Steven Arnold wrote “Gaming search engines for fun or profit is of zero interest to me as are those who practice these dark arts,” and he wrote that content was the secret. “SEO is a way for content free sites to game the indexing systems. Content, Aaron Wall, content. Not tricks, spoofs, and carnival tricks.” That is the mindset of a guy who has probably spent thousands of hours researching search. Bizarre.

Sure SEO can be used to temporarily promote garbage, but it is also used to make quality publishing business models profitable.

It is no secret that many publishing business models are no longer effective. Mainstream publishing businesses are going bankrupt. They have nearly limitless content, but even with their huge online archives, it does not create enough traffic and profit to effectively subsidize the cost of new content production.

The New York Times recently shared their profitable publishing strategy – waiting for many competitors to go bankrupt, and hoping they get enough inventory to become profitable.

So here is a publishing company with a strong brand, tons of content, losing money, and their growth strategy is hoping that competitors go bankrupt before they do. These newspapers get direct promotion in the search results through the Google News OneBox (a rankings boost subsidy), and yet they still can’t turn a profit. That really shows the flaw of the “content” mindset in the age of the internet.

As Robert Thomson, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal explains:

But one of the — Google — I mean, the harsh way of just defining it, Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.

Relevancy algorithms are built around making sure the search ad network makes money (even while many publishers do not). Some people run businesses. Others are bankrupt, but are just not aware of it yet.

• I have sites with great content that went nowhere.
• I had a few sites with sub-par content that got tons of rankings and exposure.
• Some of our sites make good money.
• Other projects have lost more than I care to mention.
• And we have sites at just about every level in between.

What is the difference between all of them? Marketing. SEO is a subset of marketing. It can be done effectively or ineffectively. It just depends on how healthy the target market is, who is doing the work, and how much they care for the project.

Many businesses struggle for survival or flourish based on a tiny couple percent change in profit margins. If you routinely rank #5 in the search results then it is pretty easy to see the potential upside from a #1 ranking.

Google’s eye tracking research highlight this distribution trend as well.

Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.

Last year Google’s Peter Norvig stated that Google did not use usage data directly in their relevancy algorithms because it is not very sensitive to new ranking models. When the order of search results are changed, people will still have a strong tendency to click inferior result if it appears at the top of the search results.

Like people, businesses are born, grow, then die. A solid SEO strategy can be the difference between a solid company and a company that no longer exists.

As many of the newspaper companies go bankrupt with tons of “content,” our sites (and profits) will keep growing. Not because of “content” but because we leverage marketing & SEO to ensure our content garners enough exposure to turn a profit.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

How did John come to these results? Well he changed his URLs based on “free” advice, and he got what he paid for. People who expect the world handed to them for free are always disappointed with the results, and expect a steady paycheck for bitching about and externalizing their own character flaws & ignorance.

A person can claim that SEO is ineffective if they are clueless about it, but if it were actually ineffective snake oil would…

• Many of the media outlets that publicly dismiss SEO have an in house SEO team? (On multiple ocassions I have been called or emailed – the same day – with questions from an in house SEO at a publishing company that just published a piece denouncing SEO)
• I still be writing this blog for over 5 years?
• My income have doubled (or more) every year?
• People have spent over ,000,000 buying my ebook?
• A headhunter working for Microsoft try to offer me a job paying 6 figures a year?
• Google have hired more than 10,000 remote quality raters?
• Google’s Matt Cutts spend so much time going to SEO conferences?
• Yahoo! have a patent for automating SEO based on their proprietary user data?

As I mentioned to Chris Crum from Web Pro News:

“It is not surprising that search engines know the value of SEO. The only thing I find surprising is them openly admitting it,” Aaron Wall of SEOBook tells me. “Google always tries to shape, control, and minimize the scope of the field of SEO. And here Yahoo! is trying to expand it. Exciting stuff!”

Now SEO is constantly changing. Search engine crawlers are getting more sophisticated. Mechanical SEO is practiced by many people, and so it may not offer a sustainable competitive advantage. But SEO is not just a mechanical process as it draws upon market research, psychology, sociology, public relations, branding, advertising, and both online and offline marketing.

Outbound links show up in referral logs and act as a marketing tool. Plus they help establish & develop social relationships, such that when you have important news to share, some of those people might be willing to reference your works. There is a cumulative advantage effect.

Getting just an extra little bit of coverage on a few more channels leads to many additional citations (hey everyone is talking about this, so it must be important). For every publisher that is an original thinker there are dozens (maybe hundreds?) of followers. Many of those followers also write blogs, bookmark resources on Delicious, use Twitter, promote stories on social news sites. Some latent links come from ignorant journalists that are too lazy to do real research and just quote from whatever sources are easily accessible via a Google search.

When you get new links into key parts of your site, they not only pass PageRank, but also pass anchor text. Having inlinks from a variety of trusted domains with targeted anchor text pointing at relevant pages is MUCH more valuable than raw PageRank score.

When people link at you in editorial channels, they not only link, but in many cases leave behind an endorsement. Assuming they are writing to a relevant targeted audience then you just gained a bunch of social proof of value and reached a wider audience in a means that is much cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising.

Unlike John Dvorak, professional SEOs do not need to lie and pull sleazy tricks to get “hits”… we rank for high value keywords and turn that traffic stream into real business. His publishing strategy is so inauthentic and cheesy that he writes by number:

One Youtube comment on the above video says “What a clown. Journalist? Snake oil salesman more like.” Funny, that sounds familiar.

John writes:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

Aaron Wall ’s rebuttal:

Unlike John Dvorak, professional SEOs do not need to lie and pull sleazy tricks to get “hits”… we rank for high value keywords and turn that traffic stream into real business. His publishing strategy is so inauthentic and cheesy that he writes by number.

And now the video!

This guy Dvorak doesn’t have a clue – friggin foolio, I would love to debate his view on SEO – jimminy crickets.

John Dvorak – a Good Example of Why Many Media Companies Deserve to go Bankrupt : SEO Book.com

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information. Mind maps may also aid recall of existing memories.

By presenting ideas in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps encourage a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks. Though the branches of a mindmap represent hierarchical tree structures, their radial arrangement disrupts the prioritizing of concepts typically associated with hierarchies presented with more linear visual cues. This orientation towards brainstorming encourages users to enumerate and connect concepts without a tendency to begin within a particular conceptual framework.

The SEO IMME outline includes:

Read the original IMME – Internet Marketing Made Easy Mind Map Article on SEOBook – by Aaron Wall

Social networks, blogs, Twitter etc indicate a move away from the webmaster as signaler of importance i.e. who you choose to link out to. The search engines will need to mine the social signals form those networks. The user will signal where their attention is focused by their interaction and paths.



Universal search, in may cases, has pushed results listings down below the fold. For example, to get a client seen high up on the results page may involve making sure making sure they are featured on Google Maps. Similarly, if they have video content, it should be placed on YouTube. Google have shown they are increasingly looking to the aggregators for results and featuring their content in prominent positions.

Check out the entire post from Aaron – The 100+ Ranking Variables Google Uses, And Why You Shouldn’t Care : SEO Book.com

1. Establishing a Baseline Keyword Value – Given a fairly constant ranking position and traffic stream you should be able to estimate visitor value AND how much additional value would be created by improving your rankings.
2. Review Typical Click Distribution Profiles – A friend recently said “whether we’re 15 or 150 doesn’t make much a difference.” Indeed, search clicks are heavily concentrated on the top portion of the first page of search results. And this trend toward traffic consolidation has accelerated as time has passed.
3. Considering factors that modify click distribution – A variety of factors must be taken in account for when estimating overall search volume distribution. While this list is not exhaustive, it contains many of the common factors worth considering. Whenever possible we also offer tips for how to overcome these data biases.
4. Tapping the Long Tail – People search for everything under the sun. When the leaked AOL search data was manually classified into 20 different categories the category with the leading volume was other!
5. Improve monetization Via Scale – With more scale you can test and improve monetization faster, be more selective with what customers you are willing to work with, have leverage over suppliers, and/or negotiate direct ad deals that allow you to drastically increase the profits from your website. To put this in perspective.
6. Take action Today!

Aaron has some amazing tips and also completely outlines the extreme importance and value of having the #1 result in Google. I personally recommend every user of SEOi and SEO Guru prints this out and puts it on their office wall or uses it as part of any whitepaper to sell clients on the value of Search Engine Optimization.

Check out Aarons original article ‘How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?’ here…

See Marks quote below:

Over the next few months, I’ll be redesigning MediaShift in conjunction with adding new video and audio features. One of my goals for the redesign is, not surprisingly, to increase traffic; and with nearly 50% of MediaShift traffic coming from Google, getting more traffic means doing more SEO.

The Top 9 SEO Suggestions are listed below:
1. Get inbound links and link out as well.
2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated.
5. Highlight your best content on every page.
6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.
7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.
8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.
9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.

I think this is a really awesome article and it also marks a pivotal point for the SEO industry as well – it’s not often when BIG media is covering topics like this on their site, about their site.

Kudos go out to Mark for such a great piece, I encourage all SEOi users and readers to check it out here.