Some time ago I had a “debate” with a backlinker, who was offering backlink packages via a popular web marketing forum – I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a good idea to start off backlinking too quickly for a brand new site, or fairly new website, with thousands of backlinks within a short period of time. It just doesn’t look organic to Google for this to happen, it looks off – especially if most of the backlinks are from low quality, low pagerank sites, and all with the same anchor text (for the uninitiated: anchor text means link text, instead of “click here”, the hyper link is a search term, so if you want to rank for “dentist new york city” then the link text, aka anchor text, would be  ”dentist new york city”).

So I decided to test it, I selected three of my test websites, 2 of which were already starting to get towards page one, and guess what – SLAP, down into the murky depths they went!! This was almost a year ago, and they’re still bogged down – I haven’t done anything to rescue them, but it shows that too much too soon in terms of backlinking, really can kick a website down the Google rankings.

The backlinker never replied when I let him know that it appeared I was right, funny that!

The moral of the story, is ORGANIC. Do things which look natural – I’m not saying don’t hire someone to do backlinking for a new site, but don’t go mad in terms of volume. In my opinion, if you want to invest in some backlinking with a new site, the best bet is to aim for decent authority sites, higher quality lower quantity. Paid backlinking is fine too, as long as it’s not obvious paid backlinking.

OK I’d better qualify what I’ve just said, as I have been annoying people for ages talking about how paid backlinking isn’t a good thing…

A few years ago Google messed about with things & found a way to figure out if linkjuice was being sold, i.e. if a website appeared to be giving a link which passed linkjuice (the nofollow attribute not being applied to the link) only because they were being paid to do so, and with little thoughts to the quality of the site – then this site would be blocked from being able to pass linkjuice.

This saw lots of sites that had got rankings through paid backlinks, dropping like flies! There was a big controversy, lots of very annoyed people.

So it’s not that paid backlinks are banned, or that you’ll get a google slap from buying a backlink – it’s that Google block sites from passing linkjuice (or un-trust them all together) if they’re selling links without any real quality control.

There are some directories which Google trust to sell backlinks while keeping a close eye on quality – but there are many more that they don’t, because lets face it – when you’re selling backlinks, money talks.

So you can do some research and invest in backlinks in trusted directories etc., but I think one of the best bets is to target great authority websites which match your niche perfectly, which get lots of traffic – and which don’t appear to sell backlinks – and phone them, build up some rapport with them, and ask if you can purchase an ad with them – and ask them if they’ll make sure that your desired anchor text is used in the ad, and that the nofollow attribute (or any other way of achieving the same thing) isn’t used, so that it’s good for your SEO too. Be open about it, let them know that you hope to see a return by direct traffic from their site, and also some SEO benefit. Better still if you can come to some joint venture agreement which means you don’t have to pay for it – but chances are if they have a great authority website, they’ll want some money from you.

Hope this helps

Alison has just asked me an interesting question which other driving schools / driving instructors may learn from too:

Dear Kevin,

Thanks for the great tips emails, very useful! I wonder if you can help me with this, we run a driving school, we hired an SEO company and they have been working on keywords such as  ”driving lessons, cheap driving lessons, driving instructor” and so on, we’re getting no traffic, are they doing something wrong??

Thank you and kind Regards

Alison R

Hi Alison,

Very simple and straight forward answer for you, I’m not sure where you’re based – but let’s say you’re if you’re a driving school in Ashford Kent, UK – Then what good is traffic from potential students in Manchester, Cornwall, Scotland – etc? So by going for a national term like this, you’re completely wasting your seo spend. Use the free google adwords keyword tool (search google for google adwords keyword tool external) to research locally specific terms, again using Ashford as en example you might type in “driving instructor Ashford” , “driving School Ashford” and search terms relating to other local area’s in which you are accessible enough to in order to make it worthwhile getting visits from people in these areas. Then have a look at the Google stats in terms of search volume and rough competition. I recommend ticking the “exact match” box so you’re shown the search volume for this exact search term – and make sure you’re looking at the “local” column, so it’s traffic from within the UK (or from whichever country you’re in if you’re reading this from the US, Australia etc).

The competitiveness indicator gives you an idea of how competitive the term is – a rough guide is that if it’s says low competition – brilliant, medium – hmm probably ok, high – then proceed with caution. This advice is meant for those small – medium businesses who have a relatively small budget & want to see a return in the near future. If you have deep pockets, and are happy for it to take many months or even years for you to see a return, then fine go for competitive terms as long as you’re sure it’s going to be worth it if / when you do end up on page one for a competitive search term.

Don’t go completely from the competition stats from Google though, this is just an indicator – what I’d recommend is that you install the free SEO Quake add-on for firefox or Chrome (I’m having trouble with mine in firefox at the moment so I’m using Chrome with SEOquake instead when I do my competitor research) , do a google search for the search terms, and see what the competition is like on page one. Page one is where you need to be, if you have a fairly new website, with very little in the way of indexed pages & backlinks, and you can see that all on page one are  PR4 & higher (google pagerank, which gives a rough idea of how strong the site is in Google’s eyes based on the incoming hyperlinks to the site from other websites) , and most have long domain age, and hundreds or even thousands of indexed pages – then trying to compete for page one for such a search term, with a new site, would be like someone who’d never entered a race, sticking on a pair of trainers & getting on the starting blocks at the Olympics and competing with athletes - madness! I’m not saying you can never get to the point that you can compete, everyone starts somewhere, but you would be very well advised to look for search terms which are accessible to you, many businesses go for terms which are way out of their league in terms of where there website is for domain age, backlinks etc., and where the competition is.

If you’re a small business such as a driving instructor or driving school, you need to see a return on your investment (whether you’re investing time or money, or both) now, not in a year or two – and anyway, if you’re a business offering a service locally, if you go for national keyword you’ll probably never see a return, as the conversion rate from visit to new client will so tiny when it comes to national terms – mainly due to the fact that those searching for national terms such as “driving schools” are not buying customers – i.e they’re probably researchers, people looking for companies to telepest (oh sorry I think it’s known as telesales…), and so on – if you’re looking for a driving tutor, you would more than likely search for one in your area, rather than having to sift through tonnes trying to find one in your area.

Thanks for the question Alison, and I hope you find this helpful

Kev

If you’ve read my other reviews of SEO tools / website marketing software in the past, such as my review on Web CEO and SEO Elite, you’ll know that my  SEO software reviews are honest, and that unlike many people who “review” such products, I have actually used them.

I don’t swear by tools. I see them as exactly that – tools, to be used when required, but I don’t tend to use them habitually, the only tools I use constantly are free firefox plugin’s which enhance our manual capabilities & speed up the process.

But, there’s a “little” SEO tool I’ve come across recently – that I think I may be in danger of becoming addicted to!  SEO Andy Black’s “All in One SEO Toolbox”

Andy Black runs through the feature of SEO Toolbox.

I refer to this as “little” – it’s not by any means “little” in terms of effectiveness or power – but in terms of the size of the overall application – AND the cost, this is teeny – but like David’s slingshot, it packs a real punch! (Watch out Goliath! )

Many of the things that can be done with tools like webCEO, take away a lot of the freedom & flexibility of doing it manually – it can be like trying to play guitar with gloves on. So, usually I’ll dip into tools like this just to use certain parts of the tool which saves a lot of time & effort.

With All in One SEO Toolbox though, I’m finding that everything that the software does – is a real time saver! It’s rare that I would say this about an ap.

I’m not going to go into detail about the features of the tool – no point because the video above goes through it, but the first thing that will hit you when you watch that, is just how simple it is. Many applications of this nature are complex, and packed full of features you just don’t need – this isn’t, you won’t even need to read the instructions, it’s really self explanatory.

One of the most important elements of SEO right now, in my opinion, is finding great Niches so you can “shoot the planes on the ground” – keyword research within these niches, and registering keyword rich domain names. This tool does all of the above! Perfect!!

I’ll just go into what I’ve just said, in a bit more detail to make sure I don’t confuse anyone – I’ll write a full post about this shortly, I’ve been meaning too for a while now.

What I’m talking about is the fastest way to get a return. This, for most small businesses, is what is most important at the moment (which is why I’m offering my new one off cost SEO service), OK it has always been important to get a return, but in previous years it’s not been so important to get a return as quickly as it is now. A couple of years ago, it may have been OK to start an SEO campaign & wait 3-6 months or more for any results at all – for most of us now, we don’t have the buffer to allow that, and we need a quick return from any marketing we do.

Going after the most competitive & high volume terms in your Niche, isn’t usually about fast returns – it’s about gaining that elusive page one ranking for a term which could make a major impact on your business. often this can take months, even years in some cases, depending on the competition.

So the most appropriate thing to do, if you need at least some return within days / weeks – not months/years – is to do more in depth keyword research to find terms which you have the ability to rank for within the near future, but which also have the ability to bring targeted traffic.

The fastest route to page one rankings, for lesser competitive search terms, is keyword domains.

So, in an ideal world, you would do your keyword research, find that the search term in your Niche, for example “Dinglehoppers in Somerset” (well, better than “widgets” is low on competition – but OK for traffic.

Note I say “OK for traffic” – it’s very unlikely you’ll find a low competition term which has mega traffic, not impossible but it’s very rare.

You’d register the domain “DinglehoppersinSomerset.com” (or .co.uk, or whatever) and create a website which is focused around that main term. Doesn’t have to be only that one term, for example the websites I’m doing this with generally rank page 1 for 20-30 search terms of this nature or more.

This doesn’t have to be a “Landing Page” type website, you can create your main website on a keyword rich domain.

Lets use a really good example – B&Q. If you’re in the UK then obviously you’re aware that Britain’s biggest DIY store is B&Q – and there domain, diy.com.  In fact, B&Q were a pioneer in keyword domains, they were probably one of the first big retailers to do this.

Obviously  the website will contain your branding – we’re not talking about just plastering the website with the search term. Unless of course you were creating a niche directory with your business in the prominent spot (This can be a very effective & cheap way to do this – email me for more info), in which case we’d go about it in a slightly different manner.

So – this is the fastest way to gain fast results. If you’re a medium to enterprise level business with plenty of resources, then this probably isn’t the route forward for you – but if you’re a new business, home based business, start up SME, or you run a small business  & you need to increase sales fast or you won’t be running a small business for long… then this would be an appropriate method to use.

And – for using this method – Andy Black SEO  All in One SEO Toolbox is absolutely spot on.

Just watch the video above, you’ll see what I mean.

And the price – it’s cheap!! It’s nearly 10 times less than I paid for WebCEO, and I probably use it ten times more!!

So there you go – by shirt review of the new SEO software ALL in one SEO toolbox.

Something else – I’m pleasantly surprised by Andy Black’s sales copy – for once, it’s sales copy where hype is kept to a minimum, and he simply says what it does.

You’ll have seen in my review of SEO elite that I was critical of the over the top sales copy which seemed to suggest that the software would turn everything you touch into gold , and recently I’ve been seeing more & more hype on sales pages, some of it is really off putting & often down right fanciful. The website for All in One SEO toolbox is really balanced, it tells you what it does, gives video’s & screenshots – and then tells you the price & gives you the link if you’d like to order it – Perfect!!

Thanks

Kev

Hands up if you get phone calls from SEO marketing companies……

Notice I have bolded the term above, as I’m trying to point our the destinction between SEO companies and SEO marketing companies.

There are firms out there flogging the heck out of the phones – with call centres packed full of people trying to hit their targets for either closing deals online or setting appointments – they were doing this years ago with various things, some of them slightly scammy – some completely scammy (some were closed down & prosecuted, even some fairly large organisations that were using telesales to peddle scams. In the UK we had the business rate reduction scam – wow that was a good one, and although you can say it was very naughty – and eventually proven to be illegal – you’ve got to also admit that what these people did was clever too. They were selling nothing – nothing at all – and making brilliant money from it. That is, they were offering a service which they weren’t actually offering – or which differed a great deal from that which was offered – but it was fairly difficult for anyone to find out, which was why these scams were picked, as people could make a fortune out of them for years before they were shut down.

Now – SEO & SEM, is a perfect are for this kind of marketing brain – in fact with the birth of SEO and PPC I am quite sure that some people wept with joy when they figured out just how perfect it was for them. You see, with SEO & SEM, its very easy for marketing companies to sell a service very very well based on telling a customer what they want to hear – with very little chance of being shut down for not providing what is being offered, unlike with other markets.

Now this isn’t at all an insinuation that all of the SEO marketing companies who’re conducting telesales operations, are  actually providing a service which is any less than that which they’re proposing to sell – but some certainly are, and they’re doing it remarkably well.

The point is, if you think a SEO company hasn’t done a good job – or hasn’t done what they’re contractually obliged to do – how do you prove it? It is very difficult in many cases to even clearly define the service that the company has undertaken to provide.

For instance, if you pay a company xxx per month for SEO services, and you don’t think they’ve done enough because you see no results in terms of traffic – but the company can show that your website is  no1 of Google for your company name, and page one of google for some obscure terms which relate only to your company – and which may have been positions that your website had attained without their involvement – how can you prove that they haven’t then provided a good service, and unless you have it in writing exactly what services the company will provide for the given money (x number of article, x amount of backlinking, etc.,) then you’ll find it very difficult to prove that an SEO company is in the wrong.  This can be fustrating, for example of you shelled out a few grand over the period of 6-12 months, to only see that you’re ranking on page one for terms which bring you no traffic, but this doesn’t prove that the company did anything wrong.

So for this reason, what I would suggest is that you learn to see that there are SEO companies, and there are SEO marketing companies – and there are SEO marketing companies which do a lot more marketing (of their own service) than they do actual optimisation service for their clients.

Personally, I would ask a lot of questions of an SEO company using telesales tactics – if they’re a professional SEO company, why are they not practicing what they preach, why are they having to resort to cold calling in order to make sales? This isn’t always right though, I’ve had a couple of calls from true SEO companies – but you can usually tell by asking some questions, if you start talking even slightly technical, and you start to panic the caller, then it’s obvious you’re talking to a telesales person & not an SEO person, and if it’s a a telesales person that’s calling you to sell you something he’s clearly not all that clued up on, then I would be slightly dubious.

One near trick to separate true SEO companies from SEO marketing companies, is to tell the caller that you’re knowledgeable about SEO and you’d like to ask them some questions, including seeing some proof of their ability to rank their clients highly for quality, relevant search terms – if you never hear from them again, then you know that you scared them off, if they are quick to come back with impressive data, then maybe you’ve found a true optimisation company that know their stuff, in which case, great!

I recently received this question from Ben:

“hey,

So can you tell me how to get higher up on Google? Do I need to pay for a listing in the paid google thing or? Is that not linked? Someone phoned me and said they’d get me higher up (think they said either number one or page one) within 30 days or my money back. Should I do something like that, pay some one, or what? Advise would be gr8, thanks. Ben P.”

Here’s my answer:

Hi Ben, thanks for the question.

First of all, you’re asking the right question BUT it needs extending slightly… It’s great that you recognize that you don’t just need to be on Google, but that you need to focus on being found higher up on Google, this is something that many new to Google don’t quite get at first – but what I mean about extending the question – is that you need to know how to get higher for your targeted search terms, not just get higher in general. So, first you need to know which search terms you’re targeting & then you need to work on getting your web pages (your home page and sub pages) higher up in the Google organic results.

So the first thing, is keyword research – I’m always going on about this, but it’s because it’s so important & it’s a step that most people miss completely. You need a list of search terms that you’re going to work on getting onto page one of Google, and this isn’t just a case of having a list of relevant terms, you need to know how competitive each term is, and how much targetted traffic there is available for each term, and whether it’s likely to be a buying term or a tyre kicking term, so that you end up with a list of terms that you’ll get a return from. If you focus on terms which are too competitive, it’ll take you ages to see any return, if at all – if you focus on terms which have no traffic, you’ll be wasting your time – if you focus mainly on terms which will bring researchers & tyre kickers & not buyers, you’ll be wasting your efforts – so proper keyword research is hugely important.

Once you have your search term data, you need to create unique content – and focus on quality. Don’t try to get PLR articles, duplicate content, spun content, scraped content, cheap content writers who’ll pump out tonnes of low quality content for very little, or you’ll be wasting your time – just focus on quality. Don’t worry too much about quantity to begin with, just go for quality, and steadily add more great content, content which people will find helpful and informative, this kind of content will naturally bring more visitors & backlinks, offline word of mouth & other good stuff – and most importantly, this kind of valuable high quality unique content which adds value to the internet, is what Google want, and is what they want to push to the top for relevant search terms – that’s what their ranking systems are intended to do!

Next important step is to ensure you understand the basic elements of good on-page SEO, page titles, search engine friendly URLs, meta descriptions, alt image tags, H1, H2, H3 tags, internal link anchor text, no follow on certain links to keep link juice in more important areas, etc etc – all this stuff is fairly simple, just so some reading & get some understanding & improve it as you go along.

Then – offpage SEO, which means backlinks.  Actually, the better quality your website is in terms of quality & quantity of unique content with good on-page SEO, and the better job you’ve done of targeting the right search terms in terms of being appropriately competitive, the less you really need to worry about offpage SEO.  There are lots of things you can do to get backlinks, article marketing, directory submitting, blog commenting (not SPAM commenting but actual valuable replies to relevant blog posts), social bookmarking, guest blogging, joint ventures / backlink swapping, buying backlinks (I wouldn’t recommend buying online, but instead phoning or emailing particularly high quality websites which have great content which is very relevant to you, contact them to see if they’ll feature your website due to your high quality content – if they won’t then offer to advertise in return for the backlink) – I don’t recommend paying online for backlinks, it can be tricky to ensure that you’re actually getting any value for money, read my post about paid backlinks.

Thanks again for your question, and I hope this answers your question on how to get higher up on Google.

You’re wondering if auto content for wordpress & other platforms, works for SEO?

(if you’re not sure what auto content is, it’s tools which pull in content from various sources, other blogs, google answers etc., because we all know Google loves content, but unique content is so tine consuming and / or costly to create, so it’s no surpise that people try automatic content.)

Answer is nope, it doesn’t work….. move on

OK you want a more in depth answer? Thought you would

I didn’t think it would really work, because it’s fairly easy for Google & other search engines to sniff out auto content – but I didn’t leave it at that, I tested it with a number of different sites, some I ran both auto content & unique content, some just auto content. The sites running only auto content were just smacked into oblivion by Google, never to see much light of daym a couple of them get the odd bit of traffic for obscure terms, but that’s it. The sites that I ran both unique content & auto content, didn’t do as well for the unique content as I’d usually expect, so it appears to be that Google is tarring the whole site with the same brush & not only the pages with auto dupe content, although of course I can’t prove that.

I even tried some tools which promised to de-dupe the content in various ways – nothing appeared to work, so I have concluded that it’s just not worth trying to cut corners with auto content. Waste of time.

I don’t think there will ever be a way to do away with the need for good quality, unique content. It’s the only thing which really adds value to the web, other than other great features which don’t class as content as such but bring with them other benefits (unique features are great linkbait – in other words if you have something on your site which can do something great for your visitors, you’re more likely to get backlinks as a result – without even asking for them).

So – stop reading this, and start writing some content!

Are you extactic about the way your website performs?

Is your website an incredible 24/7/365 marketing machine which just keeps churning out the sales / leads / enquiries?

If the answer to this is “NO” – or “I SODDING WISH!!!!” then keep reading….

When I speak to small business owners, and then I look into their google analytics stats, their traffic, page views per visit, search engine positions, PPC spend & so on – most of the time the missing peice of the puzzle is the exact same thing for pretty much all of the business owners I speak to who tell me they’re not happy with the performance of their website as a marketing tool.

The missing peice of the puzzle – is email list building & marketing.

The problem is, that most people hugely over estimate when working out what their conversion rates will be from web visit to sale, or to enquiry.

Most people expect conversion rates to be in the region of 2-3%, and assume that if they’re getting 100 visits per day, for example, they should get a few sales or enquiries per day – but the the reality is that conversions are usually WAAAY lower than this.

In fact, the best cross – industry average I’ve been able to find – is 0.25% – which means 400 visitors are required for one conversion!

The majority of small business websites, in every day businesses, in every day industries, do not get enough targeted traffic to be able to make very mych impact with a conversion rate this low.

What’s more – is that many businesses are are losing money hand over fist, and don’t even realise it.

Think about it – if you make £50 Net profit per sale, and your average CPC is £0.50, with the above conversion rate you’re spending £200 to make £50 – not good business!

(By the way – do you know what your conversion rates are? It astounds me how many people use PPC marketing without using conversion tracking. Get conversion tracking on all your PPC campaigns – and if you can’t, then assume a very low conversion rate, and do your figures from that, or you could end up wasting a lot of cash with PPC)

Yes, we can work on trying to increase conversion rates, and we can work on getting more traffic – but as I said earlier, for most small businesses, the missing peice of the puzzle is list building & marketing.

There’s not a lot in marketing which is certain, but this is – if you’re not utilising email list building & marketing as part of your website marketing, you’re leaving a pile of cash on the table.

What’s List Marketing – is it Spam??

Email list building & marketing is not Spam – Spam is when peope send out unsolicited emails, list building & marketing is where you give people an incentive to join your list – to give you their permission to send them emails.

So they opt in to your email list – they want to receive your email, because you give them some incentive to do so, so for wehatever the reason, they want your emails, and you now have the ability to email them, to start building a relationship with them.

It’s far easier to get people to opt in to a list from first visit than it is to get them to buy from first visit.

In my guide “The Ultimate Marketing Machine” I tell you exactly how to set up & run email list building & marketing. I’ll just copy the first part of the guide below, to download the guide FREE just enter your details below. What’s more, it comes with re-sell rights, so you can re-sell the guide (whether or not you originally got it here free).

Once 100 people have downloaded the guide free – I will start charging for it – at which point
you will also be able to re-sell it, even though you got it free.

Here we go:

1: The difference between catching fish with a rod & using
a net.

In order for you to really understand the power of list building &
marketing imagine a guy stood on a boat with a fishing rod as apposed
to a guy who lays down fishing nets.

Who do you think will catch more fish??

Also who do you suppose will be catchingpassive fish, in that he won’t have to be stood there twiddling his thumbs in order to catch the fish?

Of course the net fisherman is the one who catches the most fish, and he catchespassive fish, in that he doesn’t need to be stood watching the nets, he can cast his nets, then go have a snooze, come back & reap the rewards.

If a website is trying to gain sales & enquiries purely from the first visit then this is exactly the same as rod fishing! The chances are far more slim that a fish will take the bait on a hook, as apposed to the chance that the fish will swim into a large net and the chances are far more slim that a visitor will buy on the first visit as apposed to the chances that they will join your list & then buy from you in the future.

A more accurate analogy.

Once you catch fish in a net, you have the fish so the above analogy isn’t 100% accurate. It would be more accurate then to see list marketing as catching your fish in a net, and then having the opportunity to catch your fish one at a time from the net which is far easier than trying to catch them in the open sea.

So, basically a website without list building & marketing is dependant on visitors buying from the first visit, which is similar to hoping that in the wide open sea a fish will come take your bait.

Whereas a website which does use list building & marketing, is far more likely to gain list
signups, and you then have the ability to communicate with your list, which is the same as catching lots of fish in a net & then fishing from this net rather than in the open ocean.

WHY?
There are a few reasons list building & marketing is so important.

Firstly, standard sales conversion rates from visit to sale are TINY! In fact the area that most website marketers fall down is that they have far higher expectations of their website’s potential conversion rates than is practical to expect to achieve. On average, sales conversion is somewhere in the region of 0.25% – which means that youneed
400 visits to make one sale!!!!

OK it’s difficult working with averages, and you may achieve more than 0.25, or you may achieve far less, it depends on the market, your product, your pricing, how good your sales copy is & so on but I believe it’s better to hope high but expect low, so you don’t end up over spending on marketing, so I always take 0.25% as an average conversion rate if there are no conversion stats to show me the actual conversion rate.
As I wrote in a recent blog post : is PPC marketing destroying your business? , it is very difficult to afford to use paid marketing methods when you’re achieving a conversion rate like this. If you’re paying $0.30 per click, for example, it’s going to cost you $120 on average to make one sale, if your conversion rate is 0.25% – and if you make $30 profit per sale, then you can see how this wouldn’t work?

When you’re using the fishing rod method, in that you don’t have list building & marketing implemented into your website, then any form of marketing is going to yield very small amounts, so if you’re paying for marketing services such as SEO, then it’s going to be very difficult to make a return even if you’re doing all of the marketing yourself, you could end up earning very very little per hour when you work out time in vs. money out.

This is why list building & list marketing is so important!

As long as you follow the following instructions, especially when it comes to creating an
incentive for people to join your list your conversion rate from visit to new sign up is likely to be substantially higher than you could possibly ever achieve as a straight sales conversion rate.

It’s not uncommon to see list signup conversions of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% or even higher!

To read more – just enter your name & email below to download the guide, free.

One thing that I’m constantly telling people, is that SEO isn’t just about search engine positions / search engine ranking.

Yes, of course it’s about SE rankings, but it’s not JUST about ranking / position.

Firstly – it’s about positions for the right key terms, so it’s about keyword research to ensure that the keywords you’re working on achieving good ranking for, are going to bring you a return on your time invested.

The biggest mistake that I see, is bad choice of keyword selection, either focusing on key terms that the website is unlikely to gain good ranking for within a reasonable amount of time, targeting key terms which are unlikely to bring good volumes of traffic, or targeting keywords which are unlikely to result in targeted traffic which will convert into sales.

Secondly – it’s about click through rate. There’s no point having top search engine positions if no one is actually clicking through to your website. I see a lot of websites which are achieving good rankings, which are unlikely to be enjoying much traffic from these positions, as the titles & descriptions have been written purely for rankings, with little or no thought to making them work as attention & interest grabbing headlines to ensure a good click through rate.

The whole point of search engine optimisation, as with all methods of search engine marketing is to increase sales – a lot of people seem to forget this when working on SEO, and focus only on achieving top search engine positions.

So, I was sat in the office this afternoon minding my own business, working on SEO projects for some of my clients, just thinking about ordering something from the sandwich shop – when BANG, all the power goes off!

The server UPS starts beeping, all the lights go off, my monitors go off, the phones go dead, and all the alarms start going off up & down the street.

Power cut! Doh!

So I get on the phone to united utilities who tell me that power has gone down to most of the homes & business in the area due to an underground cable error – and it will be back on by 3.30. At 3.45 they tell me it should definitely be back on by 6 – well it’s gone 7pm now & still no power!

(This is nothing compared to what a lot of people in Scotland have had to put up with recently, no power for days – in the cold winter we’re having in the UK at the moment, not good!)

All the shops closed, business stopped – no power, no money.

BUT – This wasn’t the case for me.

I sat there, in there dark & cold, and realized I was in quite a unique situation, in that the power being down didn’t need to effect me.

I could take my laptop into a cafe’ a couple of miles down the road where the power isn’t effected, and work in there – plug into their power if the battery was running low, and use their wireless broadband connection.

Internet marketing doesn’t require you to be fixed to one spot, although it’s handy to have a base, you can actually work anywhere.

I could jump on a train to Manchester, (15 mins) and work in the cafe’ of any of a number of very nice hotels, buy a coffee every so often & nobody will mind I’m using the cafe as my makeshift web marketing office – I can even take a stroll to another hotel if I get bored of the scenery.

Or I could work from home, anywhere in fact – even the beach if it was warm enough (I have actually worked from the beach car park while having a break from surfing, I didn’t take the laptop on the beach though as sand tends to get everywhere.  I’ve worked from airports, trains, car parks, cafe’s, even sat in stationary traffic on a motorway traffic jam.

Internet marketing is one of the rare businesses that can be operated just about anywhere, you don’t need to even have an office, with a laptop & a mobile phone you have all you need.

Just one of the many reasons that web marketing is the business for me!

Update - if you want to invest some money on something that works, see my post on Traffic Kaboom the video & content syndication program.

Just a few years ago, paid backlinking was a major part of SEO for many people, in fact I have first hand knowledge of many SEO consultants who only dealt with paid backlinks, and many web marketers who didn’t bother with anything BUT paid backlinks – buying them was easier & far faster. I never got involved with paid backlinks personally, not because I’m some angel, but because I expected Google to have taken this action a lot sooner than they did, I knew it was going to happen at some point.

However – just like any other loophole or shortcut, Google will find a way to stamp it out – and they did this with paid backlinks quite some time ago. October 2007 in fact is when the results of “the Google campaign against buying & selling Pagerank” began. I’ve just called it this by the way, I’m not sure that Google officially had a name for it or specifically sent a memo around the office saying “the Google campaign against buying & selling Pagerank officially starts today” although I like to think that they did, and that they were hand written memo’s on post-it notes, that were stuck on monitors while members of the Google team were taking a dip, or having a quick game of pool . 

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Basically Google just decided to take stronger action against this violation of their terms, and it was October 2007 when the results of this were first seen after the toolbar PR update that they did at that time.

If you weren’t aware of this – and you’re not sure whether or not I’m talking out of my behind read…

Google’s thoughts on paid backlinks

Email from Matt Cutts of Google, to search engine journal confirming that Google had begun to take real action against the buying & selling of backlinks that pass on PR.

Very detailed official information from Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye including a timeline on action taken against the buying & selling of links that pass PR, on the Google webmaster central blog

How?

Quite simply Google found ways to figure out which sites are selling backlinks – and they stopped trusting these sites as “voters” towards link popularity.

What?

For those who think i’m talking in double dutch : Every backlink to your website (to your home page, or a sub page) is basically a vote towards the link popularity of your site (well, your home page, or sub page).

The link popularity of the website giving the link, and the number of outbound links on the page the backlink is coming from determines how much this backlink increases the link popularity of your website. There are other factors such as relevance of the linking page to the linked to page, and relevance of the keywords in the anchor text (the linking text), and probably about 10 zillion other slightly less important factors.

But – if the site you have the link from, is selling backlinks, the chances are that NO good stuff will pass from the website via the backlink. The vote will be ignored.

Google clearly state in their guidelines that they do links being sold in order to sell PRis against their terms – so if a link has been sold – this is OK as long as the “NoFollow” tag is used to tell Google not to follow that link.

Google say :

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”

But of course if a site is selling backlinks, they’re usually not going to use the Nofollow – because this would make it clear to the link buyer that the link does not give them the value that they’re paying for.Some may direct to a page which tells the search engines not to follow, in the robots file – but even if they do, would you have bought the backlink if not for the boost in pagerank you thought it was going to bring?

I’ve got no problem with buying links – buy links from sites that do follow Google’s guidelines, as long as you’re doing it to buy the traffic you’ll get from these links, because obviously if the nofollow tag is used, there will be no benefit in terms of SEO.

So – if you’re buying backlinks as part of your SEO efforts – the chances are that a good chunk of your budget is just being completely wasted, as far as SEO is concerned.

Will Google specifically penalise my website if I buy backlinks that pass Pagerank?

The simple answer to this is maybe. but it really doesn’t matter – the fact is most paid backlinks will not have a positive effect, so what is the point of doing it, regardless of whether or not Google will actually penalise your site for buying links?

Google say : “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Plus if you follow the links above to read other statements from Matt Cutts, and other snippets on google webmaster central, you’ll find lots of comments which give the impression that this may be the case, but I’ve yet to see any definite clear answer that says “Yes, if we find a site is buying backlinks we will penalise that website”

So, to be honest, I’m not 100% sure, I’ve not seen enough evidence to know either way for sure. But if they’re not doing now – this doesn’t mean they won’t do in the future.

I know that most paid backlinks will have no positive effects in terms of SEO, but whether Google actually penalise websites for buying backlinks – despite a lot of opinions out there on both sides – I can’t say for sure.

There is one theory that google discount a certain percentage of ALL backlinks to a website once they know that link buying has taken place, or that link popularity is dropped by a certain percentage as well as all of the paid backlinks passing on no linkjuice.I can’t agree or disagree with this – they may do, who knows, I’ve not seen anything from Matt Cutts to indicate whether ot not this is the case as yet.

But again – what does it matter? We know that buying backlinks that pass pagerank is not going to help you – so don’t do it, simple

Does previous paid backlinks negatively effect future SEO efforts?

Some people are under the impression that if a site that has been involved in link buying in the past, but then linkbuying has been dropped, and the webmaster has decided to go down the straight & narrow (avoiding other temptations to violate Google’s terms in order to try to find shortcuts) future efforts will be hampered by the websites previous “convictions” as being involved in buying backlinks.

I wasn’t sure about this, you never really know for sure unless you happen to be lucky enough to work for Google, but my experiences over the past few years tells me that this isn’t the case, rankings may be lost, but it doesn’t appear to have any influence on the site’s future rankings.

One of my best clients have a website that had previously had a LOT of link buying done for, the previous SEO consultants appear to have been prolific in this area (we’re talking thousands of very obvious paid backlinks, completely non-relevant in most cases) they suffered a big drop in PR at the end of 2007 as a result. I was brought in to help them at the end of 2008, and within a few months they were back at the top of the search engines for many of their main terms, including some pretty competitive terms, competing with some huge brand names.

So as far as I can see, Google don’t appear to hold a grudge against websites that used to be involved in link buying.