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I’ve just been reading a post over on Damien Mulley’s blog on some of the things that make him trust an online business more, and others that make him trust them less.

I’m going to commit a cardinal sin here and block-quote Damien’s lists (one of the “Trust Less” items) in the interest of clarity. Hopefully I’ll get away with it by adding more than one line of commentary .

First Damien’s “Trust More” list:

• Companies that have personalities and a team that adds humanity to their business both online and offline.
• Companies who care enough to monitor what blogs are saying and react, even when people have negative issues.
• Companies who contribute to online discussions and mailing lists without pimping their solutions and help even when the topic matter isn’t in-synch with their business area.
• Companies that ask for help, contributions, feedback

I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above… it’s about adding real value and contributing to the discussion. As with all human connections (and that’s what online marketing is all about today) the more you give, the more you get back in return. It’s just unfortunate that so few businesses actually “get” this… it’s a dialogue, a conversation, and if you want to engage with your audience you have to do at least as much “listening” as you do “talking”. Stop preaching… start connecting!

Now for Damien’s “Trust Less” list:

• Businesses that use domain names to describe what they do instead of using a company name.
• Business people that leave comments on blog posts with their keywordladen website name and not their name and surname.
• Businesses that write blog posts and internally link to their services in every blog post, again laden with keywords.
• Businesses that write blog posts that are neither interesting nor useful but instead are dressed up brochures.
• Businesses that write blog posts that do nothing more than block quote someone else’s blog post and then add one line of commentary.
• Businesses that use Adwords on their business blogs.
• Businesses that don’t name who they are on their About page.

I agree with most of these, but can also see the motivation behind them… however misconceived. Businesses simply don’t understand, and are often acting on poor advice.

First, I actually don’t have a problem with businesses using keyword-related domain names that describe what their sites do rather than their company name — as long as it makes it clear to users what to expect. For example, as a web-surfer I’d probably find something like www.officeapps.com a lot more useful than, say, www.ZOHO.com in terms of knowing what a site is about before visiting. But then of course you lose some of the branding potential. It all depends what you want to achieve – but it should be driven by usability rather than search-engine rankings.

And there’s the rub. Most of the items in the “Trust Less” list are motivated purely by SEO. They’re strategies aimed at one thing, and one thing only: getting higher Search Engine Rankings for particular keyword phrases. Often these decisions stem from poor SEO advice (and God knows there’s plenty of that around), and a lack of appreciation that traffic, without effective content/conversion, does nothing but consume valuable bandwidth.

Neglecting users in an attempt to impress/fool the search engines is always a bad idea. But most businesses are sold on the concept that driving traffic is the primary objective, over and above the quality of the user experience. Which is of course complete tosh!

Effective SEO is about looking after your users first, and then aligning that with what the search engines are looking for. Search engines want to deliver the very best, most relevant results to their users. It’s what their reputation, their audience, and ultimately their revenue model, is built on. The way they analyse that relevance and quality at the moment means that they sometimes get it wrong… but they’re getting better at it all the time.

So you need to make sure your site delivers for users first, but that it’s also structured /optimised to make it easy for search engines to understand what your content is all about. Aligning those two things can be tricky… and the real problem is that many businesses are persuaded, erroneously, to skew the balance in favour of search engines for short term traffic results.

For businesses looking to build a solid online reputation, sustainable search engine rankings and long-term online relationships that’s a huge mistake.

SMX Social 2008, Long Beach, CA: “SEO is a wasted industry. You’re wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You’re just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won’t kick you out. It’s a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.”

SES 2006, Chicago: “SEO is bulls**t…90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesmen.”

The firestorm that followed reverberated across the social web….

At the risk of attracting a little vitriol, I have to say that there’s truth in both of those statements.

Content isn’t king… the customers is

I agree, for instance, that spending time trying to “game” the engines for short term results is a futile exercise, at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term prosperity. For sustainable rankings you should focus your efforts on producing great content, and making sure the search engines can index it and recognise it as such… which of course is where SEO comes in.

I’m not convinced yet that purely human search — like Calacanis’s offering at Mahalo — is the answer to the search conundrum. Perhaps some sort of hybrid search will emerge… a synergy between algorithmic and human-edited search that delivers better results all ’round.

Ultimately great content is what users are looking for… and therefore what search engines, regardless of their flavour, want to deliver. And as search engines get better at determining what users really want when they fill in that little box, it’s outstanding content that’s going to win the day. Not because content is king — because the customer is.

Plenty of good SEOs

While there are certainly a lot of cowboys out there in the SEO world who prey on the gullible and exploit the naive, there are also plenty of SEOs who are passionate and genuine and do a great job of getting their clients’ websites in front of their users. They help people to find great content that would otherwise slip under the search radar.

Search engines are amazing, but they’re not good enough yet to find and analyse all the content on the web correctly. They need a bit of help. Good SEOs have the knowledge to be able to align their clients’ content with both what users are looking for, and what Search Engines can index… again, a synergy that, in a perfect world, ends up with a win-win-win for user’s, search engines and site owners.

The snake oil salesmen? They routinely crop up in every new industry all over the world: the vampirical underbelly of humanity emerging to suck sustenance from the unwary and anknowing. It’s not an SEO thing — it’s a human nature thing.

Fire the good people

Which brings me to Jason Calacanis’s latest outpouring of controversial entrepreneurial wisdom. In an interview on the Sydney Morning Herald’s small business blog this week, he advocates firing the good people to make room for the great.

Again, a lot of what he says in the interview makes plenty of sense… you do want to attract and retain great people… and sometimes good just isn’t good enough. If you want to cultivate a culture of excellence, you have to build a team of excellent people. So far, so good.

Where he loses me is with the following statement under the heading of rewarding obsessive behaviour:

“You don’t want people with balance in their life. You want people who are responding to email at two in the morning… People with balance in their life can work at the post office.”

Er… how do I put this tactfully… WRONG!

Excellence demands balance

Balance is a good thing… and if you want to encourage excellence in your staff you damn well better make sure they have some balance. Balance doesn’t mean punching in, working 9-5, five days a week and then taking the weekends off. But it absolutely does mean having more to your life than work. I like to call it working for life… as opposed to living for work, which is what so many people seem to do these days.

Without balance, all you have is… well, imbalance, and where does that get you? A company full of wired, burnt out former geniuses tethered to their internet connection is no company at all.

To get the best out of people, I believe, you have to encourage them to be people, rather than automatons. In my admittedly limited experience, people who obsess about work all the time — the ones who are answering their e-mail at 2am — may spend more time working, but are often less productive than people who have found a healthy balance.

But hey, Jason Calacanis is a multi-milionnaire serial entrepreneur… and I’m not….

What do you think?

According to the article SEO spending in Britain will reach £400 million this year, and the figure is growing 60% year on year.

The article also highlights another, less welcome trend: basically that newspapers really don’t get Search Marketing!

When it comes to describing SEO I found it simplistic. Keeping things simple for the sake of clarity is of course a good thing… but in this case the article manages to be simplistic and confusing.

For example, Author James Ashton describes SEO as:

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines.

Hmm! Not sure that’s really it.

Summarising how companies go about SEO he adds:

Most companies achieve SEO by peppering their websites with keywords that Google’s technology can easily read.

While comparing SEO and PPC he ventures:

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo.

Strictly speaking the article isn’t inaccurate, and it has some interesting facts and figures in it, but overall I found it a tad misleading.

Perhaps my biggest problem with it though is the unwritten implication that SEO is about gaming  the engines — when of course (at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term rankings), that’s really not what it’s about at all.

Think I’ll stick with this SEO theory.

Increasingly businesses around the world are harnessing the power of the internet to reach out to consumers in new and exciting ways. Studies show that more advertising spend is being diverted online – and that search is the biggest online channel by far. Keeping abreast of the latest trends in search engine marketing is vital for marketing professionals, web masters, website designers and developers, business owners, media buyers and just about anyone else involved in marketing today.

Search Marketing World is hosted by leading Irish interactive marketing agency, Interactive Return, and offers a uniquely Irish perspective on the global phenomenon of search engine marketing. More details are available on the website at www.searchmarketingworld2008.com, or by telephone on 01 672 9022 (9am – 4pm Mon-Fri).

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Marketing,Search Marketing events,search marketing Ireland,Interactive Return,Chris Sherman

Q. How long have you been involved in search?

Since 1999.

Q. What general advice would you give to someone just getting started with SEO / SEM – people trying to optimise their own sites, or launch their own online business?

First, recognize the importance of search for any business using the online channel. Second, resource your search marketing efforts appropriately. If you’re a small business the most importance resource is you. Give some time to understanding search yourself. It will pay dividends to your business for many years to come.

Q. What are your top tips for generating a good SERP ranking for a new site, and improving the ranking of an established site?

Make sure you don’t build a website that is inherently search unfriendly, for example, a website that consists of a single Flash movie. Content is king. Work on this. Use the medium – blogs, social networks, email etc etc

Q. What’s the best way to find relevant keywords / key phrases to use for both site optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising?

Ask your customers what they search on,. Analyse the web logs for your site. Examine the content of your competitors websites, especially the high-ranking ones. Use the search engine query tools.

Q. What should people look for when hiring an SEO / SEM professional?

Proven expertise, experience, a reporting methodology that delivers accountability, transparency.

Q. Tell me a bit about Black Hat SEO… can you give me a general overview?

For example, in the Summer of 2007 the BMW.de website employed a black-hat search marketing technique called “cloaking”. Their homepage was quite search unfriendly so they produced a second homepage which they displayed to search engines while regular users saw the original homepage. Search engines don’t like this as it means they are unable to measure the search relevance of the page seen by the user. The bmw.de site was banned from the Google index. Don’t do it. The search engines are smarter than you are. As in all other media and channels, use marketing techniques that deliver long-term value for your customer and your enterprise.

Q. Can Black Hat SEO / Negative SEO tactics be used to adversely affect the ranking of competitors sites? Tell me a bit more about this… are there any clear examples / case studies out there that we could use?

In theory you could point thousands of links from a link farm at a competitor site. This could look like the competitor is attempting to spam the search index. Therefore the competitor’s ranking could be adversely affected. Your time would be better employed writing some great content for your site and producing quality link-bait (content that will encourage other relevant sites to link to you).

Q. Is there anything web masters can do to protect their sites / search rankings from unscrupulous tactics?

Don’t employ unprofessional search marketers

Q. What is meant by the term “long tail” in SEO/SEM?

In any keyword domain there are a small number of highly trafficked keywords or phrases and a large number of low-trafficked keywords or phrases. Often, the keyword domain approximates to the right-half of a normal curve with the tail of the curve extending to infinity. Low trafficked keywords are therefore also known as “long-tail keywords”. The highly trafficked keywords have the following characteristics: highly competitive, consist of one or two words, have a high Cost per Click and may have low conversion rates as they tend to be quite general. Examples from the accommodation sector might include “hotel”, “London hotel” or “cheap hotel”. Low-trafficked keywords are not so competitive, often consist of 4, 5 or more words, have a lower Cost per Click and can have a higher conversion rate as they are quite specific indicating that the searcher is further along the online purchasing cycle. Examples might include “cheap city centre hotel Dublin”, “stags weekend hotel temple bar Dublin” or “business hotel with gym and spa Wexford”. Effective search marketing campaigns tend to put a lot of effort into discovering effective long-tail terms, particularly for use in sponsored listings campaigns.

Q. How do you see the search market developing over the next few years? Will Google continue to dominate between now and, say, 2012? What’s the next big thing in search?

2012 is an awful long way off in search. You may as well ask the postman. Google is quite dominant now. There is no significant competitor in sight. The big things currently happening in search include image ads, video ads, mobile search, social networking, local search and vertical (sectoral) search.

The Evolution of a Search Marketer – By Jill Whalen

If you haven’t seen the High Rankings site, and you’re interested in learning about long-term sustainable ranking strategies for your site you should definitely take a look. Jill talks (writes) a lot of sense — which is refreshing in a world that, to the uninitiated, all too often seems to make absolutely none.

Check out the site and the associated High Rankins SEO forum — they’re full of great SEO insight and advice. There’s also a great SEO FAQ on the site that sheds light on a lot of the questions people new to SEO might have.

The more I think about this stuff the more I’m coming to realise that search optimisation / marketing is not about understanding automated robots and complex ranking algorithms (although some of the “experts” out there will probably disagree with me). Search marketing is about understanding people.

Understand the people using search, understand the people running the search engines, understand what both of those groups are trying to achieve… then align your site so that it meets their wants and needs.

Bingo! Sustainable high rankings.

People have this uncanny knack of wrapping things in layers of complexity that don’t really exist. More often than not poor ranking seems to stem from a failure to diligently apply basic principals in a consistent and iterative manner (something I’m as guilty of as the next man); not addressing the “prime directive” — which is to build a site with killer, information rich content that delivers what the user is looking for; or people basing their entire SEO efforts on finding and exploiting “loopholes” in the engines’ algorithms, and then wondering why their sites bomb out when the search engines slam the door.

If you’re looking to rank a site quickly to make a fast buck, those loopholes may well pay dividends. If you’re looking to build a sustainable, trusted online brand with sustainable long-term rankings though, it makes sense to work with the search engines and their users, rather than striving against them.

Technorati Tags: SEO , SEM , Search Engine Optimisation , Search Engine Marketing , digital marketing , internet marketing , digital marketing success

This is hardly going to be news to the SEO experts among you — but for those (like me) getting to grips with SEO for the first time, it’s a pretty important concept to grasp.

The 7 most used word phrase lengths for Web search engines averaged over a the two month period to the end of January 2004. (figures from OneStat.com)

Understanding how people are using search engines to find what they’re looking for lies at the very heart of your SEO/SEM efforts. Choosing the right keywords / phrases is critical both in terms of optimising (or optimizing, for Americans out there) your site for organic SEO, and choosing the phrases worth bidding on for your paid search / pay per click campaigns.

Web users are demanding more from search. They don’t want to trawl through spurious pages of results, and are getting much more sophisticated in the search terms they use in order to narrow those results down. Search engines are also getting better at handling these multi-word phrases, and are delivering back exactly what the user is looking for.

Search engines, and perhaps more importantly search users, are coming of age… typing more natural, and longer phrases into the search box is a natural extension of that.