That level of prediction on marketing campaigns is a tough thing to manage when it comes to SEO and SMM. For paid media it is much easier to know and measure since you get the measured results almost immediately. You can make quicker adjustments, basically on the fly. With SEO and SMM you need to execute and then wait and see and with SEO sometimes the waiting could be 12 months+ depending on your goals.

And for social media I think that many SMM consultants struggle with nailing down solid metrics and then measuring those metrics to the fullest extent. This is in part because of client ignorance or stupidity and in part because of the organic nature of SMM. But there are effective ways to overcome these issues and SMM is becoming more widely adopted. The companies that are getting it right are WAY ahead of their competitors and are enjoying incredible returns, especially since SMM tends to be extremely cost effective.

Here is an awesome video I found from Outspoken Media today that pretty much nails it:

I think that like SEO, SMM is becoming more acceptable to C-level execs and that with time it will have an increased presence in the online marketing mix. I see more and more SEO adoption by C-level execs and SMM will see the same adoption curve. The ROI from both SEO and SMM is unparalleled and in the end this will win the day!

I am going to discuss what I felt were the major points, feel free to view the video yourself below.

What I found most interesting were the statements around crawling. We already knew that crawl priority was based on Page Rank at Google, not the PR that we all see but the internal PR that only Google sees and that is calculated and changed almost daily in most instances. Note that the toolbar Page Rank that we see can be a decent indicator of page authority but that it is not the actual.

Site Traffic and Other Engagement Stats Debunked as Ranking Factors

Matt noted that Page Rank is the main factor in determining crawl frequency and that traffic was not much of a factor at all. If you think of the porn example it makes total common sense. Porn sites constitute and overwhelming amount of traffic compared to most sites. If traffic to a site were to ever be too big of a factor in rankings then porn sites would dominate. Therefore traffic, and I would argue time on site and some other purported new SEO ranking factors based on visitor performance, are not good factors to weight heavily in the ranking algorithms.

The other interesting point made during the interview was that having a chain of 301 redirects is really a bad thing and that Google will only put up with so much. Having a redirect go to another redirect and so on is just suspicious for one, and another thing is that it reduces the crawling efficiencies for Google. These two thoughts are my personal ones and were not directly part of that interview.

There are some other good point about geo targeting based on IP and why that is bad for Google. I’ll spoil it and sum it up in simple terms. Google.com only crawls from one set of IPs worldwide so if you are IP serving content you may end up blocking googlebot.

The launch of DIYSEO.com today, after over a year of development and design, came with much fanfare. They are offering a nice 7 day trial to test dive the system. The videos and screen shots of the system look VERY good so far. The site looks clean and really easy to understand and follow. But the true test will come with actually using the system, which is exactly what I plan to do.

I will be posting my honest review of the service so please check back here or subscribe to my blog via RSS or email.

I know that there are many SEOs that were really scared of this service, that it would take business away from SEO agencies and SEO consultants. The other side of the camp says that this service is a rip off and that it will not hold value for most users. But I do not see it that way. I think that this is a great idea and that the purpose is to help service the small businesses out there that do not have thousands of dollars to spend on SEO, and that literally do not really need to.

But I also feel that no matter how well made the site is and no matter how good the service is, that some people will still need help. I hope to help fill that void. I get a really big kick out of helping small businesses. You can really have a positive impact on someone’s life when working with small businesses. Generating 10% more profits for a Fortune 500 firm is really like a drop in the bucket, but for a small business it can be a game changer.

So I look forward to my journey with this new product and I welcome it to the SEO community. I may change that stance after using it but as for now it looks like and seems like it would be a great solution for a large number of people out there. Not everyone, but there is definitely a market there.

Only about every 2-3 years do I see something new in SEO that I have never seen before. I’ve just been around too long and worked with too many clients. I say this not to toot my own horn. I say these things in order to help you understand where I, and many other SEO peoples, are coming from. The ideas I am putting forth in this post are the same things that my SEO brethren all experience too.

Photo Credit:imnotadoctor

Cost of SEO

I can’t even remember how many people have decided not choose me for their SEO campaign and that end up going for a cheaper package elsewhere. Maybe it’s from India and maybe it’s your nephew who says that he knows SEO. Most likely it’s your web developer or hosting provider that say, “SEO is easy, don’t pay those guys that much, I’ll do it for half that!”

What ends up happening is that the client comes back to me after having wasted their $1000/mo, or $500/mo, for the past 6-12 months and are left with no results. Or at least not the results that they wanted, expected, or needed. Had they just taken my advice in the first place, or gone with a different reputable SEO consultant they would not be 6-12 months behind their competition and would also not be thousands of dollars in the hole. Had they spent just $1000 more per month they could be seeing an actual ROI by now.

But instead they rolled the dice and crapped out. And their money lost has now become part of the cost of SEO, putting ROI even further out of reach. But to me the worst, and most costly, thing that happens in these situations is that valuable time has been lost.

Time Cost of SEO

This can be extremely expensive. The time cost of SEO is heavily influenced by what your competition is doing while you are not. But there are many things that influence the time cost of SEO. Imagine all the sales you have missed out on in the past 6-12 months because you are not ranking. Imagine all the market share that your competition has taken from you in the past 6-12 months. What if your competition has been spending more money on their efforts, with real professionals? Then you are really screwed.

How to Know if You Have a Good SEO Campaign

I’m not just going to carry on about how you need to spend more and choose good people for your SEO campaign. I actually have some ways that can help you understand if you are getting a good campaign.

First, do research on the person or company that you want to work with. Google their names. See if they are referenced in any reputable industry websites. Look for video of them too, its always nice to put a face with a name. See if there are numerous complaints on consumer sites. But be careful here because almost all of these “consumer advocate” sites (Ripoff Report, Complaints.com, etc) allow anyone to anonymously post whatever malice messages they want, and without any warrant of authenticity. But if you see many complaints from what appear to be different people (you can usually tell by the tone and the story that they tell) and on different sites then you can pretty much be sure that the company is bad news.

Get a third party to do an SEO audit of the work being done by your consultant, agency, or in-house people. Now this also comes with a word of caution because everyone has varying opinions of what is most important to the right techniques when it comes to SEO. So you have to take the SEO audit with a grain of salt. I recommend doing this so that you can get an “idea” of whether or not you are getting totally ripped off. This is not for you to nitpick at every little thing that the person auditing the SEO disagrees with. You have to be weary of the auditor wanting to steal your business away. If you can get a few different people to do the audit and that should be plenty to let you know whether or not you are getting totally ripped off or not. I will do another post on SEO audits at a later date so subscribe to my feed for that update when it comes.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that I can think of handfuls of reasons not to skimp on your SEO efforts. But most importantly is the huge cost of not getting a good SEO campaign. So please, if you are in getting ready to launch an SEO campaign make sure that you perform due diligence and that you not be afraid to spend on your SEO efforts. After all, SEO is still THE most effective form of online marketing. So if you spend hundreds of thousands on TV, radio, and print you should be spending even more on your SEO. Spend in the areas that have the best chance for an ROI. And nothing fits that bill better than SEO.

The overall jist of it is that Caffeine’s main goal is to increase the speed of its results as well as integrate more “real time” results from sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

But this is an SEO blog, and I am an SEO consultant, so we don’t care about Google getting faster or stuff like that. We want to know how this is going to affect our rankings. Right? Right!

Thank goodness that Summit Media conducted an independent study on Caffeine’s impact on rankings. They compared Caffeine results against current Google results for over 10,000 keywords.

They saw that on generic search queries news sites and social media sites were being given a bit of an advantage while other niche sites were ranking well for longer tail searches.

Most sites should not expect to lose many rankings, there were not many fluctuations, but sites with older content have a greater chance of losing out.

No changes to any one sector or niche over another. All changes seem to be across the entire index.

Domains with exact matched keywords had less emphasis

So overall not much to riot about. Things SHOULD be fairly stable as far as rankings go. But I’ll tell you this much, with the recent Page Rank update and Caffeine rolling out, things have been fluctuating. And if any of you use Google Alerts you will notice many more alerts coming through erratically and for content that is super old in many instances. I noticed this phenomenon right after Google integrated Real Time results. Seems that these changes did not mesh well with Google Alerts, which really has not been working well at all for the past year anyways.

I was recently asked to contribute to an article for iMediaConnection.com explaining how brands can use review sites to monitor their brands better. I found it a bit odd that the word “review sites” was being thrown around. To me, “social media sites” would have been a better vernacular because it would encompass all places a conversation was happening online.

This was an excellent article because it utilized a great number of experts to give their perspectives on how to monitor brands online. I wrote a great deal more than was used in the piece but I feel that I had some good coverage in there. Thanks goes to Neal Levitt, the author, for inviting me to the discussion.

I think that the quick points at the beginning of the article pretty well sum up the consensus amongst all those involved. Except I feel that advertising in areas where your brand is getting negative attention is a waste. I also feel that one of the most important points was not emphasized enough. The idea that when you find a person not happy with your brand or service, that you reach out to that person in a very public way and make amends. This puts a whole new spin on the negativity, shows the community that you care, and fuels a great PR victory that you can promote the heck out of. There you have, you have now turned a nightmare into a dream come true! There are not many chances in life for that kind of turnaround, opportunities like this are worth their weight in gold!

Anyways, how about that duplicate content? Well, its not nearly as big of a deal as it used to be. Google has wised up and started to monetize aggregated, syndicated, news content. Therefore they had to change the ways they treated dupe content.

If you have a trusted domain or are not totally, obviously, trying to manipulate the search engines. So its OK to have some duplicate content as long as its not done on purpose and with intent on ranking higher. Having a trusted domain puts you in a whole other category. And it makes sense as most spammers or black hats have dupe content on weak domains. Plus if you have dupe content you will most likely hurt yourself because you will dilute your internal link juice.

What I mean by bait and switch is when SEOs take a page that has a good amount of links and redirect the page to a product page, homepage, or wherever so that the new page can rank for the term that the old page did. Now sometimes the new page that the 301 is directed at is relevant to the old page, but sometimes it is not. And it is in this latter instance that Google gets offended.

It was noted that Google worked to eliminate this tactic (the latter in the previous paragraph) by implementing the Googlebomb algorithm a whle back. the idea is that if you 301 a page and the new page is not relevant to the old one, meaning the new page does not contain the keywords from the old on the page, then Google diffuses the passing of the anchor text(s). So the old page will still pass page rank theoretically, but it will no longer pass any keyword anchor text link value.

What does this mean to SEO consultants?

This means that if you want to take full advantage of 301ing pages with links to new pages, make sure that the two pages are relevant and that the new page contains the keywords of the old. It makes sense being that Google wants relevant results. It was too easy to manipulate the SERPs using 301s before. Now at least there is an order of relevancy.