Wilks Media at Conferences

We will be attending TRAFFIC Downunder on the Gold Coast, as well as Ben Wilks sitting on the SEO Panel for CAP Downunder.

Been a Long, Long Time

Our first post for 2008, what a year it has been. With Wilks Media effectively closed for business, only servicing key clients and spending four and a half months travelling Asia, Europe and the UK.

2008 marked the year when Wilks Media stopped servicing new clients and focused on the development of over 600 domain names marked for development. It's been an interesting ride indeed and some of the Wilks Media Websites have been performing exceptionally well.

In the Press

I was quoted several times in this article, Chasing Google Sheriff, in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, & Brisbane Times, about Google (Matt Cutts the Sheriff), Blackhat and the coveted top search positions. It was written by Dan Skeen.

Mr Wilks often works on performance-based payment plans, so his ability to manipulate search engine rankings is directly related to his income. He chooses from an arsenal of no-risk to high-risk tactics based on client needs.

"I don't discriminate, because I'm a consultant; I'm paid to know both sides," he says. "It comes down to the client being fully aware of what they are doing and the implications of how aggressive they want to be."

Certainly, there are some categories in which an aggressive approach is more common. These typically involve drugs, sex or gambling, a trio that insiders have labelled PPC, an acronym for both "pay per click" advertising and "porn, pills and casinos".

In these areas, Mr Wilks says, a conservative approach is likely to leave you buried in search-engine rankings.

His view is that the aggressiveness of the competition should determine the appropriate level of risk

"A lot of it is just knowing all the processes involved, being able to put together a game plan marketing the business strategy versus just specific tactics," Mr Malicoat says.

Sites such as Digg, Slashdot and Reddit are attractive forums for acquiring links and driving a flood of traffic.

Some SEO experts have proven adept at gaining mindshare in these communities by creating and submitting popular content items, often referred to as "linkbait".

"For larger clients it's definitely a massive opportunity, especially for something new, because the social media is basically for early adopters. If you start it there it will go out really fast," Ben Wilks says.

Certainly among the players in this field you will find some of the most diverse tool kits and adaptable approaches of any profession.

Reflecting on more than 10 years of chasing the top-ranked search result, Mr Wilks adopts a flexible outlook that should serve him well for the next decade:

"It's a totally different landscape, but I think that is part of the whole SEO consultant thing," he says.

"You need to be adaptive and ready for the next wave, whatever it might be."

The above quotes came from this articles about Google, Blackhat & Matt Cutts the Sheriff.

Got a backlink too ;-) So massive thanks to Dan Skeen for interviewing me and doing such a great write-up. Much appreciated Dan, big cheers mate!

The Day I became a Domain Broker, 8/8/2007

On the 8/8/07 the WhoIs changed on one of Australia's top holiday destination .com domain names. When questioned during a recent interview the domain broker, was not prepared to go into details, except to add;

"We are very pleased with this sale and potential partnerships that may ensue as a result of the expansive development at this premium web address."

Filed under: Qld .com Geo Domain Sold For 90K AUD

Quote of the Week

This was my favourite quote of the week at stuntdubl.com ranting about Calcanis.

You'd probably be getting much more respect now, if you hadn't tried baiting a bunch of people who study human behavior for a living.

Australia.com Web Site Review

Frankly I am embarrassed to be an Aussie just now. I just heard via the TV that Australia.com has had a makeover and that it received 'thousands of visits a year'. I am fairly sure they meant millions.

If you check the archive you will see that Australia.com has always been a little lack-lustre. I could have picked the old design, site development and marketing apart and come up with a list that would almost amount to a total over haul. This latest effort is so embarrassing I would recommend rebuilding and revisiting the entire strategy asap.

A web site of such national significance as australia.com should be something special and a gateway to the entire country. A gateway that should have far more features and be developed to attract and maintain the maximum amount of visitors for the longest amount of time possible. Currently the web site is not only a search engine marketing disaster, but a web standards nightmare, ignoring basic accessibility and logic.

With a confusing user interface and a lengthy load time that delivered a sub-standard and long opening presentation. I am on a fairly regular broadband plan and it's generally quite fast. It's a total failure.

Australia.com, where the bloody hell are your heads at?

FLASH HAS NEVER BEEN, NOR WILL EVER BE A WEB DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM. Say goodbye to all search rankings that you hardly had to start with and I cannot believe that in today's modern age you don't have a special section for Australian's to add their travel businesses.

You have the power to make a large difference, yet you don't realise you can take every Australian small business and give them a massive exposure via your premium domain name. I'd be happy to help give you a few pointers anytime.

New Directions

I have had a steady group of clients over the past couple of years and referrals have been kind to me and most of my clients are still in touch, or are doing their own SEO/SEM work based on what we taught them. All my clients are great, from tropical getaways in the Daintree Rainforest, Cheap Luggage in Sydney, Holiday Packages across North Queensland, State Portals, National Portals, Opal & Gemstone Sites and a whole range of stuff I am not allowed to disclose.

Things are really going well, everything is running smooth and I have the capacity to serve maybe two small clients or one more large client and remain sain. Quality of life is paramount to everything I do :D I have witnessed a lot of people burn out and it's clear where they go wrong. Work smarter, not harder.

So where am I going with all this? Well basically I said this year would be big, and so far it's sure living up to predications. Around three months ago I decided I'd like to take my business to new levels, beyond current growth. A natural progression that allows me to take my core seo business model to a new level and affords me far greater revenue and control.

Currently I work mostly on client website's. We only really take on clients that will make decent money online and have a business model suited to or strictly web based. I have always priced my services so they are high enough to be profitable yet also within the reach of small business. I do this mainly due to my interest in local search, but also to help the business community and give a little knowledge away and move the space forward a little. I'd rather share, that's just how I am, there is more than enough to go around and it all cross promotes somehow.

This year I am going to put prices up on traditional seo services and start developing my own domains and traffic/revenue sources. Those close to me know I have always owned around 20 - 25 domain names and I am set to expand on this and recently made the decision to move from seo to full time domaining.

To me it's a logical progression. I have never viewed myself as strictly an SEO company, a SEM company, however you put it because there is so much more to it.

Once you start developing dynamic ecommerce sites and gain an insight into where the web is at and where it's going you start to see it's very akin to a land grab. Only this time around I will be owning the traffic and building memorable domain names that find and convert new customers while I sleep.

I have managed to secure around 200 domain names, 150 I could not live without, just this year. I will slowly develop these out over the next year until all are ROI positive (initial tests look good), memorable and either monitised, partnerships set up or rented.

For me it has been a refreshing change and I have really enjoyed exploring some of the expert commentary available out there today and thinking outside the box. Revenue model creation and testing is very exciting, for a money and search engine standpoint.

I really need to start exploring more aftermarket names, as well as the exploration tools I am using and start to roll some of them together.

I am also looking for a partner. Someone that is driven, can write well, know's the Web, has domains, has SEO know how, Money and a view for the future, if this is you contact me please. I need help as I have so many great ideas that could really be adding to the entire project no-end.

So there you have it. I have confessed. I am now a domainer. Now I need cool geek domainer friends, anyone? I have ideas for cool tools@!

Frank Schilling lashes out at Theo Hnarakis

It's a pity that Theo Hnarakis would say in-accurate things that weaken his Country's name space in order to benefit his company. Deregulation will help the Australian name-space to thrive.

I am all for protecting legitimate famous trademarks for the benefit of those who have built exclusive value within their brand, but I do not support giving covetous, over-reaching latecomers the opportunity rewrite history by inequitably unseating entrepreneurs from generic domain names.

It's sad that Mr. Hnarakis (the chief of MelbourneIT) would try to work against a process which would ultimately help his Country's name-space to thrive for all its citizenry by making it more open, available and globally relevant.

Update/Ramble

I'm sitting here on a hot Autumn afternoon relaxing on the couch feeling good about the world. All my main clients have been in contact today and are all quite happy.

A revenue share I have been working on is coming along nicely and I have almost sorted the mess of code and redirects (* all 302's*) I started out with.

These guys have sold accommodation, holidays, tours and various other bits in their local region for over 35 years and have wholesale arrangements with most of the larger hotel chains. (They buy up rooms in hotels, then onsell them). Their holiday packages are very competitively priced and they know their product well. They also have a very good idea of what's involved (especially now) and are very responsive to new ideas. All in all things are looking great (which is important as I am devoting quite a large amount of time to this).

These guys are all such a pleasure to deal with and it looks like I have landed myself a fairly cool role in a very relaxed company.

Why do I post this shit? Basically as a timestamp to myself and a record of some of the stuff I do.

So, it's the 28th March, client pays $200 - $250 per day to Google Adwords program. Website's receive total of approx 8K - 10.5K unique's per month.

Goal: Turn off Adsense in 6 months time (when traffic is about 10K+ organic unique's), build traffic to 40K unique's over 1 year period.

Should be a fun one anyway. If anyone has Queensland related holiday traffic, hit me up I want to buy it.

Have you seen the latest on Splogspot?

We always knew Blogspot was basically a pile and would ultimately be overcome by zealous sploggers, but 3 in 4 Blogs ranking for 'commercial terms' are SPAM?? Forgive me but I think that is kinda cool.

Microsoft launched a study into Blogspot spam, an interesting angle to attack poor old Goog, Adsense, Adwords and Blogger all at once. Good angle Microsoft, go click fraud next. (or do a long-term behavioural study and see what data they really use, the use that for MSN Search).

From Article: Study Exposes 'Search Spam'

But a new study by a team of Microsoft Corp. and University of California researchers has shed light on how so-called "search spammers" work and how advertisers can help stop the practice.

"By exposing the end-to-end search spamming activities, we hope to.. encourage advertisers to scrutinize those syndicators and traffic affiliates who are profiting from spam traffic at the expense of the long-term health of the Web," wrote authors Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma of Microsoft Research and Yuan Niu and Hao Chen of the University of California in Davis. Their research will be reviewed at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta, in May.

The irony of the situation is the fact MSN rank Blogspot high in their search results (to the point of stupidity at one stage).

Google Phone Confirmed by Google Engineer

The head of Google in Spain and Portugal, Isabel Aguilera has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. "Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone,". This confirmation was received via Spanish News site Noticias.com

This is a sign of some very interesting times for search in general and I think the average business had better start paying the online world some serious attention! Online is the new offline!

Linkedin

Linkedin is really quite a well done 2.0 site. I cannot say I agree with the monitisation model but the site is a good example of what the Web 2.0 world can do.

Guy Kawasaki has written a good article about ways to use Linkedin.

2.0 Publisher Bashes SEO, Google & Threadwatch - OH THE IRONY

Ok, this one is actually kind of interesting. A lovely Publishing 2.0 guy named Scott Karp has been busy bashing SEO, Threadwatch.org and Google as well. Very funny considering SEO is top of the online marketing tree, and is actually far more publishing than any other media these days. Scott Karp has been slapped before (by none other than Natasha, that lovely girl from marketing :D), but obviously is not interested in the opinions of those that do the Google hard work. Knowledge is power, adapt or die.

Also I agree with what StuntDubl said in the first linked post, however Todd ignorance is no excuse, if he wasn't spouting Publishing 2.0 it would be far different.

Latest Developments

2007 has been a massive year so far and all systems are firing. With a good spread of projects across multiple industries we have launched over 10 new sites and are managing around 5 new campaigns.

As always we are on the look out for good website traffic and quality paid links. Please contact us if you have a good quality Australian directory and are willing to do a deal on bulk submissions.

Sky and Google Alliance

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky), the UK's leading entertainment company, and Google today announced plans to work together in bringing ground-breaking web-based services to Sky's community of broadband internet customers.

Added:
British Sky Broadcasting, (39% owned by News Corp.) will deploy white label versions of Gmail and YouTube.

United Kingdom's digital pay-television giant offering an online video-sharing platform based on Google's popular YouTube platform. BSkyB will also allow be throwing a bone to Google's nascent Google Apps for Your Domain feature by branding Google's Gmail service for folks interested in signing up for @Sky.com email accounts.

Bitten by the Google Spider

A well constructed Forbes article on PPC arbitrage. Michael Gray, GrayWolf & Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney are both quoted & misquoted.

Tactical Internet Marketing Articles

Some great tactical Internet marketing articles from a range of perspectives. Skim your way through these, some of them are really good.

Cool SEO Quote of the Week

This one came flew out a client's mouth at a meeting today. It was so good I made him write it down.

Anyone who's in the Yellow Pages and not spending money on SEO is a fuckwit.

Internet Video; Turn Here Productions

They shoot the Internet Video then map into local geographic directories via Google Earth & some other stuff. The Google video directory is cool.

SEM budgets target direct sales over branding

According to SEMPO, organic search (SEO) is still the preferred way to spend marketing budget dollars, with 9 out of 10 senior managers either moderately or heavily involved in SEM.

Brand awareness as an objective has lost its top spot from last year, with only 53 percent of respondents seeing that as their prime reason to use SEM. Forty-eight percent cited lead generation.

But even as corporate advertisers shift their priorities, survey findings show that SEM no longer is taking dollars away from other marketing channels, SEMPO found. It has now gained credentials as part of the overall marketing mix.

Forty-two percent of those advertisers responding to date told SEMPO their SEM budget is a new allocation. Print budgets are losing most from this shift, the survey found.

Also, nine out of 10 senior management executives now claim they are very involved or moderately involved in SEM programs. This is a huge jump from last year, when less than half surveyed said they were very involved.

Business still has quite some room to go towards SEO/SEM. There are also many elements in SEO that include branding not commonly considered. A good example might be running a PPC campaign at No.1 in PPC while maintaining the No.1 rank in the organic index (left hand side search results). Another would be ranking your website on the short tail (more the research phase of the online buying cycle). Certain sites gain a lot of credibility when ranking for 'place name' searches, especially in the travel and tourism market!

Link Bait or Link Trolling

You have to wonder about the different link profile each type leaves behind. Yeah, trolling is effective. But what about the skewed link count from trolling being stronger and the effect on the search algorithm? As Troll Bait links are mostly negative or neutral votes (technically) it's not really fair they be considered equal in the eyes of a search engine. If a review is negative enough, perhaps a link should count as a negative vote?

It will be interesting to see how the engines will respond to Link Trolling and if (how!) to downplay it in the algo!

Happy Client Story - SEO Case Study

It's great when you have a keen client that's watching a site harder than you. I got a call from a client this morning - "My site was down almost the entire day yesterday and we still did 600 unique's", "we're ranking everywhere on Google". Naturally I was very pleased, maybe not quite as pleased as my client, but it's great work on his behalf. This client has worked very hard, heeding my advice at every turn.

We have optimised everything from scratch, working with an existing CMS we worked with his web developer to make SEO modifications to the site to get it ranking. We hand built links to the site from numerous locations, quality links with relevant traffic. The site practically owns MSN and Google now, not bad for a 3 month campaign.

It is a very competitive niche and the top PPC price for the main search term runs at over A$7.50 per click. So looks like an amazing result all round.

The site is doing around 500 unique's daily with a very healthy enquiry rate!

We also optimised a second website targeting a very competitive sub-niche of the original site. Ranking at No.1 for the generic name of this product in MSN has been great business.

My client has changed his entire business since working with us. We were asked politely to slow down a few times (due to enquiry rate). It has changed his entire business. Having to deal with such an influx of new orders highlighted small flaws in his business processes which are now saving him time and money. Interstate enquiry was only around 2-3 per week and his business was largely focused on Brisbane and Queensland. We expanded this footprint significantly and they now receive business from around the World, majourity from Interstate.

Needless to say I have a very happy client!

So here's to 2007, and working with your clients to turn their business into a market leader!

So many thanks to this client for the hard work and unwavering faith!

Well done team :D

Enter Phase Two!

Launch 22 sub niche sites filled with search friendly product pages and categories. We have built an in house CMS to manage the entire 22 domain project.

Every domain will be connected and totally unique with search friendly url's .html extensions and full CMS capability with totally customized blocks and menu's. Every step has been optimised to allow for greater site usage (current site runs at about 14-16 page views per visit within Australia) and totally search engine optimised.

Internet Marketing Tools & Channels

blogs, email newsletters, flash based tutorials, viral marketing, articles, podcasts, social media, affiliate programs, banner advertising, search engines (organic, ppc, trusted feeds), news sites, links, wikis, directories

Online video 'eroding TV viewing' - First Newspapers, Now TV

This works for me, if 80% od the market in Australia use Google, how will tomorrow's adults find their media? Answer: Search Engines, namely Google! This is why Google bought YouTube!

Online video 'eroding TV viewing'

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

It's all moving fast now, I hope your company is getting geared up for Web 2.0 and the big players in TV and News can keep up. I hope they have good online marketing managers and some decent inhouse staff directed by a third party SEO consultant studies Internet Marketing like the back of their hand. I seriously doubt they do and will rely on other means (more to follow there when I can talk about it :D)..

What does Google have planned for Australia?

I will break this down with more explanation later, a bit late here atm.

Via Alan Koler at the Australian ABC, Google retain over 80% of the Search Market in Australia. Some interesting insight into Google Australia and the Goog vision.

ALAN KOHLER: But do you plan to take on the classified sites, like realestate.com and carsales.com and seek.com.au?

RICHARD KIMBER: Many of those customers that you mention work with Google right now. We drive traffic to their sites. There are variations of classifieds in the US through a product called Google Base, where people, users will put in their own content and advertise through Google. But in this market we are looking to work with the partners that we have.

ALAN KOHLER: Do you see Google participating in any way in the consolidation in the media in Australia that's clearly coming up with the media reforms going on here?

RICHARD KIMBER: No, we don't. We see Google being a key facilitating agent in the media industry. We see ourselves very much acting as a distribution point. Clearly we'd like to work with all the Australian partners, as we have done through a number of relationships with Google video that we've established, including the ABC, Channel 10 and a range of other video partners in Australia already.

ALAN KOHLER: The advertising that appears on Google is a sort of an evolution of the advertising, in that advertisers pay by the click, so it's more analogous, I guess, to direct mail or direct marketing. How far can that model of advertising go, do you think?

RICHARD KIMBER: It can go a long way. I think one of the great things about our advertising model is that it is very much based around the relevance to the user. So it's not an interruption form of media marketing, so basically what we're talking about is the way Google ads work is, and the sponsored links people only see the ads when they are searching for a particular topic or product, and that, as a model, has a long way to go.

ALAN KOHLER: But does it limit Google to only that sort of advertising and mean that you are going to be always excluded from the brand campaigns that companies spend a lot of money on?

RICHARD KIMBER: We're seeing a lot of our customers, in the US particularly, exploring branding. One of the great things about the internet is the amount of eye-balls that you get. So in terms of the research we've seen, we've seen a lot of the traditional consumer packaged goods companies now starting to go on the internet.

Client vs SEO

John Andrews always comes out with excellent comments on seo issues. A good read for business owners working with SEO's.

Automating Regular SEO Tasks

Cool post from Sugar Rae on automating what you can.

Online Marketing Links

I will start posting a few basic run throughs in my blog and you can follow the links from here. I will cover everything from PPC, to SEO, SEM, Internet marketing, blogging, social media, and all other crap. Exactly what you want and a snapshot of now. Starting at the overview level then deeper.

Online Marketing

return traffic basically = cleaning up the site's design, copy and information architecture (1 2).

online presence = traffic = links, banners, pay per click

links = blogs, website's, forums, podcasts, video (embedded or otherwise), social networks, press releases and articles.

Blogging:

http://performancing.com/ is good for blog stuff

http://www.threadwatch.org/ search news and 2.0 stuff with all major internet happenings and a very small amount of tech news

http://www.seomoz.org/articles.php some cool articles on mainly search, with some good primers, ie. http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php

Newcomers Guide

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum48/71-1-15.htm

Beginners guide to web promotion

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum48/1765.htm

http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php filter the seo stuff out, some cool 2.0 stuff

Start a really structured set of bookmark folders for these links and be sure to filter your bookmarks very well. If you don't the links will stack up and become easily lost.

Also read these articles on web sites and search marketing.

Yahoo in Partnership with US Newspapers

Similar to the Google deals of recent, Yahoo has started a partnership with US newspapers.

Press & PR, Tips and Tricks

An interesting transcript of PubCon Vegas 06 with some very good points, especially toward the bottom of the page :)

Some Press Release & Linking Tips from Gregg Jarboe Via Dan Zarrella

90% of journalists they're looking for visuals, add images. 41% of journalists say visuals could dictate their content. Post video to youtube, add multimedia, podcasts, video. Release to canada and the UK journalists want to be loved, prefer crevice majority of information via email. only 4% of journalists will admit to using press release.

email it to them before you put it on the wire.

pitch anchors to CNN and human editors of yahoo news. yahoo news editors are lonely people, pitch them.

Matt Cutts says main benefit is not in pagerank of links in press release. the links from sources that pick up your story do count.

Who gives links? Blogs. pitch Huffington Post and boing boing. even the a-list can be pitched (ahead of time) over 1700 news stores and over 390 blog posts were generated. generated record traffic to the CSM site.

The top 2 sources of traffic were cnn and yahoo news. 10% of the traffic came from can da and the UK.

the huffington post generated 3.4 times more unique visitors to the CSM site than ABC news.

• begging researching key blogs in your niche
• original and unique content
• pages designed for humans
• hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting related content
• Graphics

Building Links Naturally

If you are buying links you are facing many potential search filters, especially with Google Algorithm. Establish how many links you can build over time using a simple equation.

Site Maps

All three major Search Engines (Google, MSN & Yahoo!) all support the Site Map protocol. This the first real collaboration we have seen from all three engines.

Google Click to Call

This is very cool, easily the best feature AdWords has ever added.

Downsides to click to call:

• high cost per click
• part-time branding (if it's turned off competition gets the jump)
• click fraud is always increasing
• advertising not marketing

Superior Minds

It's rare I disagree with Bill Slawski! He is well ahead of the curve with regards to what Google are up to. Check his blog post on Google by Phone and you'll see where Goog are headed and why. Google are becoming very powerful and totally on track to actually organise the world's information (you'll see :).

I am currently in the process of setting up a few friends with blogs and voice recognition software as yet another side project. One should be good it will cover all the Media on You Tube that traditional media shun. I will post the url once it's up to speed.

Domainiac

I think I need to start attending Domain Name Addicts Anonymous. I have been buying so many lately and finding so many more it's crazy. I LOVE DOMAINS - Always have, always will.

For those of you that don't read WMW, you probably should, keep an eye out for Jeff (Web Work)'s posts, they are true gold. Thanks for the ideas Jeff!
:D

Sydney FX Blog

A great blog with some good SEO information from Robert Mirabito. Tithe info in the SEO section is right on the money, couldn't agree more on most of the posts, especially the one about seo consulting and telling companies their new web sites need redesigning or coding.

Australian Search Marketing Statistics

An interesting read about search engine marketing. 4 in 10 dollars spent on Online Marketing goes to Search Marketing. Not much mention of Search Engine Optimisation which is undoubtedly the pivotal driving force behind any successful online marketing campaign, or as Australian IT have stated in the past "top of online marketing tree".

It's great to see Australian IT covering the market but I really wonder why everyone thinks Search Marketing is Pay Per Click and a lot of the terminology is slightly incorrect and very confusing. I have worked in the Industry almost since it's conception and I am confused by the article. I don't think the author really know's the space that well, but cool to see none the less.

Google Video Australia

Google Video has come to Australia, some are on board already. Interesting how Australian media reacted, if you can't beat them, joint them. Best part is Google have released a Video AdWords for displaying ads on videos. We wonder if Google will launch Google Video AdSense (so contributors get paid for clicks from their videos) as proposed for You Tube.

Google 2.0 Mash up of all mash up's?

It appears Google may be moving fast on this one. Once they get a little more localised data look for the ultimate Web 2.0 Mash Up combining Google Search, Google News, Google Earth, Google Videos, Google base and all other related services. Basically the ultimate community portal as your homepage, with everything at your finger tips, including classified and an area to control your offline advertising. To launch the service Google will partner with local newspapers and radio stations to extend their advertising network and brand's reach.

Signs of a paid user generated Google portal?

Combining their AdSense network and users generating content for a percentage of advertising derived from their content adverts things could get interesting indeed. Google's true intentions are to be revealed here, will the game the commerce system they created? Or will they continue to just sort the worlds information?

SEO Copywriting

A very good blog full of very relevant SEO information from the most relevant angle - the copy.

Some articles by Bill McGrath

A Little Internet Marketing & Light SEO Reading

Internet Marketing articles from some areas I don't normally read, but they offer a good breakdown of search engine marketing and SEO. Enjoy!

Danny Sullivan Keynote

Search marketing is different than branding. It’s about putting your message in front of people who are explicitly looking for your products. Search allows you to instantly find answers that immediately satisfy your desire. Search is a reverse broadcast medium. Traditional advertising was about putting your ads in front of millions of people who probably didn't want to see your message.

Desire marketing is about listening to what the people say they are looking for and tuning into that. It’s much more efficient and not wasteful. The closest comparison is yellow pages. Success depends on identifying the new broadcast channels.

Search engines are expanding into other non search and pull advertisers into the marketers. This will transition people from search marketers into metrics marketers. It’s good for business as it you can get efficiency from looking at your ROI. It’s going to expand into other devices. Search is not just about an auction, or taking print ads and re purposing them for the internet. It’s about expressing your desire and that desire being fulfilled.

Danny is also starting up Search Engine Land launching December 11th 2006.

Big Daddy

Everyone was wining, pages were dropping like flies and you know what? The white SERP's became cleaner. I posted the above around the Big Daddy update, still applies to this day.

Times are a Changing

I remember when I was a small boy and had lot's of knives, this take the Swiss Army to a new level. Very Cool if only it was cheaper and a larger storage capacity.

Ted Leonsis

Vice Chairman of AOL thinks he know's the Google Algo backwards by ranking for his own name with a blog. Best of luck out there mate!

Belle-Vue Belgian Beer - Nectar of the Gods

Australia can get hot, and here at Ben Wilks Web Marketing we are great fans of boutique beer. Ben is obsessed with Belle-Vue Kreik (Cherry) and Framboise (Raspberry) which run to about $8.50 AUD per beer so it's not for the faint hearted but quite delicious. Nectar of the Gods as Ben kindly reminds us. We all want to go on a Belle-vue Brewery tour someday, and find a cheap supply in Australia.

Sillyness from Gray hat news

I got sites, they're multiplyin', and I'm losin' control
Cause the rankings you're supplyin', it's electrifyin'

You better shape up, cause I need good ranks,
and my backlinks are all from you

You better shape up, you better understand,
all my rankings must be true
Nothing less, nothing less is gonna do

Chorus:
Its number one that I want
(it's number one I want), ooh ooh ooh, money
Number one that I want (its number one I want),
ooh ooh ooh, money
Number one that I want (its number one I want),
ooh ooh ooh, money
Top spot I need (top spot I need),
oh yes indeed (yes indeed)

My site's filled with good content,
Your users want you to convey
so send some link love my direction, blog your way

I better shape up,
cause you need to rank
(Yes I need a rank),
Which can keep you satisfied

I better shape up, if I'm gonna prove
(You better prove), that my positions justified
Are you sure?
Yes I'm sure down deep inside

[chorus repeats out]
Its number one that I want
(it's number one I want), ooh ooh ooh, money
Number one that I want (its number one I want),
ooh ooh ooh, money
Number one that I want (its number one I want),
ooh ooh ooh, money
Top spot I need (top spot I need),
oh yes indeed (yes indeed)

Matt Cutts hit's the UK

Mr Naylor is testing a theory that you can 301 domains out of the MSN live index as was done with davidnaylor.co.uk. Fingers crossed it works.

Bathrober and Underpanter Hygene Class

Are you a grubby SEO working from home? GHN has some great tips for keeping those choppers clean and smelling rosy.

Sitemaps Aren't for Ranking

Nothing special just an example of client nieveity from DaveN

Ok.. question…

Is it true that the big 4 search engines are all link based, this means that for a page to do well in a Search Engine it needs 2 things .. internal links and external links ?

So that in mind if a Search Engine can’t find a page on your site, would it not be better to go get a link or two and point it to that page, that way we know the SE has found your site by a method which it values !

I have seen too often recently, people using XML sitemaps to get pages indexed and then they just never rank, then they ask me why these pages don't rank..

So I have to say well what pages did the search engine find to give relevancy too, if the answer is, “I don't we use a XML sitemaps”, then how the hell do you expect me to improve what pages rank if we don't know what pages the SE found the natural way.

In the Search Engines eyes it looks like a standalone page, an island, a doorway page. Bad internal linkage should never be a reason to use an XML sitemap, if you have indexing problems don't make it worse by hiding the problem.

I would rather have 10 pages indexed from a 1000 page site than 1000 pages included in a index because of an XML sitemap, IMO XML sitemaps are a quick route to supplemental hell. Make your SEO's life easier and don't use an XML sitemap.

If the engine's can't access your information already your doing something wrong.

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