Just in time marketing means understanding that you need to have an arsenal of techniques with which to react to changes, whether they’re in an engine’s algorithm or your seasonal business needs. It means that you aren’t actively holding onto anything that makes your marketing more cumbersome or cluttered, that you simply are able to adapt readily when necessary. This is like having a savings account that you aren’t using. It’s nice to know that, if you need it, you can access it. Just in time marketing means spending time reading, learning about what works and what doesn’t, and just generally staying informed so that you can react in a timely and appropriate manner. In case you care, just in time marketing has its roots in the Japanese factory industry. Instead of filling up their warehouses with parts needed, they’d simply order them just in time and save on storage. I may be oversimplifying but it’s not really a difficult concept to grasp.

It’s much less stressful than just in case marketing, where you continue to do things like spend $5000 a month on a banner ad that was good 2 years ago, isn’t doing much for you right now, but one day soon it might again. Yes, I know that the banner ad is enjoying a renaissance but I’m talking about the OLD banner ads, thanks. This is usually done by people who hang on to jeans that are 2 sizes too small in hopes that one day they’ll fit again. I don’t do that, for the record. I DO keep the ones that are 1 size too small though. Just in case marketing can tie up loads of your budget, and occupy your mind with things that aren’t going on RIGHT NOW. Even if you aren’t spending money actively, if you have to look at a PPC account for 50 keyphrases that you’re marketing that get zero traffic and maybe 5 total impressions per month, you’re spending time and effort that could be put to better use elsewhere. I say all this with complete respect, of course, as I tend to carry around an emergency string cheese wherever I go and I am rarely in an area with restricted cheese access.

Just in case marketing does have its place here, of course, but if you’ve done the basic SEO on a site, you’ve probably handled a lot of it already. The point of just in time marketing is the freedom that it gives you. If you’re not being pulled in a billion different useless directions, you’re more efficient with what you do need to be doing. As mentioned above, time spent monitoring something that isn’t productive for your needs is time taken away from something that could bring you more visibility. Instead of continuing to hope that someone searches for (insert obscure long-tailed keyphrase here), why not try and find some new keyphrases that will produce? I feel like one of those people who writes the “want to eat this, how about trying this instead, as it has half the fat?” articles now.

Obviously you’d not want to go to either of these extremes, as they each have their downsides. However, maybe if we spent a bit more time in the “just in time” mindset, we’d all be a lot more productive.

Two examples?

1. He specifically told us to either use nofollow or javascript for paid links so that we wouldn’t pass link juice through.
2. He specifically told us that nofollowing our own internal links would be a good way to sculpt our link juice so that it flowed where we wanted it to.

Now? Both of those specific instructions are null and void. If you followed some of those directions, you now have to start over. Why?

1. At the Google I/O conference recently, Vanessa Fox learned that Google can now understand more Javascript and that those links pass both anchor text and PageRank. Uh-oh. If you followed Matt’s instructions and used javascript on your paid links, you now have to go back and change them all - AGAIN - now that Google has changed things on their end.
2. At SMX today, Matt Cutts basically let everyone know that PageRank sculpting is now dead. He said “Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There’s this assumption that that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”). So now, all that work you did to sculpt your PR throughout your site, which Matt earlier suggested was a good idea, is work that is down the drain.

See folks, Google used to tell us that we should design for our users and NOT for the search engines. But then, they realized that they could manipulate us by giving us nuggets of info that we would chew like cows chew cuds, so they did. Unfortunately, that ends up hurting us in the end when they change their tactics every few months, and it may end up hurting our users as well, as we keep jumping every time we’re told to jump by the mighty G.

I think we all have enough information now that we can make wise decisions on our own. I think I’d rather go back to the dark, secretive days before our puppet strings were being pulled. At least then we’d be pulling our own strings rather than being manipulated like a bunch of muppets.

Matt, I appreciate the efforts and all, but I think maybe I’ll just go back to making decisions based on what my user needs. They are less likely to change their minds than Google is.

Ah, geek it
Ah, geek it

Oooh, Lisa baby
Julie baby
Oooh, Judith baby
Donna baby

Get up on this!

Ow! baby!
SEO Chicks are here!

[now wait a minute, y'all
This song ain't for everybody
Only the geeky people
So all you fly coders, get on out there and hack
Hack, I said!]

SEO Chicks here, and were in effect
Want you to geek it, babe
Codin’ by day then at night working up reports
Cmon girls, lets go show the guys that we know
How to become number one in the search engine results yo
Now geek it

Ah, geek it - geek it good
Ah, geek it - geek it real good
Ah, geek it - geek it good
Ah, geek it - g-geek it real good

Hey! ow!
geek it good!

Oooh, Steph-y baby
Jane-y, baby
Oooh, Anita baby
Chicky baby

geek it good
geek it real good
Ah, geek it
Ah, geek it

Yo, yo, yo, yo, LondonSEO
Yeah, you all go there, to get pissed
Online you saw the posts knowin’ what ya missed
Did you hear the algo’s changing like we knew it would?
Now fast go geek it

geek it good
geek it real good
geek it good
G-geek it real good

Ah, geek it
Rank up on G!

Look, my site’s now ranking high
I got lovin’ from the big G so now I’m fly

Ah, geek it

How do people use search these days? Well, Hitwise would be our first port of call with a secondary nod to Google and other keyword research tools then some online studies. Watching friends and family and asking questions seems to have drifted away a little as specialist companies who examine user interactions with technology tell us how people are using search.

What do you do to rank well? While it seems instinctive to those of us in the industry as well as there being a wealth of information online, it’s still more of a secondary thought after traditional advertising outlets, of which PPC is becoming increasingly a part of. Search may be in our blood, but it’s still an aside to most people.

Generally, people expect the web to work. They expect Google to work and yet when I searched for children’s toys and related terms, I had sex toy results displayed so it isn’t quite working. We assume Google uses context and search history and explain to customers that this is why results change and yet it doesn’t always work.

I love search – as an industry it’s full of geeks and those are the people I feel most comfortable with. As a discipline it is always changing and so like law I keep having to update and refresh my knowledge. It is oriented around people though, and my psychology degree gets a full workout regularly.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out in Twitter, there are thriving search communities that are yet isolated from others. Search is diverse, dynamic, engaging and challenging. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else and yet at times I read Twitter, blogs and the like and wonder at our omphalocentricity.

So I’ve made a resolution to email people outside search more and touch base with my friend building a boat to sail around the world more often. I’m going to meet up with my friend who teaches humanities and religious studies and talk mythology. I’m going to lunch with my friend who works with Native Americans in traditional health. I’m going to try and stop navel-gazing and get out more

What do you do to escape search-centricity?

Matt “B-Boy” Bailey and Judith “deCabbit” Lewis are activating their Wonder Twin powers into the shape on a series of affiliate surgeries. Housed at the i-level offices in W1 near Oxford Circus, these surgeries kick off with a kick ass SEO for affiliates session and the emergence of new technologies. It will be a solid 2 hours of pumping info so bring a notepad and a sharp number 2 because we are giving it up for you.

You want more? You know you do… FREE TICKETS for one thing! That’s right – 30 lucky people are going to get a ticket to this fab first event so toss your name in the hat by emailing matt.bailey@i-level.com and he’ll let you know by May 21st if you’re one of the lucky 30 who will be joining the two of us for two hours of information overload.

Need that in plain E? Read on…
The Affiliate Surgery will be hosted at i-level’s office close to Oxford Circus in Central London at 5-7pm on Tuesday May 26th.

Matt will be talking about the emergence of new technologies in the affiliate space and how these can be used to increase your site stickiness, click through rate and conversion, ultimately meaning more money for the affiliate. Matt is the current Chair of the IAB’s Affiliate Council and a popular speaker at events such as A4U Expo and AdTech. He is a passionate proponent of both performance marketing and Manchester City.

Also speaking will be Judith Lewis with her introduction (and so much more) to SEO for affiliates. Learn what you need to know about the fundamentals of how search engines work, how they rank pages, what every site can do and what you really need to know without fluff or filler. This course will be about the white hat, Google-allowed techniques for gaining a higher position in search. It will then go on to give specific examples for affiliates looking to earn even more by examining what is possible and what is practical in affiliate SEO. Delivered by popular speaker Judith Lewis, she shares her love of SEO and chocolate while teaching everyone what they can do themselves now to rank better and drive more traffic.

One definition of a hypocrite, according to dictionary.com, is:

a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, esp. one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.

Google’s stance on paid links:

…link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext…when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”

And yet, Google has NO PROBLEM profiting off of this very thing, as you can see by the screenshots I took for a search for [sell links].

Like I said, nothing new here. We’ve all seen this before, but I like to serve a reminder now and then, that Google does what is in the best interest of Google’s bottom line, so keep that in mind the next time you kneel down at the altar of Goog. Just sayin’…

It was slightly later than usual and yet earlier in the year than I was expecting this particular twist in my life to take. Things are always changing, and that should just be expected but this was a little weird and just slightly unsettling. It was a big change and it was forcing me to make alterations to my life I hadn’t expected to have to make.

The lights flickered again as a flash of lightening lit the sky. Sighing, I logged off, shut everything down and unplugged my main storage unit computer from the wall. This was getting me nowhere so I pulled the laptop out and worked on battery power.

“You know you want to…” was the subject of the email. While this usually meant spam, I happened to know the sender and so stared at the email. It could only mean one thing. I didn’t want to think about what it meant.

April. It was a beautiful April and I was married. I was happily married and my poor, long-suffering husband was about to lose me for yet another week to conferences and work. As the rain poured down ever harder, I considered what the contents of the email contained.

That this was an invitation was a given but the question was, an invitation to what. I thought back to the last time I had seen him. Nothing unusual had been mentioned but so much time had passed this time it was hard to think what it might mean.

We had joked that Amsterdam was a city of sex and drugs, neither of which ever appealed to me but had to him and thus while I had never visited, he had quite a bit. Here I was, on the edge of a work trip there and he had mercilessly teased me as a result.
“We both know what you’ll be doing in the coffee shops there kiddo” he said with half a smile.
“Ya, drinking coffee and trying to figure out if the baked goods are safe!” I retorted and we both laughed.

So here it was – an email with the subject “you know you want to” emblazoned across it and the prospect of a trip to Amsterdam in front of me. Did I? Could he know me better than myself? Did I secretly harbour some deep desire only someone that close and yet distant could see?

I ignored it and checked my itinerary – 9:30am the first day I was speaking on “International SEO” then I had to work the rest of the day and the next until I spoke on paid search. That this was at the Affiliates4U conference was interesting – it had become the alt.seo.con with some of the biggest names in the industry speaking at it. At about half the cost of SMX London, and with a dedicated search track that was always full to capacity, A4U Expo was an alternative search conference with 10% off using code SPK10 for search folk.

I kept ignoring it as I investigated the AAC itinerary. This conference also had a significant SEO track and was happening immediately following A4U. Both these conferences was what had brought me to travel to Amsterdam and the email.

I looked at it again. I had procrastinated some more by checking my KLM flight baggage allowance and found it slightly wanting but not unmanageable. I had a couple of suits to bring plus more comfy clothes.

The email stared at me.

I stared back at it.

I got up, went to the kitchen and got myself a cup of tea. What could be in it? It began to plague me. I started dreaming up possible contents and as each got less and less likely and more and more lewd, I walked up the stairs and sat back down at my office desk.

I opened the email.

After such a delay, and the endless possibilities of what could be in it I couldn’t believe the actual contents when I read it. In fact, I believe my jaw dropped. I’m not sure but I may have made an audible sound. The shock was simply too great.

The email was opened – there on the screen where anyone could see it. The email entitled “you know you want to…” had it’s contents brazenly splashed across the screen. It had given up its secret with nothing more than a click of a mouse.

The email had much to say and yet nothing I didn’t already know. I must have because it didn’t seem at all strange.

It told of the SMX London conference and 15% discount using code JULIEUK15 in May and its team-mate eMetrics also with a whopping 15% off using code SEOCH15 and suggested I go and we meet for a drink beforehand.

Nothing more.

How dull!

“you know the scene - very humdrum
boredom – boredom”
The Buzzcocks

There are a few things in life that bore me to tears, those being, in no proper order:

1.Popular literature (yet it sells like mad while no one gives a fuck about Milan Kundera over here.) Yes, I’m talking about John Grisham, and I’m talking about the author who wrote that book about the bad dog. I have a bad dog. I don’t need to read a book about one.

2.Popular music. No offense to most of my friends (hi Melinda!), but popular music sucks a duck’s ass. It sucks it through a bendy straw. It sucks it through a bendy straw that has enough of a tiny hole in it that, while you can still get something through it, there’s more effort and that whistly effect. I won’t even bother to name names here but come on, go and listen to The Clash and tell me that Fall Out Boy is a decent band. You can’t do it with a straight face.

3.Sports, with the exception of rugby, played in very hot weather, preferably with loads of rain and mud.

4.Wicca. Yes, I think it’s great that you enjoy the solstice and you like your hair dyed blue-black and down to your knees but honestly, I don’t feel like having to listen to you talk about goddesses, nor do I want to see your lovely collection of sword replicas.

5.Scrapbooking. I need say no more.

Obviously these are all actually quite popular, with the possible exception of Wicca unless you happen to run with my brother’s circle of friends. However, what if you do something for a living that bores the normal person? I’m not professing to speak for him or her, of course, but let’s take drill bits for an example.

You have a site about drill bits. Your site is one of the 4,890,000 results that Google shows for a drill bits search, God help you. You are, perhaps, situated quite poorly at spot number 650, you want to move up in the SERPs, and you’ve heard that link building can help you. How exactly are you going to reel in these links? With great content? Viral marketing? Link bait? I scoff, laugh, rinse and repeat. Actually link bait might work…I’d certainly be interested in a piece like “Top 10 Worst Accidents Due to Misuse of Drill Bits.”

You can apply this fact to any other fairly boring niche…there are, amazingly, loads and loads of people out there who share your boring interests. There are even people out there who make you look exciting due to their even more boring interests, but that’s another (scarier) story. You need to find a way to get your poor little boring message out there! Social media is there for you. As you’ve probably seen based on several Twitterers, boring pieces of useless information are still interesting enough for someone to post. I am actually very guilty of that too, but I like to think that my boring updates are simply a way for me to stay in touch with the Twitterverse. (There is one SEO that I follow who has the most banal things to say…my GOD I wish I had the balls to out him right here but I don’t.) Anyway, with the growth of social media, the odds of finding a community of folks who are interested in what you have to offer are very, very high. If you don’t find a community, form one.

How can you leverage this newfound community to help you build links? First of all, interaction with other like-minded individuals is always a decent way to build up relationships that can serve to do much more than simply bring in new links for your site. You can formulate new ideas based on what is and isn’t being done, you can find new stores who are looking for a better drill bits supplier, and you can subscribe to an online newsletter that is, wow, all about drill bits! Maybe the author of the aforementioned newsletter will ask you to contribute a piece on the merits of wood auger vs. cobalt drill bits, and you’ll get a lovely link that goes out to the 43 people who subscribe. OK all joking aside, you can see that being asked to contribute to a newsletter has the potential to bring more attention to your own business, of course. Maybe your piece is so good that it gets mentioned in a few sites run by newsletter readers, and maybe those sites have a huge reach across the industry. Thus you have some new links (which should be pushing you up above spot 650), but more importantly, you have some nice new traffic sources, too.

There are probably also a decent number of links pointing to an outdated page or site, in your boring niche. Surely someone who sells drill bits has declared bankruptcy or has moved on to selling actual drills…To make use of these currently broken links, contact the site owners and point out your own site, asking them to point the link to you instead. Since they’ve given a link to a drill bits site before, they shouldn’t balk at doing it again, right? Read Tom Critchlow’s SEOMoz post to learn all about this. In this same manner, search for mentions of your drill bits company to see if you have indeed been mentioned online, without a link. If you find any instances of this, contact the site owner to ask for a link. They’ll be glad to take a break from thinking about drill bits, I bet.

Then there’s the old alternative to link building in such a lovely risk-averse manner...you could, um, buy them. That’s right. I said it. I feel like Chris Rock now.

The gentleman who was arguing that Google was taking credit for that last click countered that Google was trading off others hard work.  For example, he said, Renault work hard making an advert about their new Clio car only for Google to force them to use paid advertising and stealing money as people go to Google to get more information about the new car.  Thus, since Google is stealing money from business, they are making money only because other people do the hard work for them.   Google thus was some sort of leech, draining money without making any effort. Well, even leeches make a bit of an effort and took thousands of evolutionary years to arrive at where they are.

Back when I started doing this SEO malarkey, the world was a different place. I’d been online for 10 years and in the previous 2 had heard more and more reference to something called “mosaic” and something about pages. You could see things on these pages! Unfortunately as someone who used raw telnet on a light computer this just was not possible but the online world was magnificent even without images.

Very quickly things changed and Windows 3.51 entered in to my life and the world got graphical. Google wasn’t around in 1996 but plenty of others were and many evolved in to the space with aggregators like Web Ferret and Dogpile bringing us a wider selection of search results. It was through Dogpile that I remember Google standing out. The results included actual on page text – a revolution!

What followed was a slow growth stage, then a heavy branding and marketing phase and now when certain parts of the world talk about wanting to find something online, they talk about “Googling” it. This came after only substantial marketing and technology efforts and the work that Google put in to their product should not be lightly dismissed.

Google did not simply form itself out of whole cloth and land a finished entity which cost nothing to develop and deploy – there’s millions behind this endeavour. It is able to make millions from its advertising platform because of the combined brand awareness and human nature.

I’m the first to admit to a love/hate relationship with Google. I miss the old keyword-stuffing days when it was easy to rank for anything. I’ll also be the first to admit Google is an effective monopoly in the UK and I think something has to be done. That does not make Google thieves, leeches, or sponges. They worked to become dominant and while I hope it goes the way of IM or Microsoft, we are where we are at the moment.

Google is not stealing money - they are not trading on the back of someone else’s hard work.  They are a dominant brand like Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and others.  Make the most of traffic they drive to your page by whatever route and get that conversion first time. Don’t blame Google for managing to win in a sector, learn to utilise them as a tool.

(rant over!)

I run a site that is technical in nature. No surprise there, if any of you know me. I have a fair few tech-oriented sites, though, so don’t assume you know which one I’m talking about. Because I’m always interested in diversifying my income stream, I am constantly trying new ad networks to see if any are going to make me rich and famous. (Actually, I’d be happy with just rich. Fame, not so much). One such ad network that I tried was a contextual CPC type similar to Adsense, but with some distinct differences. Let’s call this network NonSense, shall we?

If one were to just do a quick cursory glance at NonSense, one might think it was the next big thing in contextual ad serving. It had many improvements over Adsense, with lots of wonderful enhancements for publishers, specifically. The ads’ look and feel could be customized in ways far beyond what publishers were used to being offered, so I was looking forward to seeing some nice results.

After running the ads for a while, I was contacted by a friend who was disturbed by the eerie ads he was seeing on my site. The ads were obviously targeted at him - and him alone - because they had absolutely nothing to do with my site’s content (in any stretch of the imagination), but they had everything to do with a subject that he frequently searched on. It would have been nearly impossible to call it a coincidence based on the subjects involved, so I asked an ad network rep if perhaps some ads were being targeted based upon user behavior, rather than site content.

The answer: “Yes”.

Now, here’s the problem that I noticed over time. Because ads were often targeted to a user’s past behavior and interests, two things happened.

1) Users got freaked out. Many thought that my site had somehow invaded their privacy, read their minds, or in some way had obtained control over their search history. They did not connect the ads to the company serving the ads - they connected them with me personally - so they thought I was the one invading their privacy.

2) CTR was terrible. Worse than terrible. Almost non-existant. As it turned out, my users didn’t want to see ads based upon their interests or past behavior. Those that didn’t get creeped out by them, were simply uninterested in shifting their focus from one subject to another - even if that new subject was one that interested them. They had a goal, and the ads were in no way helping them to meet that goal. The result? They never clicked the ads, and “momma didn’t make no stinkin’ money”. (Momma in this case would be me, in case I confused you along the way there).

And that, my friends, is why I hope Google abandons its behaviorally-based ad serving on Adsense. My Adsense earnings have plummeted enough over the years, thank you very much, and I’d really hate to see them reach rock bottom because of this. Not only that, but I really don’t want to creep out my users. I kinda like ‘em, ya know?