Thursday, November 26, 2009
   
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More resources, rewards for PayPal partners

itwire.com (87 hits) - PayPal will throw more rewards and monetary incentives through revenue-sharing opportunities at its Australian partners who integrate the online payment service within their e-commerce and web solutions. More... (Online Business)

Latest Internet Dugg

SEO services under estimated in India

pr-inside.com (105 hits) - SEO Services is under estimated a lot in India. Best marketing technique for business is not utilised much in India More... (Search Engine Optimization )

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How can social media marketing help your brand?

marketingweb.co.za (84 hits) - Social media has been around for a number of years, although we’ve only recently seen an increase in the number of South African social media campaigns. With South African internet... More... (Internet Marketing)

Twitter for small business owners

SprouterWe've already seen the Twitter model applied to organizational employees via Yammer, which encourages coworkers to share and collaborate by frequently answering—in 140 characters or less—the question, "What are you working on?" Now Canadian startup Sprouter invites entrepreneurs to do the same thing as an opening for discussion, support and collaboration. Toronto-based Sprouter is an online community that allows small business owners and entrepreneurs to share links, ask questions and share expertise with their peers.
 

404 Pages: Tips for SEO and User-Friendliness

Let’s face it 404 pages are a pain, for webmasters and for users. I absolutely hate clicking on a link and getting a 404 error page. However, what’s really our concern here is what it does for your SEO. What should you do about those 404 pages? Should you just leave it alone or should [...]
   

What Does $14 Million Worth of PageRank Look Like?

From Hitwise:

CircuitCity.com is back after Systemax purchased the brand and domain at bankruptcy auction for $14 million. Systemax also owns TigerDirect.com and acquired CompUSA last year. CircuitCity.com was quickly relaunched last week to capitalize on the remaining brand strength and traffic to the website.

Not to mention the link equity, eh?

Not a bad strategy there Systemax. That traffic is cheaper than AdWords, will pay for itself in less than a year, and since they are a corporation the Google rankings + traffic will stick. This is probably even a better buy than CompUSA was.

If you are ever worried about creating a second site focused on a high margin portion of your business, just remember that this company owns at least 3 electronics retail brands targeting the exact same keywords. And Google loves it.

This sort of domain name + brands + links transaction highlights multiple fallacies in Google's broken view of the web...

  • Google tries to scare you about buying a link or two in the dark corners of the web (and even takes away your ability to funnel the link equity you earned), and here are these brands being bought and sold (with link collections) like true commodities.
  • If they don't like unnecessary duplication then should 1 company run 3 parallel competing websites with the exact same business model in the exact same niche targeting the exact same keywords? It is viewed as legitimate because they are a corporation, but since when have corporations been on a higher moral ground than individuals?
  • Brands don't make the web less of a cesspool. They often create the cesspool. They simply find something that works, wrap it in brand, and look for ways to scale it. They love.com to scale and automate. Any intelligent SEO that has many Fortune 500 clients will tell you that some of their clients are far spammier than they could be on their own websites, largely because of brand.
  • As corporations grow more web savvy, they will create more of the same "nasty" no-value-add duplication that Google complains about when passing judgement against the affiliate industry.

Which reminds me...I really should create a fake perceived large corporation (founded by lawyers, perhaps) to buy assets, which would mitigate Google engineer interference and profiling as we try to grow our humble web business.

   

Quit smoking with Electronic Cigarettes

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This little mini starter pack is wonderfully economical and comes with everything you need to start with,(other listings are cheaper). One battery, one atomizer, 6 cartridges and a neatly built-in charger, all in one compact box. If you have been smoking for many years and have tried many methods of quitting,(for eg, nicotine patches, sprays, gum etc.) but always failed, and if you thought you could never quit smoking cigarettes, think again. This product is IDEAL if you want to try e-cigarettes but aren't sure if e-cigarettes would work for you. It's very cheap compared to other brands; so if by any chance you find it isn't for you, and only use it for a week or so, you wouldn't have lost anything. The cost of cigarettes is so high, that this kit will pay for itself within a week all depending of course on how many packs you smoke a week.
   

Spying on Customers & SEO Data Aggregation

We Do Not Spy on Our Customers

I have had a very well known SEO company dust one of best link building strategies (outing it directly to a Google engineer) because I was trusting enough to mention how effective it was inside our training program, thinking that a competitor would not out it, but I was wrong! At least I know what to expect, and can use that knowledge to mitigate future risks.

One of the common concerns about the SEO Toolbar is something along the lines of "does it phone home" or "are you spying on us" or "what data is it sending you". Some SEO companies offer a huge EULA and do spy on the people who use their toolbars, but we do not do that for a number of reasons

  • I felt rather angry when that well known SEO company outed my site (and haven't really trusted them since then)
  • I never really liked the idea of spying on customers, and going down that path could harm our perceived brand value
  • knowing that information is kept private adds value and builds trust
  • we are already under-staffed (running quite lean) and have more projects to work on than time, so we are not in need of new projects
  • With all the great competitive research tools available now (like Microsoft Ad Intelligence, Google Search-based Keyword Tool, Compete.com, SEM Rush, and many others) it is easy to get a lot of keyword data quickly, and I see little value add in spying on our users.

Why Give Away so Much Value?

It is pretty obvious that the trend in software (since the day I got on the web) is that open source software is commoditizing the value of most software products and tools. Providing tools that require limited maintenance costs and provide access to a best of breed collection of SEO tools makes it easy for us to evolve with the space and help our customers do so, without building up a huge cost sink that requires raising capital and having to listen to some icky investors. :)

The reason we can (and do) provide so many free SEO tools is because I feel doing so...

  • makes the web a better place (Tim O'Reilly says you should create more value than you capture)
  • offers value to the community
  • extends opportunity to more people around the globe (anyone who is just fresh starting out like I was ~6 years ago could use the help)
  • commoditizes the value of some bloated all-in-one SEO software (many of those products generally lack value and misguide people)
  • makes it hard for con-artists to sell hyped up junk (by commoditizing the value of their offerings to all but the most desperate of get rich quick folks)
  • helps to educate potential future customers (when we did a survey recently about 80% of our customers have been practicing SEO for over a year)
  • is an affordable distribution strategy for brand awareness
  • builds trust by delivering value for free (rather than trying to squeeze every penny out of potential customers)
  • is a big differentiator between us and most SEO websites

In addition to all the above points, most of the tools we create are tools I want to use. So the cost of building them would still be there even if we did not share them. Sharing them gets us lots of great user feedback to improve them, and does not cost us much relative to the potential upside.

Small Industry, Lightweight Strategy

Rather than centralizing things, we like to rely on a distributed software strategy which has a much lower cost structure.

That strategy allows this site (with a popular blog, an array of tools, some videos, training modules, and an active community) to run on 1 server. We find the Plenty of Fish story inspiring, though doubt we will need his distributed computing skills anytime soon given how small our industry is. After 5 years we are still millions of visitors and over a billion monthly pageviews behind Plenty of Fish :)

Though we are doing ok in our little corner of the web :)

We have analytics on our website to help us see where we are getting coverage, and to measure and improve conversions (an area ripe for opportunity given our brand exposure and site traffic). We may add relevant affiliate links and offers to some of our SEO tools to help pay for the 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars we spent developing our various tools (for example, see how we integrated a link to our Wordtracker keyword guide and the Wordtracker keyword research service in our keyword tool). But we have no need or desire to spy on users who download our tools. Spying and outing are poor strategies for professional SEOs to employ....they erode trust and value.

   

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