phoenix search engine marketing firms

Meet Liana Evans, the Search Blogger of the Day. Today I’d like to highlight a post called Utilizing Video in Online Marketing Strategies. Despite the prevalence of video, the actual production and use of it as a marketing strategy is still new to many of us.
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He said Free … Link Building … and Report. Need I say more? Best words in SEO history.

38 Vote(s)

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I started a blog on search engines in 2002.

In those days, the idea of blogging about anything other than politics, or blogging, or what your cat had for breakfast, was new. In fact, the idea of blogs was new. Most people’s reaction to the word blog was “huh”?

I quickly built up an audience, and links, mostly because I had first mover advantage, and I threw in a few social media basics. It certainly wasn’t rocket science. But, at the time, I was doing something unique and “remarkable”, in the Seth Godin sense of the word.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very different.

There are thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of blogs on search, and most of those go unread. A blog on search is no longer remarkable.

Unless you have first-class insider information, and can produce it on a regular basis, I wouldn’t advise anyone start a generalist search engine blog these days. The low hanging fruit is gone, but there are still easy pickings in other areas, it’s simply a matter of finding them, identifying your strengths, and exploiting them.

How Many Blogs Are Out There?

This years “State Of The Blogsphere” report indicates there are around 133 million blogs, and they are only the blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002.

Even if we assume that half of those are spam blogs, or cobweb blogs, that’s still a lot of “personal journals”. Are there 133 million readers?

ComScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
Total internet audience 188.9 million
eMarketer (May 2008)
94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
Universal McCann (March 2008)
184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
77% of active Internet users read blogs

Would a generalist blog do well in such a market? It could, but it’s highly unlikely. Such deep markets tend to favor a niche approach.

So, instead of a blog on search, one strategy might be simply to go deep on one aspect of that market. How about a blog on the mathematics of search engine algorithms? Or search marketing for a specific region? Or search marketing in one industry vertical, such as travel?

How To Find And Test A Niche

First up, read these posts:

• Market Research Using Google Adwords
• Innovator, Imitator or Idiot
• Targeting Niche Markets

Once you’ve decided on a niche, you can further test the validity of your idea, and your approach, by asking questions.

One formalized way of doing this is called a SWOT analysis. It’s a high-brow marketing term, but the idea is simple in practice. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Make a list:

• Strengths - why do I do well?
• Weaknesses - What do I do poorly?
• Opportunities - What upcoming trends fit with my strengths? What am I doing now that could be leveraged?
• Threats - What internal problems do I face? What external problems do I face?

You then detail how you can use each strength, how you can improve each weakness, how you exploit each opportunity, and how you mitigate each risk.

Simply going through such exercises can open a world of possibilities. It is important to write it down. I find the simple act of writing something down seems to make an idea less abstract and more concrete.

One of the big threats in the blog world is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can start a blog within minutes.

Ask yourself how will you stay ahead of the person who starts in the next hour? The ten people who have started by tomorrow? The hundreds of people who have started by next week, not to mention the big, established names who already have a dedicated share of an audience that isn’t really growing.

Tough call. There are no easy answers to such a question, as it really depends on your individual strengths and weaknesses, which is why asking questions like these can provide valuable insight.

Philip Kotler, a renowned marketing guru, suggests asking the following questions of any new business plan or idea:

• Does this strategy contain exciting new opportunities?
• Is the plan clear at defining a target market?
• Will the customer in each target market see our offering as superior?
• Do the strategies see, coherent? Are the right tools being used?
• What is the probability that the plan will achieve its stated objectives?
• What would you eliminate from the plan if you only had 80% of your budget?
• What would you add to the plan if you only had 120% of your budget?

Those last two might seem a little odd in this context, but they certainly are applicable. What would you do if you had more of a budget to promote your blog? Would you spend it on advertising? If so, where, specifically, would you spend it?

Asking these questions can suggest all manner of options. By pretending you have more of a budget, you might identify great advertising partners, but because, in reality, you might not have this budget, you could instead suggest you write guest articles for them, and thus achieve much the same result.

SEO For Blogs

The latest shift in SEO, as Aaron details in Social Interaction & Advertising Are The Modern Day Search Engine Submission & Link Building, is towards relationship marketing, which is why SEOs are increasingly adopting marketing and PR strategies in order to operate more effectively.

Let’s face it - SEO for blogs is a cakewalk. Blog software, such as Wordpress, is already search friendly, right out of the box. If you want to tweak it further, there are a wealth of available tools and instruction. Anyone can do it, and that’s a problem.

But it’s not really about the tools. It’s how you use them. The key part to success in doing SEO on blogs is the way you interact.

Specific Strategies To Consider

Quote And Link To Popular Bloggers

Apart from the obvious potential that a blogger will follow inbound links back to their source (you!), meme aggregators, such as Techmeme and Google Blog News, are becoming more prevalent.

These sites aggregate similar conversations together. Simply by talking about what others are talking about, and adding to the conversation, you might get a link and/or attention.

Leave Valuable Useful Comments On Popular Related Blogs

Go where the crowd already is.

For example, I follow most comments in these blog posts back to the authors, and if they have left a site name, I check it out.

Most are then added to my RSS feed reader.

Write Articles For Other Popular Blogs

Think of this as advertising. Advertising costs, and in this case, that cost is your time. The benefits of contributing editorial can be fantastic, however, as you can reach a large, established market quickly.

Create Community Based Ideas, Ask For Feedback Before Launching

This is cheap and cheerful market research. You also give your audience an opportunity for buy-in on the outcome. If the audience feels they are part of the process, they are more likely to accept it, and even promote it.

Add Value To Ideas So People Reference You When Talking About Them

Besides the obvious link benefit involved, it is also great for your brand. Your name becomes your brand, and the more people mention your name, the further your brand spreads. Seth Godin is a master at this, and if you aren’t reading his blog already, you should be.

See! It just happened. Twice, in this post, in fact.

Actively Solicit Comments And Reply To Them

One over-looked value of comments is that people are providing crawlable, unique content. Usually I find the more contentious the post, the more comments you receive. So don’t be afraid to stir the hornets nest every one in a while

Encouraging Contribution From Others And Highlighting Their Contribution Builds Community

The best situation is win-win. Are you giving your readers and community members a chance to do so?

This is one of the reasons I think black hole SEO is short-sighted, especially for community sites and blogs. It doesn’t allow others to win, too.

Network Offline At Industry Trade Shows

I once worked with a guy who had been a very successful investment banker on Wall Street. He says he ignores the University qualifications and information in the public domain, as the real business world works on inside information and who you know. There’s no doubt that the best place to get insider search information, and great contacts, is in the bars between conferences.

Every community has an epicenter - a group of people who most others take a lead from - and that epicenter might be as small as three or four highly influential people. Those are the people you need to talk to.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Controversy

If you gain mindshare and authority, some people will hate you for it.

This is related to my “stir-the-hornets-nest” point above. Once you start getting attention, you also become a target. You have little choice but to go with the flow, and keep in mind you cannot please all the people, all the time. Sometimes, it even pays not to please them. People are more likely to engage if they feel passionate, and especially if they passionately believe you are wrong!

Reminds me of a great quote by Oscar Wilde: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about!”

Further Reading

• The Blogger’s Guide to SEO
• How To Do SEO for Blogs, Members Area
• Wordpress SEO, Yoast
• 30 Tips for Marketing Your Blog, Toprank
• Blog Marketing Strategies (and How to Measure Them), Clickz
• Blogs and self promotion, Seth Godin
• Purple Cow, Seth Godin

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by rhaden

SEO is an analytical occupation, so it’s no surprise that we experiment. The trouble is, we can’t experiment freely with our clients’ websites, and setting up a website just for experimentation doesn’t really mimic the natural conditions in the online environment. Therefore, I was delighted when I recently had the opportunity to arrange a small experiment under remarkably controlled conditions.

I have to provide a little bit of background. Before I became a fulltime SEO, I did a lot of teacher training. When I began working with a web engineer with a commitment to client education, it was only a small step to persuade him to do a little teacher tech training with me. He was excited about Google SketchUp, an application designed for architects. I came up with a dozen lesson plans, we did the training, I posted the plans at my education blog, and that was the end of it.  

Until the engineer, having seen the lesson plans mount up, decided to make a page at his website with links to all those plans. So there was a new page with no content, really, besides a group of links to lesson plans on SketchUp. It had nothing to do with the rest of his website, which is about web design. Yet it’s a real page, not something created for experimental purposes. I’m a real teacher, and my blog is a real education blog. The new page of links is in fact the most useful page on the web for people who want cross-curricular lesson plans for SketchUp.

And here’s the great thing: almost nobody does. I checked, and sure enough, there’s hardly any searches for SketchUp lesson plans, and no competition to speak of. So here we had an obscure little page that provides the best information on an obscure little subject which is not associated with its domain in any way. There is no money changing hands, no clients to worry about, just a keyword phrase and a page. It’s not a keyword phrase carefully chosen for its SEO potential, nor was the page itself designed to pull people in. There’s also no history or industry buzz. The domain has a healthy page rank, but no ads or paid links, and no IRL marketing going on for it in the education community, either. If that page got any traffic, it would be entirely a reflection of SEO efforts. And, since no one else was making any competing efforts, it would be a reflection of the particular SEO efforts I wanted to track.  

The question, then, was how quickly would a little manipulation show results?

And I say “a little manipulation” advisedly. I posted a couple of comments at an old discussion on a Google educators’ group, one at my education blog, and one each at a couple of educational technology discussions where I sometimes hang out. I posted a link at Wikipedia. That’s it. 

These were not enticing links, either. They were bald announcements: “There’s a collection of lesson plans for SketchUp posted at ___.” The anchor text wasn’t optimized. I didn’t email anyone about them or otherwise use networking, charm, or eloquence. Just links.

The results? They were evident within days. The links collection is on the third page at Google, the second page at Yahoo, the first page at MSN. One of the lesson plans (the one with the engineer’s very cool log cabin model) was on the front page at both Google and Yahoo before I did any experimenting, and it hasn’t moved, but it’s not in the top hundred at MSN. The rest of the lesson plans are languishing in obscurity, unfindable unless you actually type in something like “SketchUp lesson plan on the Golden Section” – and even then, the page of links is #1 and the lesson plan itself is down in the middle of the page. #1 at Google is the comment I made at the Google groups page – with the engineer’s URL prominently displayed before you even click through. Not bad for half an hour of SEO.

Traffic has also zoomed. At one point, the page of links had more visitors than the engineer’s homepage. While some people do come look at the actual SketchUp lesson plans from search, most come through the page of links. There may not be very many people looking for SketchUp lesson plans, but those who do are definitely coming to visit. If there were anything for sale to teachers there, the engineer would be celebrating.

What does this tell us?

• First, I think it shows that standard SEO works. In the absence of manipulation, I think it’s safe to assume that the lesson plans themselves – at a relatively old blog about education – would be the hands-down winners over a newly-made page at a non-educational site with mere links to the lesson plans. Dropping a few links made a difference. When we so often have to wonder whether our results come from our efforts, from the IRL marketing we coach our clients to do, or simply from some natural progress over which we have no control, it’s good to see some evidence.
• Second, it shows that the search engines work. Once the page was pointed out to them, they served that page right up to the searchers. We do have to point things out, and the system can be manipulated, but in the absence of active pushing around, it works. This ought to be encouraging to those of us who emphasize excellent content and honesty over trickery. It’s so easy to feel as though you’re quixotically encouraging your clients to follow rules while all around them others are breaking the rules and perhaps at least briefly benefiting.
• Third, this should cheer up our clients who haven’t yet hit Google’s page one for their desired keywords. Most of the traffic to the page in question is from referring sites, not from search. Good quality links benefit the website before they move the page up in search rankings.

It is possible that you’re questioning my use of the word “benefit” there. After all, the visitors are leaving the page to follow the links. A few checked out the engineer’s portfolio while they were there; one went to the contact page. But it may seem to you that the engineer is not benefiting at all, while I had the geeky fun of my experiment and a blog post topic.

There are other sorts of benefits, though. The engineer tells me that late at night, when he is at work in his office, he enjoys seeing people from all over the world visiting that page. Someday one of them might need a website.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

You always have to go back to the question to get the right answer. Just wanted to get that down in writing….



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Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by Duncan Morris

Earlier this year Rand did a Whiteboard Friday video talking about how to get an SEO job. A couple of years ago Rebecca covered the SEOmoz hiring process, with a full re-cap of how Jane became a ‘mozzer. What follows is my take on a similar topic, two years later, and a couple of thousand words shorter

We are in the process of hiring a Search Marketing Apprentice. This post will explain the steps we go through when hiring and what we are looking for at the various stages. Whether you are hiring or job seeking, you will hopefully get something out of what follows.

Don’t forget the SEOmoz Marketplace has a list of internet marketing jobs, including our role.

The SEO Job Description

Our SEO hires so far (Lucy and Rob) have been people who had no SEO experience when they started. What I’m going to talk about here is the way we have approached hiring people in order to train them in-house. I’m sure the steps we would take when hiring an experienced person would differ slightly, but since we haven’t yet hired an advanced SEO, I’ll have to leave that to your better judgment.

For inexperienced hires questions about past successes are not relevant. For much of the interview process you need to be working out who has an aptitude for SEO. The first step of this has got to be defining what you mean by SEO, or at the very least deciding what role the new hire will take on. This is no different from creating a specification for a new piece of software. If you don’t know what the program is meant to do, it’s impossible to say when it works. Likewise, if you don’t know what the new role will entail it will be harder to know when you have found the right person.

We had this exact problem recently and ended up wasting a lot of time interviewing people for a vague job description. Given we didn’t really know what we were looking for, we struggled to find the right person. In the end we didn’t hire anyone.

I urge anyone who is starting the process of hiring to really tie down the job description and the type of person you need. It will help in every stage of the process.

SEO Aptitude

Discovering aptitude is something that is quite tricky, since you are trying to work out how good someone will be at something they know little about. Our approach has always been to ask fairly broad questions and see where the candidate goes with them. The following are some of the questions we have asked in the past:

• What, in your opinion, are the goals of the search engines?
• Please tell us about two websites that you really like and discuss what makes them so good.
• Give an example of something you’ve promoted or sold to others.

The right candidate has, in our experience, always managed to provide interesting answers even if they aren’t always 100% right. At this stage we’re not looking for 100% right - we’re looking for someone who has that certain spark and who, with training, will get what SEO is all about. Working out if someone is going to "get it" is incredibly hard. If you are lucky enough to meet someone who does, you just know.

Writing Job Adverts

The type of job advert you write will almost certainly have an effect on the type of person who applies for the job. Having just re-read the advert I wrote, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. It seems that everything we have learnt about writing compelling and interesting content (especially titles) gets thrown out of the window when it’s time to write a job ad. Jane wrote about this exact topic when she was looking to rent a flat.

The first draft of my job advert talked about keyword research, linkbuilding, linkbait and all that fun stuff. Lucy then pointed out that we were hiring someone with no experience, and the right person may never have heard of those. Draft 2 was a bit better. Draft 3 came after I’d written this post and realised that I wasn’t practicing what I preached!

Lucy said (I promise I didn’t pay her) one of the reasons she applied for the job was "the thoroughness of the spec and the fun style of writing in the ad and the questions." Spending time writing a good advert shows you care about the role. The good people out there can probably afford to ignore poorly written or dull adverts. Good adverts lead to good people.

Filtering the Applications

It turns out a lot of people are a) lazy, b) desperate for a job, and c) unrealistic about how good they are (I’m being as diplomatic as possible). The first time we hired we put out adverts asking for a cover letter and a CV. We were literally inundated with responses, of which only 10% passed a threshold of "worth looking at twice." My favourite was the "cover letter" that simply said "here is my CV for looking."

Luckily we learnt that lesson very early on, and since then have had great success in asking people to answer some questions first. Unsurprisingly, we immediately saw a drop in applications and a rise in the average quality of applications. It turns out the people who just widely send their CV to anyone with a vacancy can’t be bothered answering a few questions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of people put significant effort into answering the questions.

Time and time again we have found out more from these questions that we did from reading a CV. Rightly or wrongly I’ve had a pretty good idea of who we will end up hiring based on the answer to these questions.

SEO Interview Topics

This stage is certainly one where it will differ if you are hiring an experienced person. Like Rand talked about in Whiteboard Friday, a lot of the interview process is trying to work out the personality of your interviewee and how well they will fit in with the rest of the team. The sort of questions you ask should all tie back nicely to the job description you decided upon. If you want a creative person, asking them technical questions isn’t going to give them a chance to shine, and at the end of the day your job as an interviewer is to give people the chance to impress.

To Summarise

The people you hire will make or break your company. Good people make a company, bad people don’t. I’m not promising that if you follow the above stuff you will find a good person, but I suspect that if you write a dull job advert for a poorly defined role you are more likely going to only find dull people who don’t really have a ideal role in mind.

SEO is a relatively new industry and, as yet, career departments don’t talk about SEO as an career option. None of the (relatively few) kids I know are growing up wanting to be an SEO - they still favour farming, firemen, or Buzz Lightyear. All of this added together makes finding good people harder than hiring for other roles. On top of that there is the fact that SEO as a whole has a weird mix of marketing and technical skills, which often sit at the opposite end of a fairly long scale.

Finally, brilliantly, it sometimes happens that exceptional people just sorta turn up. If that happens, ignore everything I’ve just said and take a chance: it’ll be well worth it.

So, over to you in the comments. Let’s hear what you find works best when hiring. Failing that, funny stories about incredibly bad applications always go down well.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.