Someone suggested one time that I should be more careful when I post to blogs, forums and when I write articles. This person suggested that I am painting a great big bulls-eye in the middle of my forehead, when I mention Matt Cutts’ name in my articles. He also insisted that Matt Cutts is hunting for people like me and will take me out… out of Google anyway.
If you don’t know Matt Cutts, he is a quality engineer at Google, who specialized in targeting spam websites and getting them out of the Google index by algorithm. Matt has a blog on his website where he shares tips and tricks for getting better rankings in Google. Interestingly, he often dissects websites who claimed they are being unfairly ignored by Google. When Matt does the dissection, it is very informative. People do some of the stupidest things on their websites and cry when they get the short end of the Google stick.
I have never felt a desire to complain, because I consistently get lots of Google Love (lots of Link Popularity and hundreds of Top Google Rankings).
Now, ole’ boy had suggested that the reason I should fear Matt was because he thought my flavor of SEO work was bad and would be condemned by Matt, and Ole’ Boys’ flavor of SEO was so much better than mine. Ole’ boy insisted that Matt would kill my website, because by Ole’ Boys’ assertion, I was one of the bad guys.
One of those things that I find to be so interesting about people like Ole’ Boy is that if they are such great SEO people, how come they have time to make thousands of posts to many different online forums? I try to participate in forums too, but my post numbers are still in the dozens or lower hundreds. I am simply too busy doing paid work to make thousands of forum posts, but Ole’ Boy who claims to be smarter than I and a better SEO than I, has time enough to spend almost all day every day in forums being incessantly irritating to anyone who dares enter his little world.
Now personally, I don’t believe I have anything to fear of Mr. Cutts (known in some forums as Google Guy). I think he is a good guy, looking out for you and I and everyone nice.
I am not presumptuous enough to suggest that I believe Matt Cutts ever reads anything that I write, but to be honest, I would not be surprised if he has read my stuff once or twice.
I do get quite a bit of ink in the SEO community with the articles that I write about Search Engine Optimization. I am certainly not one of the biggest names in SEO, but I do get quite a bit of publication with my SEO articles.
Now the reason I do not fear Matt Cutts is because I believe I do my SEO in ways that Google appreciates. I don’t believe I am a spammer, and my hundreds of Top Google Rankings would seem to indicate that Google doesn’t see me as a spammer either.
Could Ole’ Boy be wrong??? You betcha. At the very least, he is wrong about me and my SEO methods.
The only thing I think Ole’ Boy has right is that he needs to spend his energy knocking me down, because that is going to be the only way he could ever look good in comparison to me. {thumb on nose and tongue sticking out at Ole’ Boy, and making that “pfffft” sound.}
Yes. I should not fear Matt Cutts and neither should you. In fact, when Matt Cutts speaks, you should listen. And that is the reason for this post.
Cutts puts a lot of Google information on his blog, but more importantly, he creates a lot of videos to be placed online and when he speaks at conferences, people record his message for play on the Internet. I came across a video by Matt Cutts that I wanted to share with you. It is an old video, but it is as important today as it was in May of 2007 when it was initially recorded. The subject of this video is “Whitehat SEO Tips For Bloggers“. Click this link to watch the video.
This is a lengthy video, but it is worth watching from the beginning to the end. And when you are done, you owe it to yourself to look up Matt Cutts Videos and spend an afternoon consuming his words of wisdom.
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My name is Bill Platt. I am the owner of the following websites: The Phantom Writers, Article Marketing Meets SEO Blog, Links And Traffic, Karma SEO, and others. I also contribute to the Article Content Provider Blog.
Tags: google, matt cutts, search engine, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engines, search marketing, seo, seo videos, whitehat seo
Whitehat SEO is generally thought to be the better kind of SEO. We agree in principle. The principle we agree with is that any Search Engine Optimization work that you do, should be done with an eye to protecting your website from search engine company backlash at some future point. (See Google’s Webmaster Guidelines)
If something feels like it would be a bad idea in the future, then we recommend that you should avoid doing such things.
Any technique used that creates short-term gains may be justifiable for most webmasters, but if that technique gets your website banned from Google, two years from now, recovery will be nearly impossible. Most websites that get banned by Google will never get unbanned.
The SEO game we all play as individual webmasters has some serious penalties behind it, if we screw up.
If we know that hidden text is something that draws Google’s ire, then why would we even consider hidden text on any of our web pages? Back in 1998, when I was just getting involved in the challenges of getting good rankings in search engines, even I had been guilty of keyword stuffing in image tags and meta tags. Fortunately, I saw the light and stopped that practice well before Google began to penalize sites for that kind of conduct.
I own nearly 20 websites that are live and operational. None of my websites are banned and they never have been banned by Google or any other search engine. I have top ten listings in Google for most of my websites, and I intend to keep my top rankings in as many of my websites as I can muster. In fact, none of my websites are dropping in the Google Sphere, but all are finding better rankings as we move forward.
One of my websites is a free dating site, and if you are not aware, this is a very competitive market. So far, I have moved about ten keywords into page one rankings at Google. For many of those keywords, my website sits at #2, outranked only by Penthouse’s dating website! Although it is still a small dating website, it sees a lot of traffic from the search engines, primarily Google, and the website’s member base is growing at a fairly nice clip.
We drive great search engine rankings using a three-prong approach:
- Build web pages with a focus on making sure our web pages are “topic-oriented” rather than “keyword-oriented”. By focusing on a range of similar keywords, rather than focusing on a single or a few keywords, we believe the search engines see our pages as more honest and more on-topic.
- We build inbound links to our web pages (not just the home page, but a variety of pages within a website), using article marketing, social bookmarks, and forum posts.
- We add value to the pages that link to us, by linking to them, using article marketing, social bookmarks, and forum posts. Frequently, we build backwards two or three levels to ensure that the pages pointing at our web pages have real Link Popularity value with the search engines.
Everything we do is based on creating value for our web pages in the eyes of the search engines and the humans visiting our web pages. We provide value content on our web pages. We provide value content on the pages that link to us. And we provide value to the web pages that point to us.
In the end, this is a long-term strategy that employs strictly Whitehat SEO principles.
We did not just think of this search ranking strategy yesterday. We have used this philosophy going back several years, but we did not put a definition to it until late 2006. We registered this website (KarmaSEO.com) in 2007, so that we could help people learn the techniques we have used to be successful in the search engine ranking game.
Maybe I should not call it a “game”, because for you and I, this can be a extremely serious business marketing strategy. But in a lot of ways, this is like a football game, where we get to play against some of the best footballers in the country, to see how good we really are as a Search Engine Optimization company.
Tags: karma seo, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, search rankings, seo, white hat seo, whitehat seo
Many webmasters / online marketers make a common mistake when they begin doing business online. Often times, people do the processes necessary for their success - backwards. Rather than starting at the beginning and working forwards, they start at the end and work backwards. As a result, they waste more money and resources, often breaking the back of their business, well before they start to see any real success in their business.
In my years of helping online marketers promote their businesses, I have seen business models that seemed to have all of the elements necessary to ensure great success. And unfortunately, I have seen many of these perfect business models fail miserably, because their owners failed to honor their business with a realistic promotional plan.
Putting The Cart Before The Horse
When people begin to promote their new business, this is where most people begin to err.
Just recently, I spoke with an individual who started a business in a pretty competitive field. I don’t view heavy competition as being a bad thing. In fact, I find that there are often enough customers in any niche to support the additional competitors, especially when a new competitor answers a need not served by the current players.
The individual to whom I refer made his mistake by focusing 95% of his advertising budget on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), before he even knew what keywords would help him to be profitable in his business! He has so far blown $9,500 of his $10,000 to optimize his website for the search engines, and he still does not know what keywords will drive traffic to his website, leading to sales conversions for his website.
His “backwards” approach has left him with only $500 in his budget, with little hope for his future. He now emails me 4-5 times a week, always in a state of utter panic for the prospect of his future. All I can tell him is to be patient, since he has to learn how to “bootstrap” his way to success, now that he has no budget left to build strong and fast.
Test Your Copy First
Search Engine Optimization should “never” be a business’ first step in the promotion process. Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement. Look at it this way. What good is search optimization if you have optimized for the wrong keywords?
The first step in the promotion of any business should be focused on attracting potential customers to one’s website.
The marketer needs to put human eyeballs on the website, so that they can test and tweak their sales copy for greater sales conversion.
Until a website has seen several hundred visitors, the sales copy should not be changed or tweaked. Sales copy should always be tested against a large statistical group of visitors, in order to ensure that the copy is given a fair and realistic test.
If the online marketer has a bit more money to start the process, often the best spent money will be to hire a professional copywriter to write the sales copy for the website. Professional copywriters have a skill, and that skill is to create the words that will drive people to buy what you are selling.
Test Traffic Is Important To The Process
Most Internet Marketing newbies are still focused on getting those first few hundred visitors to their websites.
At this point, there are systems like Link Referral and Traffic Swarm that can help the new business owner bring in a bit of traffic to their website. In a test with Link Referral, I am seeing 250 visitors per month. The neat thing about systems like these is that other members will review your website and offer good advice on how to improve your website, if necessary. Membership is free for both systems, with an option for paid upgrades.
The Law Of Attraction
While the traffic exchange systems mentioned above can send some traffic to your website, you are not going to get rich participating in those systems.
Once you have positioned your website to convert visitors to buyers, it is time to start attracting a larger number of visitors (potential customers) to your website.
There are a number of ways to do this, but two of the most effective are: Article Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
Article Marketing
Mark Silver recently produced an exceptional home study course about writing articles that will help you be much more successful in your article marketing activities.
Just last week, a friend of mine told me that he has not promoted his website in over a year, yet he noticed that his website has a steady stream of traffic to it, from the three-dozen articles that he wrote and distributed in 2006 and 2007. He said that his ebook continues to produce new sales each and every month, and the only thing he can really attribute those continuing sales to is the articles that are available on the Internet that are promoting his website and ebook.
Article marketing, in and of itself, is a promotional tool that will allow a marketer to bring regular visitors to his or her website, and if the website does its job well, then the website will be able to convert those visitors to buyers. This is important, because all businesses need money coming into a website early, to ensure that the business can survive financially, until the long-term “recipe for profit” can be found and duplicated reliably.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a process where you bid on keywords in the major search engines, through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc. You tell the search engine companies what words you desire to bid on and how much you are willing to pay for a visitor, and the highest bidders for that keyword phrase will be shown above and to the right of the free results in the search engine results pages.
Keyword research, utilizing systems like Word Tracker, or my favorite, NicheBot will enable you to brainstorm keywords and get a good idea of which keywords might be more profitable for your business.
By utilizing Google Analytics or Yahoo’s Panama Full Analytics (traffic analysis), an online marketer can follow a visitor from the search engine to the marketer’s sales page. Where this is important is it enables an online marketer to uncover the essential business knowledge of which “keywords” will bring people into a website and help convert those visitors into customers.
Essential SEO Knowledge
What one must keep in mind is that some keywords will deliver visitors who will never buy, while other keywords will deliver visitors who are extremely likely to buy. This one paragraph holds within it the secret to a successful SEO strategy. This is the essential knowledge that a marketer should have, before engaging in any Search Engine Optimization campaign.
Like I said previously in this article, “Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement.”
If you are going to spend a lot of money to optimize your website for the search engines, doesn’t it make much more sense to target the keywords that will actually help you to earn back your investment?
The Backwards Thinking
The backwards thinking I referred to in the beginning of this article was the idea that many people put SEO in front of their keyword research, keyword tracking and keyword conversion statistics.
An industry I like to pick on is the travel industry. In order to rank well for the solitary keyword “travel” in the search engines will require an astronomical SEO budget. But most people seeking travel information are looking for something just a bit more specific, like: Disney vacations, Hawaii vacations, and European travel.
So long as a keyword has been proven to convert visitors and sales, then it makes sense to optimize for that keyword. But you will never truly know which keywords will convert visitors and sales, until you have invested some of your budget into pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.
Once the necessary “keyword” knowledge is in hand, then the marketer can make an investment into search engine optimization for those keywords that can actually make them money, and with good SEO deployment, the marketer can find that they can actually capture a lot of the search engine traffic for specific keywords through the search engines’ free listings.
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Bill Platt has offered article marketing services on the Internet since 2001 at http://www.thePhantomWriters.com - As an extension of his article marketing service, he has developed a process he refers to as Karma SEO. After two years of testing his Karma SEO philosophy, Bill has reached an understanding of how he can finally offer Pay-For-Performance SEO Services. Learn more at: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com/seo-services/search-marketing.html
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Consider also his blogs: Marketing Tips blog, Article Marketing blog, and another he contributes to on occasion.
Tags: advertising, Article Marketing, online business, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo