Also, it’s all in the method. I’ve been brought up in the school of SEO, it’s fair to say that SEO has been changing for a while, however in that time it’s definitely had an impact on the way web designers do their designing. Don’t expect a print designer to sit down and design you a website and get it right first time, they won’t, this is a completely different medium. Take for example the concept of the fold on screen – most print designers will probably try to keep everything on one page – fair enough this is what they are used to – but the scrolling public are used to a much more interactice layout, I think I read somewhere that about 90% of all internet users will scroll.

Once you’ve found a good web designer you want to stick to them like glue, you’ll probably also want to stick with a local web designer so you go and bash them on the head a bit to get the type of work you want from them. Also, you normally don’t give your secrets away in this game but on this occassion I want to share with you an absolute gem. If you’re looking for web design in Blackpool then look no further than Fan Boy Creative.

Redesign GrowTraffic?

Sometimes I think I should, then I think: “you know what, my SEO and PPC management speaks for itself, I’m not going to try to pretend that I’m a web designer”.

If anyone out there gets back and tells me to redesign then I may just consider it, however as for now I think I’m going to leave it as it is.

Recently I was given the opportunity to move from my position at 2am Media to join another company as their Internet Marketing Manager with an emphasis on search, it was more money and represented a good move however there was something not right about it, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

At 2am I get the opportunity to continue to develop my craft, to try out new things over a number of client and company websites in a variety of different sectors. This is very liberating in many ways (I’ve worked on just one company’s marketing in the past and although I’ve had some great successes I’m sure they would have benefited from me carrying out search marketing on a number of other types of sites as well).

Still, the new position on offer was an opportunity that I really didn’t want to be turning down, more money, closer, a market sector I’ve carried out a lot of SEO for in the past.

Just before D-day there was a shift in the rhetoric at 2am, a shift in the projects and the development of the business further reaching a maturity and offering a tantalising glimpse of the potential to develop and grow and this was one ride I decided I couldn’t pass up on.

I’ve worked for four companies since graduating, one of those was a mistake from the outset and lasted only a few months before I moved on, I think I knew it was a mistake but had had enough at my old job and wanted a fresh start – so I found a good position with a good company doing a similar thing but I found the company ethos and the people I was working with to be completely alien to me, what’s more we were just entering a recession and from the time I signed up to the time I started the industry had been detrimentally damanged. Point being that I jumped and didn’t follow my gut instinct.

This time I’ve let the gut instinct lead and I’m not sure where it will take me however I think that’s the way you’ve got to go with these things, you can’t do yourself a disservice by staying somewhere however it’s not always best to jump ship.

The other thing about my position at the moment is it allows me to develop GrowTraffic, it’s not something that I want to do too overtly, however it is done with the knowledge of my directors and it something I believes benefits the business as it sometimes enables me to try things out that I wouldn’t normally try out.

It sounds great, expect so the argument goes this content is relatively low quality and is normally a regurgitated churn that competes in visibility terms with supposedly good content from the old and generally right wing media sources (run with me on this one – I relies that in fact I’m talking about established print media and there are plenty of “good media outlets” that could be called the left wing media – but that wouldn’t suit my blog title!).

Recently a trade group going by the name of the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been getting a document out there entitled “Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout“. Essentially this documents argues that content generators such as Demand Media and Associated Content are threatening journalists jobs – they also go onto argue that many content generators (or content farms as they are known in the SEO community) are reducing the overall quality and benefit of content on the net. It’s worth noting that many of the pundits that are weighing in and complaining about the quality of content being put out by our favourite content farms are in fact journalists themselves who demand considerably higher fees than the freelancers that work for the content generators do.

The word quality sticks in my throat a little bit – because at the end of the day Google isn’t really about quality – when you talk about quality for Google you are talking about PPC – what Google is really all about is relevance. That is the relevance of a search to the content out there, there are measures in the algorithm they determine how searchers use the content and this acts in part as a quality measure although that’s not really the point.

Generally speaking the content that content mills are putting out there is also much more search engine friendly, that means it’s not full of flowery purple phraseology that often goes hand in hand with a journalist who’s writing for a specific target market – which means in many cases the content produced by the content mills is actually much more accessible to the everyman trying to get the info, the point is it’s not about lofty pretensions, it’s about raking quickly and lots.

What are the ICSC proposing?

The ICSC seem to be proposing web standards – some kind of quality guidelines for content on the web. Does that make them the content police?

And who will they producing? Because the thing about the internet is that every second of every minute of everyday people are adding more and more information to the internet, it’s never ending and nor should it be, and it no longer needs the fleet street elite to moderate, shape or control it. It’s at large.

I write a hell of a lot of content for various websites – my content has been ripped off, reused, rewritten so many times it’s just funny, I don’t moan about this it’s the nature of the beast – it’s going to happen all the time and that’s ok – all that matters is getting it out there and making noise. Unfortunately that’s where the content mill sare able to dominate, they can produce a lot for not a lot and traditional media has yet to catch up.

What’s more – who are these new Content Police even going to be rambling on to? Each other. No one else really cares. Most people just want the information that answers their questions and it’s in the content mills interest to make sure that no matter how badly written the Content Police argue it is, the content does.

Who decides the level of quality of content?

This is really a case of the Content Police vs. the general web surfer, because at the end of the day it’s the average web surfer who will determine the quality of a piece of content.

And who are the people writing this content? The people that write this content are often portrayed as being individuals who work freelancer or in back waters of some far off country sweating out content, in fact many of these people are in western countries who have excellent standards of written skills (at least as good as the journalist elite!) and the problem the established journalists really have is that they are being undercut. Deal with it guys this is simply a case of supply and demand.

Quality of Google’s Search Results

In fact Google does consider the quality of it’s search results to be important in some way – they recently published patents that help their search algorithm identify “areas of inadequate search content” – essentially by this they mean that they are going to let people know where there are holes in terms of the content out there so they can write about it. I think of this as the way that Wikipedia put a “Can you expand this article” tag at the top of a short entry.

This will only encourage more content to be produced – Google doesn’t really mind if the content is of quality – what it doesn’t want is for other ways to find the information the searcher is looking for to be found, ultimately this is Google protecting its virtual monopoly by being extra helpful – why else would they have included hot topics in Google Insights?

Will the Content Police Win?

No matter what councils are created in the coming months and years, no matter how rigorous they will only ever be fringe elements. No, the proletariat has well and truly taken over the printing press, publishing unimaginable amounts of content through articles, blogs, microblogs, websites and social media

In reality the fringe elements such as the ICSC are not the content police, the mechanisms implemented by Google to determine the relevancy of content to the searchers searches combined with the decisions of live searchers actually make up the (non-capitalised) content police.

This is in line with Google’s overall strategy to keep people on their system by providing them with all the information they need.

The search engine is working towards becomming a one stop shop, in which the internet users and service providers use Google software for everything.

If you want an example search for a specific hotel near by, travel is a key vertical for Google as it’s one of the best local searches and people have to buy at the end of it. Ultimately, Google will be trying to make you book your stay through Google places.

These are the changes I made to the site to make it perform and I’ll update the post covering what happens and when.

Optimise the page

I already had a page called Freelance SEO specialist so I thought rather from starting from scratch I would amend this page – it’s worth noting this page didn’t rank in the top 500 for the phrase.

I amended the title tag so the key Phrase appeared first, I then amended the H1 tag to include the phrase and the H2 tags to include variations of the phrase, I also used the strong and italics tag for added emphasis of the prhase.

I then waited. A week later I was at position 55.

Freelance SEO Consultant Links

So I was at position 55, if I’d used the homepage no doubt I’d have been at position 35 or maybe better, however I didn’t want to change my core optimisation which already drives traffic to the site, that does leave me with a problem because the majority of the competitors are using their homepage title tag to get ranked, and them all being SEO’s themselves there’s a good chance they’ll be optimising the page as well as I will be, so the next job is building links.

I built one sitewide link – it’s in the footer, I had considered putting this sitewide link in the main navigation however this is inappropriate at the moment, so the weaker footer link will have to do.

A week or so after the footer link went in I got a boost, the site started to display at position 36.

I’ve built some links from some of the people I’ve been working with to get a bit more of a boost. Now I’m at position 30.

Next job is some article marketing based around the phrase freelance SEO consultant with links linking back to the page.

Update

I carried out some article marketing for the phrase freelance SEO consultant which drove the page up to the position of 13 over the course of a week or so the phrase teatered from 13 – 11 but it wouldn’t tip over the page, I have now carried out link building commenting on related blogs that allow followed links – as from this morning (5th July 2010) I am now at position 9 for the term Freelance SEO Consultant in Google UK.

I will be carrying out more link building to get this site to move higher in the coming weeks.

Me: What kind of budget do you have?

Clients: Well how much do you think we should spend?

Me: You can spend as much or as little as you want, how much does your average sale cost you at the moment?

Generally at this point the looks a little dumbfounded and either hasn’t got a clue or gets them all through networking so insists the leads are free.

Pay Per Click Expectations

Then there is the expectation, I remember working with a solicitors a few years back and we carried out a local PPC campaign for them, their budget however was set at 1,000 a month. After the first month they were already talking about halting the campaign, they get 15 conversions, of which they converted 4 into sales (and there were a couple outstanding). They hadn’t expected leads through Pay Per Click to cost so much, after all Google is free.

From this point on I have always told a client how much a lead could cost – in some sectors you may be looking at pounds, in most sectors you will be looking at tens of pounds, in competitive sectors, such as debt management, solicitors, no win no fee etc you could get t0 over a hundred pounds per lead.

The cost of the lead doesn’t really matter, what matters is how many qualified leads it takes to make a sale and from that how much each sale is worth to the business in profit. If it takes 5 conversions to lead to a sale of a product or service that costs 100, but the leads cost 30 it’s not worth it, you can try to drill down a bit more with the keywords however you’ll find then that the client isn’t happy about the volume of leads.

Volume of leads through Pay Per Click

First of all remember that not everyone regularly uses the sponsored ads links, so you’re not going to get the full volume of clicks that you would if you had a position 1 organic ranking. Secondly,  as with everything search, the volume is in the searches, not in the results, ie if there is not very many searches being carried out no matter how much you reorganise a page to make it a better landing page you aren’t going to get proportionately more conversions. The answer in this situation is to break out the AdGroups further with new keywords.

All of this does however cost more money, it costs more money in the short and long term, in the short term you have the try and see approach of marketing were you have to dip your toe in and see what happens, normally you will find a niche that works well, however you will then find that other people start bidding on this niche and your costs go up, at some point the client will come back and say woah! we’re spending a bit too much for the leads now, or it’s too competitive we are missing the leads because as soon as they come to us they complete our form and are off to another competing site to fill in their form. It’s time to find a new niche, so we’re back at phase 1.

PPC as Lead Generation vs Advertising Model

Back in the olden days people didn’t really care about the return on their marketing spend, at least not in the same way they do now. When I started marketing way back when there was an acceptance that it was a bonus if something got a return on investment, that was always the goal of course, but if it didn’t happen at least the product had been advertised, that’d because marketing back then was so much less traceable – we didn’t know how a marketing campaign was affecting purchasing habits. Now we know for a fact where people come from, how they found us, how they contacted us and brand marketing has given way to bottom line marketing.

I think this is a bit short sighted and in time we’ll find a brand marketing approach start to reappear, especially for the small fry.

Setting the budget

That all being saidm you have to be able to go back to the client with an idea about how much they should spend and hopefully an idea about what they’ll get back for their money.

There are loads of bits of software that give you a rough idea about how much people are paying for clicks. From that I tend to work by this model:

10% of impressions will click through to the site

3 – 5 % of click throughs will go on to convert

That’s not a hard and fast rule, but it will give you an idea about how much your marketing with PPC should cost – each market sector is different so you need to reassess this regularly and let the client know where things are up to.

As with everything internet marketing – good communication is the key.

Google get everywhere so why’s this news and why is this exciting the a search marketer? Simple answer is they are going to be bringing a level of search to the way we select what we want to watch, we will no longer be held to ransom by the schedulers.

What’s more, they will have a secret weapon – PageRank.

Think about how PageRank or GoogleTVRank or something like that can change the way we watch and consume media – it could completely turn it on its hea, and it’s coming fast. Expect that your next set top box could very really have GoogleTV written on it and it could means that we finally begin to see TV and the internet become one medium.

There again – let’s see what Apple are going to throw into the mix – they’ve already announced AppleTV, so who knows, personally my monies on Google and PageRank taking on TV and it fills me with a raw excitement for the changes it could bring to SEO going forwards.

There again, I’m hoping that it will rekindle what was once a love affair with Google Maps in search, a love affair that was abruptly brought to an end when I realised how rotten the software is that controls it.

Why call it Google Places?

I like many other optimisers have had the misfortune of having to sort out the Google Maps accounts for my clients – I’ve had clients that have seen a 25% drop in sales because Google merged or split up their Local Business Listings.

Let’s hope that with the rebrand there is a redoubling of Google’s efforts to make their local business listing a better piece of software that everyone can benefit from

What are Content Mills

Content mills is a phrase conjured up to represent the churn of people and organisation producing information, they are producing information for the sake of it, or at least for the sake of picking off more bits and bobs of traffic and getting more link density around their chosen keywords.

What’s the future of link building?

Ultimately the future of link building doesn’t look good, you have to remember that the more content there is the less strength a link has (because if has to work that bit harder).

The old model of buying a link for 20 doesn’t really stack up that much anymore because they aren’t worth that in terms of the returns they are going to get you in the search results, even if you do get some good movement you are probably going to see a drop as more and more people get more and more content on their site.

Don’t put your eggs in one SEO basket

I think it’s fair to say we’ve been here before, there have been many times when SEO has changed and we’ve had to catch up with it, all of what we did before is still important, it’s just now it’s more important to build more and more content that will actually attract traffic. Links help but not like they used to. Where once you’d have bought 10 links now you’ll need 20 or 30.

There products range from diet pills to slimming capsules to cellulite creams and lotions and the organisation is geared towards giving its client up to the minute information to help them lose weight as fast as possible.

Buy Slimming Capsules

There are loads of websites out there that sell diet pills and other similar products, however if you’re looking to buy slimming capsules make sure you check out the Little Black Dress website.

Whilst you’re on the Little Black Dress website, after you’ve reviewed their diet product solutions and maybe bought some of the slimming capsules, makes sure you have a look at their blog as it’s a gold mine of information about dieting and slimming solutions – they aren’t just trying to sell their diet pills they do really seem to care.