It may not seem evident all the time, as I’d like, but I really do place a high value on civility. With the recent blog posts about how certain people in the SEO industry are constantly being harrassed by other SEOs asking them to Digg a story, etc., I have to wonder if barbarism is getting a hold on some of us in this industry.

It’s not just people bugging Rebecca and other “names” in SEO for votes either. That’s simply the latest thing that I’ve read about that disgusts me…it’s the blatant attacks that are being put out there for the world to see in comments, it’s email threats, and it’s the incessant bickering that goes on in the blogosphere in which people seem to feel obligated to publicly choose sides on issues that may or may not even affect them personally.

It’s seriously annoying, and while some people have indeed built a reputation for themselves as being outspoken, majorly annoying, and, let’s be honest, pretty rude, it’s not something that we should aim for. Chances are, if you’re one of these people and you find yourself gaining fans online, it’s because they’re scared to death of you. While inspiring fear in others does have its place, and its rewards, in this case it’s something that’s mostly just embarrassing. Save the fear for someone who deserves it, like the teenagers who walk through your yard and set off fireworks after 11 pm.

I have a hard time saying no to people. Just ask all the guys I dated in high school. OK that’s a joke…god almighty. It’s been drilled into my head that having no manners is worse than having no money. If someone spills coffee all over me, I’ll be the one profusely apologizing for having been in the area and possibly having caused the accident. When someone says “we’ve got a serious problem on a site” I’m usually the one saying “I bet it was me!” just to spare everyone else the potential humiliation of taking ownership of the infinite loop. I’ll take on any mindless task that’s handed out anywhere, unless it involves singing, giving up lattes for charity, or going into a public restroom. This is quite problematic at times, as it means that I’m usually insanely overloaded with a massive variety of crap to do. This is not out of fear; it’s my inability to be intentionally impolite.

Our entire culture, and not just in this industry, is becoming less nice it seems. I’m not saying anything new, of course, as you can read and hear about this phenomenon everywhere. Celebrities drive drunk, authors and scientists make racist statements, people honk and flip you off on the highway if you have an “Obama for President” sticker. I just think that, with the type of people that I know in this field, it’s really a shame to see some of us acting like spoiled little brats. It’s really not ok to act like a jerk constantly. It’s fine to complain, and to rant about something that really bothers you, but when you force everyone around you to yield to your will, you’ve crossed the line. Get some class.

Emailing threats to people isn’t nice. Neither is posting comments where you lay out your plan for the site owner to meet with an unfortunate accident. These are pretty obviously nasty things. Some barbarisms don’t seem so obvious to people, though, so let me lay some out for you…

Bugging people for social media votes isn’t nice. By doing this, you’re potentially forcing someone to be the bad guy by saying no to you. If you can handle that, and handle it nicely, then ask away, but don’t harrass people. I can attest that it’s not only the big names in this field that this happens to, either, so don’t think that just because someone isn’t yet well-known, he or she is open to your manipulative ways. If you insist on bugging people for this type of thing, at least indulge in bribery in which something lovely and tangible will become the property of the Digger or Sphinner. A new pair of boots is my current suggestion, but lattes work fine too although they don’t hold up too well in the mail. Send a Starbucks card at least.

Writing entire articles about the stupidity of someone is slightly nasty. Entities are fine to criticize though. And actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably ok to write about Jason Calacanis as well since he seems to ask for it nonstop. Even so, if you’re going to do this, at least have a bit of class and use some good words that people have to look up. Don’t just say “this guy is an asshole and he sucks” or something that shows a lack of imagination. Channel your inner Oscar Wilde and come up with something that makes the target step back and wonder, at least for a few minutes, whether or not he is actually being insulted.

Closing your group to outsiders is not something that sends off friendly vibes. Yes, I know there are private parties at conferences for specific reasons, and that’s fine, but please don’t make these so public that everyone feels like crap for not being invited. In this same vein, if someone new comments on your blog and you’ve never heard of them, at least take the time to figure out who he or she is and respond. I’m not suggesting that you have to respond to every single comment, but try to respond to most of them. If people are taking the time to interact with you, the least you can do is give them the same respect. And I beg you, don’t insult the person because not everyone is as nice as Stephanie Weingart and you may end up feeling like total crap for overreacting.

So be nice(r) if it doesn’t tax you too greatly. There are a lot of impressionable newbies in this industry, and showing them that being nasty gets you somewhere is going to do nothing good for all of us in the long run.

It’s not a secret that the SEO-Chicks are big Dazzlin Donna stalkers (ermmm fans..), so we begged (erm asked) if we could interview her for our blog.

For those of you that don’t know who Dazzlin Donna is, shame on you! Donna Fontenot (aka Dazzlin Donna) is a SEO guru from Southern Louisiana, she has been in the SEO industry for a very long time, she runs the excellent SEO blog SEO Scoop as well as the blog Dazzlin Donna. Donna is an SEO Chick of the highest class and someone we very much look up to.

If Donna was a character from Star Wars we think she would be Princess Leia!

Here are the questions we asked Donna and her answers:

1. What do you see as the primary motivation for SEO bloggers?

In most cases, an SEO blogger establishes credibility, which leads to social networking and links, which leads to traffic. Once the blogger has credibility and traffic, she can do whatever she wants with it from there.

I originally started SEO Scoop long before social networking was a “thing”, and I started it as a reference point. Instead of constantly answering the same questions over and over again, I wanted to be able to just point to a blog post that had the answer. Turned out to not be such a great idea, because it was just as much work to find the relevant blog post, as it was to just answer the question again. But luckily, I discovered that blogging had many other advantages beyond my original plan for it, so it went from there.

2. Why is there such a celebrity cult in the SEO industry?

Is it just the SEO industry? I think human nature tends to make us seek out the celebs in any field of interest to us. What I think is even more interesting is looking at what kind of person becomes a celebrity. In the entertainment industry, one might assume it’s beauty, but of course there are millions of gorgeous beauties who never make it to celeb status. In the SEO world, is it outspokenness? Integrity? Most visible?

But if you’re looking for a reason that might be unique to SEO, it’s probably that the industry is still shrouded in mystery. We can’t simply open up the Encylopedia Brittanica to find the answers to ranking in the top 10 for our selected keywords. Instead, we begin by reading and listening to others who claim to have accomplished the goals we seek. Once we find someone who appears to have the magical answers, we wrap that person in Merlin’s cloak, put a wand in her hand, and call her a wizard. Or maybe we wrap her in a long white robe, shave her head, place her atop a high mountain, and call her a guru. Whatever status we bestow upon her, she is now an official celebrity, and we wait nearby, hoping she will look upon us favorably and throw us a magic token or a profound truth now and then that we can use for ourselves. The more tokens and words of wisdom we receive, the higher our opinion of her.

3. How can we better use social media?

Use? Or abuse? LOL, j/k. I’m not sure I have any profound answers for this question. It takes a bit of work and skill to be able to remain consistently attractive to the social hounds, and there are some that are far better at it than I. Tamar is a great example of someone who has an incredible knack for playing social media like a skilled violinist. I think everyone probably starts out by trying to use more social networks than they should, and eventually figures out that there isn’t enough time in the day to really be able to keep up with them all. Once you figure that part out, the next step is analyzing which networks are most useful to you and your topic, and focus in on those. You’ll get farther – quicker – that way. But I’d go ask this same question to Tamar, if I were you.

4. Why don’t more good-looking men wear kilts?

Silly preconceived notions of what manhood is prevents many men from doing things that would otherwise attract women to them in droves. Or at least that’s my theory, but I’m no authority on such matters.

5. With the rapid popularity of SEO, why haven’t we yet seen a major movie/sitcom/novel about it?

I remember getting all excited when Sandra Bullock starred in The Net, way back in 1995, when only a few of us (relatively speaking) had actually used the Internet. It was still a mystery to much of the world, and that’s still how SEO is. We think it is popular, and it is certainly gaining in popularity all the time, but it is still a mystery to the world at large. I’m not sure everyone would really “get it” if it were turned into a major entertainment piece just yet. Then again, it might be educational!

6. What actor would play you in a movie?

Now that’s a really tough question. I spent more time on this one question than all the rest combined, but I finally made a decision. Jodie Foster.

7. Which SEO is your Obi One Kenobi?
There isn’t one. When the SEO Dream Team meme was going around, I had a heckuva time trying to cull it down to 7, as the rules stated. There’s no way I could narrow it down to one. Instead, I’d rather expand it to include several dozen. So many people out there have strengths that I look up to and strive to emulate. To choose one would require that I place them all into a mixing machine, shake them up, and magically turn them into one SuperSEO.

8. What’s your favourite movie?

As silly as it will sound, I’ll be honest – Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. What can I say? I’m a big fan of chicks kicking butt movies.

9. What is the last thing that really made you laugh?

The look on my grandbaby’s face when she opened up a present, revealing her first “real” laptop on her second birthday. She’s already a major gadget geek, and she’s constantly trying to sneak time on any of our computers. (She’s 2, remember). When she saw her very own laptop, complete with mouse, she went wild. Totally cracked me up.

10. If you went to your last ever SEO conference, who would you hang out with and why?

I haven’t yet been to one of the women’s luncheons, and I’m jealous as all get out that I haven’t been able to attend one yet. Nothing against the guys…I love ‘em all…but I really, really want to spend an hour or two just hangin’ with all the gals. All of you inspire me every single day.

Donna, thanks very much for a great interview. You rock!!

As predictable as the seasons are the debates that come and go regarding search optimisation.  As pages of publications flip and fingers whirr over keyboards, the change in the wind heralds yet another round of bashing search - and those of us who work in the industry.

Part of finding what we want on the World Wide Web involves a search of some sort.  We google on Google, ask on Ask, and search on Yahoo! & Live all the while attempting to uncover some piece of information, find that hidden gem.

Yet as the web gets more and more complex, we find ourselves abandoning traditional search techniques to utilise the ‘wisdom of crowds’ - looking to social search and Yahoo! answers, search trails and StumbleUpon to help us find our way online.

Does the new trend in using social resources spell the end of search?  Thankfully (for people like me) it does not.  Brand awareness, online marketing, being found on search, optimising for location, creating buzz and a dozen other things are now a part of search engine marketing and optimisation.

In this new Web 2.0 world, having an expert on your side is as important as ever, whether that expert is an agency or someone in-house.  Search will never die - the way in which we use the web and interact with engines like Yahoo! and Google will.

As a world class SEO, could you be replaced by an ape?

Chimpanzees and humans share anywhere from 98 to 99 percent of their DNA. And yes, a chimp is an ape, not a monkey. Apes don’t have tails, monkeys do. Knowing this, I’ll expect you to properly lecture young children at the zoo when they point at the chimps and yell “monkey!”

How are we similar? Well, for one thing, we both throw a lot of excrement around. Sure, humans may do it verbally but it’s not too different. Obviously we look similar, with some of us looking even more similar than others. Our brains and central nervous systems are quite alike as well. So with this in mind, could an ape do SEO? Hell yes. There’s no one better to back this up than Jane Goodall either…and please, no nasty comments about Jane or I’ll seriously come find you and string your arse up.

Communicating
Chimps have been shown to have learned close to 300 or more signs in sign language. That’s about 295 more than I know. One potential drawback here is that “…chimpanzees have not developed sophisticated spoken language.” Well, a lot of SEOs haven’t either. So sure, chimps may not be able to PRONOUNCE certain words but maybe you’ll luck up and get some deaf clients.

Client Interaction
If you’ve ever had a stiff interaction (ahem) with a client who was immune to your considerable charm and didn’t laugh when he said “My boss doesn’t see eye to eye with me on this” and you said “why, is he a midget?”, you should know that you could have simply sent your chimp in for the meeting. He’d have done a better job and would have been far more entertaining, most likely. Especially if he had on a cute little oxford shirt, khaki pants, and desert boots.

Coding
Basic HTML is just that, basic. It’s actually basic as hell. 10 year olds can code HTML. Now, with the popularity of code-generating software and content management systems, you can easily get away with not knowing it anyway. This leaves the door open for your friendly neighborhood chimp to come in and start clicking keys. Sooner or later, he’ll get a Wordpress blog started.

Analytical Skills
Chimps are “…capable of reasoned thought, abstraction, generalization, symbolic representation and a concept of self.” Again, this is more than I can say for a few SEOs. Most of us DO have a concept of self but it tends to be exaggerated in some cases. You won’t find that in chimps though. They’re very modest creatures, except when they’re in the mood for sexy time. While a chimp may not actually be able to interpret an Analytics report, he can at least hit the print button and hold up a printout, gesturing at it the same way you would. No client expects you to actually know anything about the damn numbers!!!

Following Google’s Guidelines
Well, I am at a loss here. They’re too feckin’ complicated for me to understand usually, so I wouldn’t expect a chimp to be able to do this properly. However, knowing there are chimps out there doing SEO might make Google clarify their guidelines in the interest of making the web a better place.

Running PPC Campaigns
Chimps might have some trouble here. They seem to be comedians who’d jack up the cost per click prices just to get a good laugh. However, is that not something you’ve done at some point? Or is it just me? A chimp could set up some ads and get them going and just let them roll…needing only minimal assistance at best. Or, you could simply have another human underling set up the ads and let the chimp login and check on them every day. He need not actually do any examination of the campaigns, of course. The key here is that he LOOKS like he’s doing it.

Building Links
Judging by the fact that chimps tend to get the most attention at the zoo, it’s obvious to me that they’d also get the most links. Everyone likes a chimp. If said chimp had to pursue inbound links, it would be quite simple to set up an email system where the chimp hit a button and bam, email requests are sent out and the chimp can take a load off, pop open a can of Budweiser (bottle openers might be dangerous with chimps and you don’t want to get hit by a glass bottle) and watch the links come pouring in, laughing all the way to his chimp bank.

Social Media
This is probably the area in which chimps would seriously excel. Chimps are social creatures, and they probably have better social skills than many of us. If a chimp requested to add me as a friend on Facebook, I’d be insane not to do it! How cool would that be anyway, to have a chimp for a Facebook friend? Chimps can use cameras, and can probably use Flickr software too. Chimps can click on the “Sphinn this” link, or Stumbleupon a website. Chimps could get Linked In, too, and show off their resumes.

Conferences
I’d definitely have a drink with a chimp at a bar after a conference. Wouldn’t you? Naturally I’d make him pay though…I’ve had drinks with some really hairy men, many of whom were also short, so I have experience with this type of thing already. Chimps are chick magnets too, especially when they have gleaming gold pendants nestled in those hairy chimp chests. Sociable chimps also “travel around in small groups of up to six, the membership of which is always changing as individuals wander off on their own for period of time, or join other groups.” This is a lot like the SEOMoz crew or the Google clan if you think about it. Chimps are natural networkers. They can possibly fake being interested in what other people are saying better than I can, too.

So perk up. At least you aren’t in danger of being replaced by a bag of sand. Not yet, anyway.

Wohaaa, now I’m so excited about this I can barely control myself (barely I said!!). It’s all confirmed, hopefully they can’t change their mind now =) I am speaking at SMX London on Thursday the 15th November at 1-2:15 pm (ok too many details, ha!). I’m on the panel “Leveraging Social Media Networks” and then, on the 2nd day, 16th November I’m on the panel at 10:45 speaking on !Search Marketing for B2B Companies!.

As a speaker I can offer a 10% discount to SEO-Chicks readers,just send an email to seochicks[at]yahoo.co.uk and I’ll email you a discount code.

Also worth putting in your diary is the big LondonSEO party on Friday the 16th after the conference, although the evilgreendonkey hasn’t updated the LondonSEO blog with details yet but he has opened a facebook group for the party called “LondonSEO @ SMX London 2007”. So go and add yourself to the group! If you are not attending the conference itself I really recommend you make the party, it will be a fantastic network opportunity.

So if you are going to SMX London this November, I am expecting your support at the session I’m speaking on. Or else!?!!

Me Julie I wish you could be there and hold my hand…..aghhh….

It’s all over the blogosphere (a word that I hate but hey, it works here) that PageRank has decreased for many sites recently, possibly due to them being penalized for buying links. Google isn’t confirming the reason right now. Normally we try not to comment on items that have been commented upon endlessly, but I’ll make an exception here since a very sweet reader asked for my opinion and, when informed that I wasn’t planning to write about it since everyone else was doing so already, he said that he wasn’t planning on reading anyone else’s opinion. He wanted mine, so here you go…and thanks Gene. You’ve obviously received the bribery check.

Here’s my crackpot theory: Google drops the PageRank for enough sites that it becomes noteworthy, bloggers take to the net and discuss/fume/rant for a bit, everyone speculates that it’s a paid link witchhunt, and fear of Google is renewed. Paid links become the next really dirty thing in SEO. Sites lose some of their “authority” and rush to spend more money in paid (Google) ads just to make a preemptive strike towards any potential loss of rankings and/or traffic. Google, as always, wins.

Google is a seriously cocky enterprise. Yes, they probably do deserve to be, but cockiness is always an ugly trait that usually gets worse and only very, very rarely gets better until something extremely humbling happens. Since we don’t really have a major contender in the engine world right now, I don’t expect the humbling to happen any time soon. So, with all of us freaking out about PageRank decreases, they can easily see that, once again, they have successfully scared the bejaysus out of all of us. This is bad because it makes them strut around like a mean little rooster. Note that, in the spirit of maturity (newfound, no less), I am not making any cock jokes. Not right now, at least.

I do believe that Google wants to prevent what they view as the buying and selling of authority, just as I do believe that they want to make the user experience the best possible. My issue with them is their motive for all of this…I certainly do not believe that they are simply seriously trying to make the net a better place just because they’re all decent people and it’s the right thing to do. If the recent PageRank decrease is, in fact, an effort to crack down on sites that buy links, why aren’t they coming right out and saying that? Because it imposes fear on people who might want to somehow try and work the system that THEY created. They’re not really big fans of exploitation you know. They built an algorithm based on promoting sites that had great inbound links. If they failed to imagine that people would exploit that, they’re bigger idiots than I thought previously.

Apparently many of the sites that are popular in Digg have had their PageRank lowered. What’s the motive HERE? As many people have pointed out, not all of the affected sites DO buy links. Many of them are, reputedly, being smacked because they are in some way associated with some potentially iffy interlinking. So the lesson here, one of fear again, is that you really should be careful about your associations. That sounds very high school doesn’t it? If you’re friends with this group, we’ll throw you out of the math club! OK that never happened but the fear of it still rings loudly in my head at times like this.

Overall, I don’t buy the notion that Google updates its algorithm for the benefit of humanity. I doubt that you do, either, of course, but since we all have to deal with Google, what can be done? You can’t simply ignore them. The alternatives are highly unattractive. If you keep doing what they say is big bad stuff, you’re going to risk having the rug pulled out from under you at some point. The best solution is to continue to find ways to hide it…as much as all the whitehats criticize blackhats, it’s times like this when they should be looking to them for advice. It’s not terribly difficult to hide the fact that your links are paid, after all. Hiding your interlinking blog schemes may be a bit tricky though…but someone will find a way, and it will be made public, and we’ll do it, and then they’ll catch it and there will be another update. THAT aspect of Google isn’t going away any time soon.

I recently overheard (hence the reference to ‘grapevines’ in my title ;o) two interesting facts about how Google evaluates the legitimacy of a site. So - being a more of a marketing orientated person than an SEO one, I wanted to put the two out there and see if anyone can offer to shed a bit of light over the reliability of this info:

1. Is it true that if Google sees more than 88 outbound list on a single domain, they are likely to consider it a ’scraper’ site? Now, I presume that it would also depend on a combination of a few other factors - like the age of the domain… But can you confirm or deny the essence of the core statement?




2. And secondly, is it true that if you bought a new domain, you should register it for longer than the initial 1 year, if you wanted to be taken more seriously by Google and possibly avoid spending too long in its ’sand box’? (of course only if you intended on keeping the domain in the long term).

Thanks in advance :o)

If you’ve ever extolled the virtues of the total accuracy of online metrics to anyone, you’ve been guilty of lying and you’re going to burn in hell. I’ll be there too though, so try and find some good indie music and maybe some cheese dip and try and drag those along.

In web metrics, discrepancies abound. If you’ve ever run two sets of metrics on the exact same data, you’ve most likely received two totally different sets of numbers. There are reasons for that, of course, but they may not make sense to someone who isn’t overly technical (or bright, like many of my past clients.) So when we’re telling someone that yes, he or she should funnel more cash into online marketing because it’s really easy to get accurate stats, what we’re really saying is that yes, he or she should funnel more cash into online marketing because the stats are probably more accurate than offline measurements, but they’re still not REALLY really accurate.

Like many of our SEO arguments that we make to each other and to our clients, the accurate measurement argument is a relative one. You obviously cannot accurately measure the number of viewings of a highway billboard, for example, even if you knew the exact number of people who’d driven past it in a certain period of time. If any of those drivers/riders were like me, they’d have been paying strict attention to the immediate dangers of highway life (bad song on the radio, band of wandering midgets who’ve gotten loose from the circus, those dusty plant things that roll down the streets in Westerns, etc.) You may have circulation numbers of a periodical but you have no clue as to whether the subcriber even opened it. You can’t tell when someone’s turned down the volume on the radio when a commercial is aired.

Online measurements, at least, are a bit more easy to conduct, since a user has to do something in order to trigger his or her action to be recorded. However, there’s quite a lot that goes on with the programs used to measure this raw data. Depending on your session length, for instance, you could count a visitor once or twice. When I used to, ahem, cloak my sites, I realized that the analytics program I used was counting each hit twice, counting the cloaked page once and the actual page served to the user once. Another analytics program I used on the exact same sites did not do this, though.

So, if we can agree that web metrics are MORE accurate than most other forms of marketing measurements, what difference does it really make if they’re still potentially not actually all that accurate? If we’re used to estimates from keyword software and we use those as a guideline for how to best utilize our content to capture the highest ranking spots and the most converting users, why can’t we be happy with inaccuracy in terms of how many people visited our site this month?

The New York Times has a great article about the dangers of online web metric inaccuracy, one which lays out the major problem with this: advertiser money. The following bits are the most telling…

“Many advertisers pay Web publishers each time their ad gets an impression, meaning that it is viewed by a reader, but each company uses its own methodology to count impressions.” So think about it: if you’re being told that your ad has been viewed 10 million times, you’re going to be charged for that. What if it had truly only been viewed 8 million times? You’re paying for 2 million views that never happened.

For major advertisers being lured by sites with the premise that their viewership is massive, this kind of discrepancy can also add up to tons of lost money, whether it’s being lost by inflated stats or by the promise of a high readership that turns out to be untrue. Speaking about site owners attempting to gain major advertisers, Gian M. Fulgoni, the chairman of ComScore, states that “It’s in their interest to make their audience look as big as possible.”

“To make matters more complicated, consumers who delete cookies — small bits of computer code that track their online wanderings — are also overcounted by publishers’ servers, by most accounts. Some news sites have tried to improve their systems by asking their visitors to register, but many people refuse.” I delete my cookies all the time, especially when I get bored. I also refuse to register on most of the sites that ask for it just to be contrary. I’m obviously adding to the problem here but I see no way around that.

Should we have to settle for constant inaccuracy? Probably so, if we’re dealing with any form of marketing. I’m not really all that concerned if I get two sets of visitor numbers for the same site, but what DOES seriously concern me is that my conversions may not be accurate. Currently I run conversion tracking on a small set of paid ads for a client, and he can verify that those numbers are correct because the conversion is on a contact us form that he receives. Currently, that’s about the only bit of accuracy that I’m enjoying though. It would be nice if that changed, but I’m not too optimistic about it right now.

Although I’m principally a big SEO fan I also value Pay Per Click and I really do think it’s a market for both, and in some cases the two markets have a totally different audience. In my personal experience I would always recommend for any new clients to start off doing both, for many reasons:

#1 – Keyword and ad testing
Pay Per Click allows you the best and most in-depth keyword research for you to implement in your organic optimisation. It can also give you an advantage in terms of message testing through the ads, and implementing this throughout your organic optimistation.

#2 – Different audiences
Now this might sound crazy, but I have been known to run PPC campaigns for keywords that my client is already ranking on the first page on the Organic SERPs. Why? It seems that some people simply trust the paid listings more, or just prefers them. This could be for many reasons, the PPC ads are often very precise and to the point. Quite often search marketers spend more time optimising their PPC ad then they do their organic ad (I made that up, it’s basically the title and the meta description tag).

I know I have been guilty of this! With a PPC campaign you are likely to:
a) have the keyword you are bidding for in the actual ad itself b) keep it short but descriptive
c) put keyword in the display URL etc

Using the PPC ad for testing what to use in your “organic ad” is more than likely going to increase your CTR in the organic listings.

Example PPC Ad

All keywords within this ad are related to Saab 9-3 and the convertible and goes directly to a page on the website about relevant offers.

Example Organic ad

It’s very relevant for offer related keywords but could possibly get more click throughs for Saab 9-3 convertible keywords if it actually had Saab 9-3 in the title tag? This might not be the perfect example as my problem with this site was that all the different Saab model offers are on the same page. But you get my drift?

But back to the point, the audience might actually be different too, some people simply prefer the organic results and some prefers the paid results. Sometimes it might actually benefit to actually bid for a keyword you are already ranking for in the organic results. BUT obviously there are also cost issues related to this, for example it wouldn’t make sense to bid for a keyword that costs £3 a click when you are already listed as number one in the organic results. You could, but I wouldn’t. One of my clients does this and it drives me up the wall. Don’t waste your money, obviously this depends how much the potential conversion is worth. If the potential conversion is worth £5k the £3 per click would make sense, doh!

#3 – Increasing traffic and popularity
Having a PPC campaign backing up your online marketing efforts can have a positive effect on your search engine optimisation efforts. Popularity is believed to be part of the search engine algorithms. I have seen this happen over and over again, organic traffic has decreased once PPC activity has paused or stopped. Usually if I have a brand new website on a spanking new domain I would most definitely run a PPC campaign to support the launch and for a good few months until the site is starting to appear within the organic results. Then gradually I would decrease the PPC spend once the organic referrals increased.

# 4 – You won’t ever rank for EVERY keyword/term you want
It’s quite logical that you can’t rank for every keyword/term you want to appear for, with careful research and an ongoing PPC campaign you can determine which keywords makes sense to target organically and which to target in PPC campaigns. Again costs should come into these considerations, example: Let’s say you had to choose between two keywords/terms to optimise a page for on your/your client’s website:

Keyword 1 costs an average of £1 per click on Google AdWords, has an average monthly impression of 3000

Keyword 2 costs an average of £3 per click on Google AdWords, and has an average monthly impression of 5000

Which one should you optimise organically for and which keyword should you whack on your PPC? See where I’m going with this one??

Anyway to sum it up, excluding PPC is just plain stupid, it should be part of your overall online strategy, but if I had to choose between PPC and SEO to invest, it’s buying the house every time!

Ps: for the record, the house analogy means bullocks all coming from someone that is still renting at 29! Ha!

Today seems like a good day for a bit of silliness with almost no link to SEO at all.  As with all things in my life, there is a link to SEO anyway, despite its tenuous nature.

Japanese animation, Pioneer and cabbits are inexorably linked for me.  While some may enjoy other anime (and I am a huge fan of “Bubblegum Crists”, “Ranma ½” and Lodoss Wars”), I love “Tenchi Muyo”.  In this series there is a character that is small, cute and furry called “Ryo-oh-ki” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryo-Ohki .  Now, Ryo-oh-ki’s name possibly translates as “something small that has the potential to be big” which is fitting since she can change from a small cabbit to a really big spaceship.

Now, in the anime (short for Japanese animation), Ryo-oh-ki does cute, if uncoordinated, things like walking in to glass doors, rolling down hills, just being cute, etc.  My husband, also a fan, decided that this character blended the correct amount of lack of coordination and cuteness to match me and my agility.  Apparently I rolled a 2 on a 3D6 for dexterity. (For non-gamers – 3D6 relates to rolling three dice having 6 sides each, numbered from one to six.)

How does this relate to SEO?  Searching for something is all about trying to find something and so I wanted to be found.  Now, being fond of my husband, I decided to use the cabbit term of affection online as a distinctive name.  I share the same name as a journalist, doctor and other persons of note so it seemed sensible.  The popularity of Tenchi Muyo meant it was not possible to easily carve out a distinctive identity.

In creating a distinctive identity I can do a vanity search on, I had to create a new name.  I noticed some names started with a lower case “de” which could mean “the” and so as I am ‘the cabbit’ I changed that to ‘deCabbit’.  Chick logic, apparently

These days, part of the process of naming a business, movie or other big budget enterprise, is the availability of the “.com” domain name.  Fail this initial test and the name is often scrapped.  In building a brand with a unique identity the “.com” is essential and failing to secure it before a cyber-squatter does could cost your business thousands in lost traffic and costs of buying the name.

So there you have it.  I am “deCabbit” because I wanted to be able to do a vanity search and find me.  I wanted friends to be able to find me and I wanted a unique, cute, catchy alt.name to be known by.  I wanted my own domain name I could post silly stuff to.  And like anyone, I was hoping for some (link) love…