Good SEO is priceless - in the right context.

I have been having a discussion with a fellow SEO’er over the last few days about how he should price work for a prospective client.

I personally prefer to work within a clearly defined set of goals, that are measurable and can provide palpable results.  He was suggesting that his work for this client should be done based against earnings that the client would generate from his work.

I totally disagreed with him, for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it is clear that many industries have high potential profits, for example, real estate (as was the actual case in point) - I know people whom have earned literally tens or hundreds of millions of dollars through good SEM (not strictly SEO), but the problem that you will encounter if you are pricing your job based on results is that there are far too many outside factors that are beyond our control as simple search engine optimizers.

Lets take an example:  lets imagine SEO guy one provides a real estate office with the worlds best SEO, now their website is getting huge traffic, highly targeted towards buying properties on the Costa Del Sol,  but the website is poorly designed - and thats the webdesigners fault, not the SEO professionals responsibility.  Lets imagine then that the company has the worlds best converting website, and each hit results in 0.5 calls to the Realtor, well if their sales staff aren’t up to scratch then the traffic is again wasted.  Even if the sales staff could close like no others, they might have no inventory to actually sell - as I am illustrating, pricing SEO work in the conventional world against sales results just isn’t an option as there are far too many obstacles between the surfer clicking and making a sale that are outside the remit of a Search Engine Marketer.

That is why my advice to him, and to any other SEO professional is not to get lured in by the promise of big bucks and bright lights (ahhh, those bright lights are sooo pretty though )  - in the long run you are always better off clearly defining goals, and then delivering the results that you negotiate pre-contract.  Examples that I use would be:

1) an increase in measurable inbound links from context sensitive sites (measured using yahoo LD)
2) an increase in total traffic  yielded by certain PRE DEFINED keyword combo’s with a specified Google address (ie. google.com or google.co.uk)
3) an improvement in SERPs for certain keywords on specific google sites
4) an overall increase in traffic from all search engines, based on actual statistics for the months leading up to the campaign, above any organic growth.

Essentially, the problem is that Search Engine Optimisation as a product is quite hard to define, and unless you have it clearly mapped out in advance what your tasks are you might end up getting blamed for not providing increased sales, when you have nothing to do with the front of shop sales structure - or in other words - it always makes sense to have your customer understand what it is that you can provide, and charge accordingly.

Anyway, enough of my musings, off to have a beer!

MM

Make Money with Facebook, part II.

Hi Readers!

This is the second time now that I will harp on about facebook applications and how they can be used to make money.  In the first installment I looked at how to build a facebook app up and sell it on,  which is done quite easily by building a PPC campaign for your app, sitting back and then selling up when you get to 10,000 or so users for a nice healthy profit. (Anybody that DOESNT know where to get a facebook app,  try out Turnkey Facebook Apps)

Well, its not the only way to monetise a facebook app,  the other easy money route to cashing in on your app is by selling the advertising space on the application itself.  The only problem is that the CTR for adsense is about the lowest I have ever seen anywhere, so what to do?  Well the best bet is to sell your clicks privately, advantages: you get 100% of the profit, disadvantages: its complicated to control and keep tabs on your earnings, as everything has to be done by hand (and you need coding knowledge to actually do the banner rotation/tracking software). Another thing you could do is to sell your advertising space to a facebook specific advertising company.

I am aware that Turnkey Facebook Apps will be incorporating such a feature in the next few weeks into all apps that they sell, so it might be a good idea to buy one off them and then benefit from the advertising platform as well.  I have also heard that each app sale from now on will get $25 in clicks when they launch their platform, so you can even put that against the cost of your app and save money as well.

A decent app with 100,000+ users can earn as much as $4,000 per day, so the money could be rolling in sooner than you think!

Anyway, off again for my calimocho

SEO in 2008 - What we should concentrate on now.

Following on from a few other blog posts of mine this year already,  it seems that the focus for SEO is moving away from that old mainstay of the SEO’er, buying links.

What does this mean in practice?  Well, in my opinion its a great thing as lets face it, in the last two years being an SEO has almost become as ubiquitous as being a webdesigner, and nearly the same as saying you are an IT professional.. Heck every other person I meet these days is an SEO!!  The changes that seem to have been brought about by this latest TBPR update signify the beginning of the end of the wild west period of search engine optimisation, and now it is starting to seem that your onsite content, inc0ming links and link weight as a combination are now much more important that just the incoming links that have been ruling the market for the last few years.

What does this to mean to me?  Well, not much really, as I have never taken on an SEO job before for a site that doesnt have genuine relevant content - but it will mean that many of the link building based SEO’s will either go out of business totally in the next 6 months or have to learn a whole new skillset.  Those of us that have been in the market for 10 years however will remember what SEO was before google placed so much importance on off site optimisation and we simply have to revert in part back to the old days of optimising.

So, to get back to this posts title: What should we concentrate on now….

1) On site Content
2) Organic link growth onto RELEVANT sites, ie. through targeted linkbait
3) Site Updates, increasing RELEVANT page yield per site.
4) W3 compliance (always important)
5) Incoming links from RELEVANT sites.

You have probably noticed a pattern with that list… Relevancy!

Basically I think that MFA sites have been dealt a huge blow in the latest update and if you want to keep SERPs over the next few months I think the only way to fully consolidate your position is to add content, content and more content.  When thats done, add some more content for good luck (or should that be “goo-gle luck”!)

Anyway,  off for my calimocho people,

MM

Costa Del Sol SEO

As is normally the case around this time of year, most people should be taking stock of that this year will have to offer.  This is perhaps more important this year on the Costa Del Sol and specifically Marbella than it has been any year since 1989/1990 and most people dont remember that far back, or werent living on the coast back then.

Either way its fairly immaterial as SEO didnt exist back in 1989, but lets study why search engine optimisation on the Costa Del Sol will be important this year.

Well, the coast in my opinion is headed for tough times.  The last 10 years particularly the local micro-economy has been boosted by the strong pound, great economy in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, and relatively weaker local pricing on everything from Jamon to Hotels.  Marbella and to a slightly lesser extent the rest of the coast has enjoyed a huge boom, with property prices going from incredibly cheap to fabulously expensive, on a world scale.

Why will SEO be important on the Costa Del Sol in 2008?  Well, lets look at the last recession in the UK/Northern Europe.  Well when this hit the places that got it worst overall in Europe were conversely the CostaDelSol and Mallorca - as all our money and investment comes from outside the area.  We have no industry other than real estate and tourism, there are probably 100,000 empty two bed apartments on the coast right now, and as soon as a recession hits in the UK whats the first thing that goes?  Not the family home, but the family HOLIDAY home.

Estate agents throughout the coast will go from making €20,000 per sale to €200 per sale, and the market will become so much more competitive that ANY advantage one agency can make over the other will be greatly magnified.

Why is this important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Malaga? Well, its time to start battening down the hatches and developing those property SEO websites now people!

Anyway,  off for my calimocho,

MM

Has Google finally killed off linksales??

Hey folks,

well the dust is starting to settle after this weeks Q1 2008 TBPR update, (see my previous blog entry) and I am starting to wonder whether google has finally dealt a fatal blow to the online link sales industry.

A Little history lesson, back in the old days of SEO, the onsite content, keywords, META tags and so on were all you had to worry about.  That meant that you could get any site of any age to the number one position, by making sure you had the correct ratio of words to keywords.  This is back in the day when it was DEC’s Altavista that ruled the search engine competition, and Lycos was second and Yahoo were just starting up (this is a long time ago by internet standards!).

When google appeared on the scene, they made it so that the on site SEO was only 20% of the equation, and the off site SEO was about 70%, and this entailed having lots of links back to your site.  Google counted each link as a “vote” for your website.  This created a massive industry of people selling links on their websites to other webmasters to promote their own websites search engine ranking positions, as opposed to buying traffic by way of link advertising.

Google has long made it clear that they disaprove of this practice and have started looking at ways to crack down on this practice, and it would appear that on this latest update to the toolbar pagerank ratings, that they might just have done that. What remains to be seen over then next few weeks and months is whether the current pagerank levels are just an interim update, or if this is it, and we have an all new pagerank algorithm.

If that is the case then all SEO’s the world over will have a lot of learning to redo!

Anyway, off for my coffee!

MM

Google Says “Jump”… are you still asking how high?

So, its time for our obligatory google dance again.  The

latest update to the TBPR ranks has been going on for the last few days, and while most sites seem to have completed their move one wonders if it will be another “double whammy” update like we had in November. (for the short of memory folks there were two updates in a week, the first being affectionately known as the google slap…..)

Like most other professional webmasters I followed it with some interest, after all it does govern how much links will be worth/are going to cost for the next 3 months, so even if you place no credence in the toolbar PR then it still affects you, directly or indirectly as links are the only true currency of the webmaster these days.

What happened to my sites?  Well, surprisingly little.

Sites that have stagnated have remained PR3/PR4, sites that have gained links (and in one case from 3,000 to 40,000 links) have not changed.  Sites that have lost links have also not changed.

Infact, out of 130+ active sites on my books at the moment, the only changes I saw were a handful of PRn/a changing to PR Zero.  All that linkbuilding, seo work, and assorted efforts, and not a single change to my sites?  There is something whiffy afoot.

It has been said for some time now that google are working on ways of removing themselves from this link economy, which to be fair they created by valuing off site seo practices at about 95% of a websites overall strength.  So whats happening? Well, a lot of playing about needs to be done to get a true picture as to what is going on but a fair guess would be that the algorithm’s that google use to calculate what constitutes a link has changed significantly. Also one wonders whether they have started weighting some links higher than others based on age, total page yield per site/IP, total content per site, and so on.  Some of my bigger sites with tens of thousands of pages indexed have noticeably increased in the SERPs over the last week, whereas some very noticeable smaller sites have slipped.  Perhaps its a sign of things to come, perhaps on the other hand we are just going to get another index update later in the week.  Hopefully it will be another big fat google slap that will upset all the other link buying webmasters!!

Anyway, Im off to enjoy my nice cool calimocho,

MM

SEO is nothing without substance

I have been mulling over something over the last few days. I have been contracted to do some SEO work which was nicely paid, but I turned it down.

I didnt turn it down because it was too much of a challenge, or because the client demanded too much, I have managed to do more for most of my customers in the past and the competition in the niche wasnt too high, so why did I turn it down?

The customers product simply had no substance to it. I in many ways come from the old school of marketing. Start with a good product, demonstrate that there is a market for said product, identify the market correctly that you wish to target, THEN set about spreading the word to the potential clients. If the product has no substance it simply wont achieve sales that would render any SEO work useless. Now I could have just taken the money and produced the results, so why didnt I?

Well, that particular client might do a five figure sum on this product, but I dont want to be part of this failure story. If the client heeds my advice and redesigns the core of the product it could do well, and then I would be interested in working with it, but not as it stands. No SEO or SEM (or any other client looking for marketing advice) is going to want to lose money in the long run. If I am part of this current debacle, I bet that customer would not be a repeat user of my services. If he chooses to go ahead with another SEO’er and my predictions turn out to be true, w ell in 6 months, or in two years, that customer might come back to me with a better idea. And that one I will be interested in working on!

Its all down to an ethical approach to marketing I guess. If you have serious doubts as to whether a product will ever turn a profit, is it correct to work on the marketing of it? In my opinion no it is not. Perhaps 5 years ago when I had to look for work it would have been a different story, but for now, those projects are simply not worth the phone call in 3 months when the customer says that funds have dried up and he is broke/gone out of business.

SEO is like any other marketing exercise, if its not a good idea or has no substance, dont bother. Its up to you as an expert in marketing to identify products that just wont work, and do yourself a favour, DONT work on them!

Anyway, its off for my calimocho again,

MM

How to make money with facebook!

Well, its a new year, happy 2008 everybody!I have been slack on the old blogging for the last week, but I blame it on an overindulgence of mince pies, mulled wine and assorted cold turkey sandwiches.

Now that the whole holiday season is regrettably past us, it would be time to focus on the year ahead and try and replicate the successes of last year, and improve upon them. The first thing that I am looking at this year, is extending my facebook businesses further.

So far I have created/launched/sold 7 apps, and so far I have made around $5,000 in the last three months with facebook - not through selling advertising, but by selling the apps themselves.

Whats the secret? Well, there isnt one really, its just you need to realign your expectations and ambitions when you move from traditional web based marketing to facebook marketing. Fb isnt a platform where you should be happy with 500 u/v per day, you should be totally distraught if you have that level of users. With the way the facebook platform is underdeveloped as far as available apps is concerned, you should be concentrating on having 20,000 per day or higher - it really isnt that hard!

Not everyone can program a facebook app though, it is a new and therefore relatively uncommon skill set, that is why I am writing this blog post, because I have a way round it! Here is the 3 step plan to marketing success with facebook:

1) Buy a turnkey facebook app from Turnkey Facebook Apps
Cost: $29.95 to $59.95

2) Launch the app and buy installs, these can be bought for as little as $0.05 per person. I suggest investing a few hundred dollars in this bit:
Cost $200 to $300

3) Wait a week for the viral marketing to run its course, by now you should have no less than 20,000 users installed, and your app is worth around $1,500 to $2,000.

Thats a NET PROFIT of NEARLY $1500 PER WEEK, PER APPLICATION.

It really is that simple, but what are the drawbacks?

Well, at the moment it is possible, but this system will no doubt only work for a few months, maybe 3 maybe 4 but this new goldrush will undoubtadly close up or be swamped by apps, so for the time being get in, and get in big!

Dont say I never told you!

MM