your Fingertips to Enhance your Business Prospects
Tips are the one means that can be used as ready reckoner for any implementing anything. In fact, tips are made in such a way that they always remain in your fingertips when you have to consult on anything related to a particular aspect. So be search engine marketing tips, internet marketing, email marketing or any other aspect of online business, you must have all the tips handy to deal with any situation. There are certain elements of your business that may need your instant attention and this is where search engine marketing tips can be of immense help to you and your business.
You can get Search Engine Marketing Tips everywhere. However, what is important is not getting those tips; rather it is implementing the tips in proper ways to do good business. The internet is a huge storehouse for information of all types. All you need to do is type the relevant keywords and you will be flooded with lots of information. Search engine marketing tips are no exception to this and you can find this very easily on the web. There are certain common search engine marketing tips that you can implement to make a success story of your online business.
Search engine marketing tips suggest that you must undertake strategies to increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a day. An increase in the number of visitors to your site automatically increases your chances of attracting prospective customers who will buy your products and do business with you. There are several ways through which you can attract traffic to your site and just make sure that you implement those methods that guarantee the stampede of traffic to your site. After all, this is your business and you must put your best efforts to make this very successful.
Another search engine marketing tips suggest that you must make your site visible at all places on the web. The simple reason for this is that if you do not use publicity methods, how do you expect people to know about you and also about the business you are involved in. So find out what all things you can do to make your site popular on the web, and attract customers to buy goods and services from your business. Working on the design and content of your site is a good way of going about doing it.
The site must contain contents that is relevant, precise, information and optimized. Using optimized content means that you must make use of the relevant keywords at the proper places within the content. This is because search engines easily recognize sites that make use of optimized content. Another way of attracting search engine attention is through making use of the latest coding to design your site. Search engine marketing tips are meant to give you all the inputs that you will need for marketing your online business site on the web.
Steve Waganer
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/search-engine-marketing-tips-must-be-at-your-fingertips-to-enhance-your-business-prospects-85922.html
