Marketing Pilgrim

Developing quality content has become the primary driver of success for many online businesses that rely on SEO.  Investing the time and energy to author a blog has become an extremely popular tactic when it comes to implementing a content strategy, but often a newly created blog fails to have an overriding purpose. Many online marketers view blogs as a strategy instead of as a tool that has a much more significant purpose.

Josh Klein a guest author at ProBlogger.net suggests:

Thinking tactically – writing a one-off post, promoting yourself, optimizing for search, building links – is all well and good, but won’t matter in the end unless it moves you towards the right goal.

So the question then becomes what is the overriding purpose of your blog?  Josh has a number of excellent suggestions on what the end goal of many blogs might be.  I highly recommend reading his article and taking the time to think critically about your own blog if you have one or are thinking of starting one.

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While the world is experiencing an economic financial crisis, the SEO industry is experiencing a surprising increase in demand. From intensive training and SEO consultation to actual website changes and link building, the demand for expert SEO assistance is growing at an astonishing rate.

For those individuals or firms that are looking to grow and add new business, Michael Martinez has solid advice on how to position the SEO space to customers looking to maximize their marketing dollars.  Michael says:

“Recession marketing for search optimization needs to sell the idea that SEO which pays for itself is essentially a zero-cost marketing effort — not exactly free SEO service, but just as good.”

But currently most established SEO professionals seem to have just the opposite need, they have too much business.  Many established SEO professionals are declining to take on new clients because they just cannot accept any additional work load right now.  Check out the post by Kelena Jordan covering an interesting project she had to turn down just last week.  And Kelena is not the only consultant who is being more selective in the work that they take on, in fact this seems to be a common problem amongst many of the most established SEO practitioners.

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A number of early stage investment outfits have popped up over the last few years, making what would amount to tiny investments in as many as a dozen companies at one time and then recouping their investment plus some as those companies mature and either build viable revenue models or become acquisition targets of other related businesses.

Neil Patel recently announced that he has joined the Founders Co-op. The Founders Co-op has a goal to invest between $10,000 and $250,000 in a number of niche software start ups. Neil has said these startups should be in Seattle or be willing to relocate there if they are interested in receiving the investment.

The investment group stresses that they offer three valuable assets to the companies that they select including investment dollars, technical expertise, and professional introductions to others who can assist in all facets of creating and implementing a successful startup. Reading over their website I also think it is important to note part of their criteria:

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Marhsall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web makes a supposition that may be inherently incorrect.

A huge number of people online don’t know the difference between their browser’s address bar and search bar. Let’s keep that in perspective. What will it take for them to learn?

That particular point has created a great conversation over at Read Write Web including an extremely well thought out response from John Andrews.

The path to Amazon.com via Google is a richer experience for her [a user] than the direct navigation path, without much cognitive overhead and without much perceived risk.

To read John’s entire response head on over to Read Write Web. I however believe that another commenter, Jahbuh, got it right when he said;

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Many established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. The opportunity for new bloggers to communicate their ideas on internet marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, paid search, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing have never been greater.

Today Michael Gray announced on his blog that he was ready to start accepting guest bloggers. He didn’t say how long this opportunity might exist but he said he would try it out and then see how it goes. In his post he makes it clear that this is an opportunity for any blogger to have a chance to reach out and communicate to his audience, not just another “A” list blogger.

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If I didn’t know better Charlie O’Donnell and many others are reading my mind. Lately I have been seeing a lot of discussion around social media noise and our inability to filter it out or manage it in such a way as to continue to make it a productive part of our days.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise – an approach that regularly sees me turn Twitter off until at least noon to reduce the number of distractions.

It is not just Friendfeed though. It is the desire for budding entrepreneurs to create new social media services, tools, and resources that add too, aggregate and multiply the noise exponentially and create an endless number of entertaining distractions.

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If this is not the complete guide to optimizing a WordPress blog then I have not seen it yet. I am not saying there is not a better free guide out there and I challenge anyone who knows of one to link it in the comments of this blog post and share with us what we all have been missing.

In my mind however Joost de Valk has come thru with an extremely useful and detailed guide showing how to effectively optimize a WordPress blog. The Guide covers seven major topics plus it provides a conclusion all of which are worth reading. The seven major topics are:

Basic technical optimization
Template Optimization
Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content
Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings
Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
Comment optimization: get those readers involved
Off site blog SEO

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PageRank (PR) sculpting has popped onto the radar of most online marketers over the last few months and it has become a controversial topic. Like with so many new techniques in the online marketing world, some talented internet marketers are touting the value and success that they are having by using the nofollow tag to sculpt their PageRank, by directing as much link value to their most important pages as possible.

Adam Audette has written a well conceived article outlining why online marketers need to step back and think carefully about whether or not trying this new technique is the right thing to do. I think the majority of the points Adam makes are extremely valid, especially the point that if a marketer feels the need to use this technique excessively then there are probably much larger underlying problems, especially with the sites architecture.

A brief summary of Adam’s 8 points:

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The devil is in the details and sometimes it is easy to overlook opportunity even when it is staring you right in the face. Thankfully not everyone misses the obvious opportunities to take advantage of the hard work they have already done.

Andy Beard has an excellent nearly step-by-step explanation as well as links to a video, from Stomper Net made by Andy Jenkins, showing how to take an existing Google listing and work to get an indented listing to go along with it.

In short here is what Andy says to do and it is so simple as to be comical when you really think about it but it is amazing how many people don’t take the time to do this or even know how.

Get one page indexed and ranking

Write a second post linking to the first (which will also then trackback to the second page)

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Within the mass confusion that can erupt when there is a blog controversy, occasionally a thoughtful post will emerge. Last week ShoeMoney wrote about the Death of SEO and here on this blog Greg Howlett supported that theory, while I spoke up to disagree with those opinions. Others have also been discussing the topic and Joost de Valk, has chimed in as well, after reading a blog post from one of his colleagues entitled Reactionary vs. Visionary SEO.

Joost has taken a step back and looked critically at the situation and determined that decision making is what really is separating the internet marketers from one another. No one disagrees that SEO is evolving, whether what we see as today’s SEO will be around in the same format two years from now is still open for debate, but Joost makes the case that internet marketers who are following the wave of change are really pressed to decide when is it appropriate to adopt change?

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Greg makes my point for me at the end of his post: How Branding Will Replace SEO.

Also, since many customer conversations take place online, your inbound link profile will improve as will your traffic and conversion rate. And by the way, so will your SEO.

I’d like to start out by focusing on why I disagree with Greg, but I also want to point out why I also approve conceptually with what Greg is saying.

First it is very rare to start a business thru the customer acquisition channel of branding. To brand you generally need an audience and that means some sort of acquisition channel be it SEO, PPC, Affiliate, or Other. So saying branding is going to replace SEO is extremely implausible. Branding can become an acquisition channel once a business has an audience, usually of customers, without that audience there is no one to introduce the brand to.

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When it comes to marketing everyone is out to compose the most compelling message possible and then measure an audience’s reaction to that message. The question then becomes are measuring the tools that web marketers use reliable? I think the general consensus is that many of the tools that rely on JavaScript are less reliable than marketers would like them to be.

Stone Temple Consulting has performed a quality test showing that where one locates the JavaScript that our analytics tools rely on matters. The two things that the test showed were one that page load time matters and two that the amount traffic to a server can adversely affect page load time. They had to take both of these concepts into account when performing their test.

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