MarkAttwood.com

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A. One. And ten others to say they could have done it better.

“SEO still being ignored” – is this a mistakenly re-published old blog post from 2004?!

Nope.

Some amazing statistics have been reported in recent weeks, showing that most of the online marketing money is still being spent on PPC rather than on SEO.

PPC gets all the attention...

Total pay per click spend between Google and Bing (the big two now that Yahoo has been absorbed by Bing) for 2010 is estimated at around $20billion.

According to analysts, that $20billion targets about 15% of all clicks.

But SEO, which targets the other 85% of clicks, is estimated to attract only $2billion. i.e. organic traffic, which makes up 85% of the search market, is 10 times less targeted than paid search traffic.

Yes – there are of course reasons for focusing on PPC – instant hits of traffic without the leg work needed for SEO perhaps the most obvious one.

But given the comparative size of the organic search market, and the much weaker level of competition – is it time you took some time out to really get your SEO strategy right?

The return on investment will be worth it.

Traditional PR methods can be fantastically powerful ways to build links

It’s obvious how public relations – attracting the attention of the media and online publishers, being talked and written about – can turn into an effective way to build links.

You attract a blogger’s attention by being interesting, remarkable or newsworthy. She writes about what you’re up to, and probably links to your site in the process.

The powerful thing about PR is that, done right, the link building workload is massively reduced.

Instead of hours spent contacting 500 webmasters and often ending up with only a handful of new links, one good publicity campaign can result in hundreds of websites linking to you. They’re looking for you, instead of the other way around. (Remember this old classic about Mark Attwood… )

Link building after a good PR campaign

Compare that to the common way of link building on a “micro” level:

•    You look at your competitors’ backlinks, see who’s linking to them, and then manually contact those sites in turn to try and get a link too

•    You get content published on other websites and make sure the content contains links back to your site. By blogging as an expert “guest” on other sites (“guest blogging”), for example, or by “article marketing” – distributing written articles and making them available for syndication on other websites.

•    Etc, etc – the many micro level link building tactics go on…

Contrasting again with a “macro” PR approach: if you are publicity worthy, then PR can result in backlinks from a range of really powerful high authority domains. Domains that you would have a cat in hell’s chance of getting links from any other way.

And lastly, public relations tactics stay nicely within Google’s webmaster guidelines for link building: don’t try and manipulate your backlinks. Just run a good website, be link worthy, and let the links flow naturally.

We’ll look in more detail at specific PR-oriented link building strategies in future.

The Easiest Way To Attract Mass Attention: Be An A$$hole!

Let’s first be clear – this is not a strategy we advocate!

One of the most effective ways to get people to start writing about you is to excite strong emotion. And as with many things, it’s often far easier to excite strong emotions in people by pi$$ing them off rather than impressing them.

The Wall Street Journal, SEOBook.com and BusinessInsider.com, among others, recently covered somebody that allegedly took this example to extremes. A U.S. online retailer of eyewear, DecorMyEyes.com, was reported by BusinessInsider.com to have systematically delivered outrageously offensive and shocking customer service, just to get written about and achieve backlinks!

“Offensive” might be understating it. The company’s owner, Stanley Borker, is reported to have violently threatened one customer, for example:

“Listen bit*h, I know your address.”

He then, wrote the Wall Street Journal, “threatened to find her and commit an act of sexual violence too graphic to describe in a newspaper”, before continuing with a sequence of increasingly scary behaviour you can read about in a fascinating article here.

Customer service?

Maybe one to avoid then, if you’re shopping for eyewear any time soon. Especially as the site’s owner has apparently now been arrested.

But the tactics did indeed work, and the site ended up as one of the top ranked sites for the massive online eyewear market – thanks to huge amounts of (negative) online publicity!

Until Google read about what was going on and now claims to have closed the loop… Doh!

The Power of PR and Being Remarkable

What Stanley Borker’s alleged crazy behaviour highlighted was the importance of being remarkable, and the power of PR for magnifying that and turning it into links.

Threatening your customers and delivering terrible service might be a quick way to do it. Google can’t yet always tell the difference between links made to a site because it is good, and links made to a site because it is dangerous – but semantic analysis tools they’re developing may change that in the future.

But for a long term strategy that most of us can live with, the point is that by being as special as you can be (in a good way!), and harnessing traditional PR methods, the impact on backlinks and ranking can be huge.

So what makes you so special?

Worth sharing

I sometimes forget that not everyone knows exactly what SEO actually is, so I am producing a bunch of glossary videos to try and explain some of the key terms and concepts of SEO and internet marketing into layman terms. (If you find any waffle in any of these videos – email me at once – I’m doing them unscripted)

Here’s a question I get asked a lot: what is search engine optimisation?

If you’re new to internet marketing, and want a copy of the DVD of my talk on internet marketing and SEO at Manchester Metropolitan University (as well as my top ten tips to instantly increase your online profits), go here: Free SEO DVD

If you’d like to see more videos and want to train yourself up with practical online SEO and internet marketing training. go here: Internet Marketing Training

If you want some seriously good live training, click on this link: Mark Attwood‘s Keyword Hospital

A few weeks ago Google mentioned the fact that the speed at which a site loaded would have an impact on it’s rankings. As usual, SEO world goes into minor meltdown on forums etc., but the reality is just common sense.

In a nutshell, if you have two identical sites in terms of links, relevent content etc., then Google would favour the faster loading one. Why? Simply because it’s all about the user getting to what they need to get to as fast as possible. It’s about Google’s customer experience. Just like it always has been. So, is the loading speed of your site important? Yes, but it should be anyway. No-one wants a site that takes more than a few seconds to load. That’s why many of my sites are “lo-tech”.

Here’s Google’s Matt Cutts making it even simpler to understand:

So, speed is one of 200 other SEO factors. Our job as business owners is to “best guess” the importance of these other factors. And the best guess that works best for the majority of website owners is common sense: keep producing relevent, quality content, a good user experience, and attracting good quality links from other relevent, aged, authority domains. Most of the other noise around SEO is just that: noise.