Got a message from Mr. Oilman late last week asking if I’d like to do part of SEORockstars with him. I asked what the topic would be (already knowing the answer) - so I have a few ideas I’m bouncing around, and would be happy to touch on near any questions anybody out there has, so feel free to post any suggestions.
1. Highly intelligent PPC automation tools and arbitrageurs
2. Age factors impacting trust score
3. Ad agencies catching on to SEO
4. User data validation for trust score
5. Saavy affiliates with established sites that don’t like competition
6. SE’s shifting of the content revenue model
7. Diminishing conversion rates for link requests
8. Just like the “real world” $$$$$$ will again = trust
9. Ad agencies playing ball with SEO’s
10. The day Aaron retires from building free tools
11. Leveling of information between buyers and sellers
**Added Matt - has a very nice list of rebuttals - that there is increasing opportunities for small businesses.
So I wrote a little bit on how important I think a best posts page is to your blog users, and figured I’d go back through and review my archives a bit. I added a few little things, organized, and prioritized my new best posts page. Enjoy.
I stopped by my buddy Brad “Ewhisper” Geddes site today to send him a funny list of dumb PPC ads, and noticed his Top 10 reasons PPC is better than SEO. Of course, I had to add a little one-upsmanship. In reality, both SEO AND PPC are essential to online marketing visibility, and they complement each other nicely, but I gotta have some fun with ol’ Ewhisper, and, like him, I tend to be a little bit biased.
11. It’s funner to buy traffic for cash rather than to lease it.
10. Bandwidth is cheap.
9. Who really wants to measure EVERYTHING when you can use your unagi like Ross?
8. There’s no such thing as SEO Fraud if you get a good consultant.
7. You don’t have to deal with customer service.
6. Even non-targeted traffic can be siphoned off somewhere.
5. SEO’s aren’t quite clever enough to implement “smart pricing”.
4. You’re helping to improve search engine relevancy.
3. Natural search arbitrage is usually deemed spam and Shari Thurow reports it.
2. No bid wars, and crappy sites don’t cost you.
1. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free**?
**Okay, free is a total misnomer, but you get the point - and credit goes to Doug Stotland of MSN Adcenter who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly at SES.
*Disclaimer - I do SOME PPC and it is a great method to drive traffic, but please understand my bias here. I love all kinds of converting traffic, I just like long-hanging fruit. I’m amazed at the developments in PPC in the last year that I haven’t really kept up, and it does truly move as fast, if not faster than SEO with algo changes, etc. There’s some GREAT money to be made in both fields, and if you can master both, you’re going to be in great shape.
I started reading through some of the blogs I hadn’t heard of from Rand’s list of top 50 blogs (mostly from some of the comments), and realized just how important it is to showcase your top posts. For me personally, it is the difference between me subscribing to your feed in bloglines, or clicking away and having it sink into oblivion where I’ll never read it again (unless perhaps someone else mentions it again).
There are actually two things I check out generally when I first visit a blog. 1. The top posts as mentioned above, and 2. the about page. The combination of personality from the about page (if you act like Bill O’Reilly I’m probably not going to want to spend my time reading your site), and the expertise shown by what you’ve written about. You probably have some GREAT posts buried in your archives that I will never see if you don’t bring them to the top. Bring them to my attention!! Show me your crem-de-la-crem. Like 99% of your potential blog readers, I’M IN A HURRY to get to the other 500 feeds I want to read today. Bust out the goods, and don’t make me dig through your cat posts (it’s okay, I do them too - as GW says, it’s good to experiment.)
With so many different types of posts (news, humor, call-to-action, resource, etc.), it’s really important to showcase the more timeless authority posts. It can be done manually, or I’m sure there are a few plugins for user favorite posts. I like the manual route myself, as I think it offers a nice level of editorial control. In case you’re wondering (and didn’t notice it at the top of the page) - my best posts are here
Think of your best posts page as a sitemap for new users to check out your style. There are two things that will get people to subscribe when they visit - Personality (about page) and style (best posts page). Personally, it takes me less than five minutes to decide if I’ll ever visits a blog again and subscribe with bloglines. Please make a good impression to your first timers.
**Added - If there is an ambitious developer out there a category level best posts list page generator plugin would be freakin’ sweet. When I was re-reading for typos, I thought of doing best posts at a category level, which is definitely going on the to-do list. Some posts are timeless, and should not fall into the blogabyss.
I thought it was worth mentioning that I’ve recently “officially” decided to make a more long-term committment to doing independent consulting work. For now, I’ll be focusing mainly on doing site audits and developing strategies for people looking to do their own SEM work, or looking to bring a team of search engine marketers in-house.
Fortunately, so far, I’ve been too busy to take time to stop and actually write up descriptions of these type services, but I’ll definitely be trying to do that in the future (sometime). Site audits include diagnosis and remedies for on-page SEO, keyword research, off-page SEO, community networking opportunities, blog marketing, PPC, affiliate marketing, or any other applicable marketing disciplines for bringing them together for better results. Site audits are generally a one-time service with some level of follow up. Consulting and training services will focus on very similar type of information, with more extensive follow up.
If you think your company might be a good fit for training or consulting, feel free to drop me a line, or look me up at SES, and we can discuss in more detail if I’d be the right fit for your situation.
Next week I’ll be attending SES in San Jose. If you’re planning to be there too, be sure to flag me down and say hi, or drop me a note ahead of time and let me know you’d like to chat. I’ll be a panelist on SEM via communities, and Search Engines: Friend or Foe?, both with an esteemed group of other great speakers. For more information, check out Search Engine Strategies.com.
