SEM – Search Engine Marketing? Shouldn’t we really call it “Search Engine Manipulation”

Google knows about this problem. This is of course why they rolled out the much talked about Panda Update late last year.

I talk about search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) on this blog and elsewhere. It’s important to note that I’m speaking about those topics with a different mindset than many SEO “experts” out there. First, I’m always talking so-called “white hat” techniques of course. But more importantly than that, I’m talking about SEO/SEM with the assumption that there is an underlying website or service of value, providing a service people actually want, and not simply a site getting revenue from clicks or ads etc. In other words, SEO / SEM isn’t the end, but only the means.

Google’s Panda update seems a bit like Yosemite Sam killing a fly with a shotgun – there’s a lot of collateral damage… and the flies are right back in the house again before long. I’m not sure the net result of Panda is positive or negative. They killed a certain class of what google considered “bad guys” but they may also have killed as many legitimate and useful sites as they did “bad guys”.

But the fact is, search results are still polluted with bogus sites and pages. You know what I’m talking about. You click a link in the top search results, only to arrive at a page that offers no content even loosely related to the search. What’s even more common is arriving at a page that is clearly “planted” through SEO/SEM tactics that contains content, sort of, but clearly really exists for some secondary purpose besides informing, usually to sell something else or drive you to other assosiated properties, products or services. It’s perhaps not full-on spam, but it’s not exactly legitimate either.

For many search terms, especially in Google’s case, the top few results appear almost hand picked, with Google clearly preferring Wikipedia pages. But after that, the next 50 top search results are often more than 50% junk. This sucks. The tricksters are out tricking those with legitimate sites with legitimate content that are also applying SEO and SEM but, for whatever reasons, the trickers still fool Google.

It’s easy to fall into the thinking that all SEO and SEM is “fooling” Google, but every site has to do what they can to get reasonable placement in search results. What’s sad is that a good site, with legitimately, highly related content, combined with a reasonable amount of SEO / SEM is not enough to beat the tricksters and their less-useful, less-legitimate sites. For the bogus sites, SEO / SEM is the business – for the rest of us, it’s just something we have to do to support the business.

It’s a huge business. There appears to be be far more money spent promoting all these bogus sites than there is spent promoting, perhaps small, but legitimately useful sites. People spend thousands of dollars on software and services that automate dastardly SEO / SEM tactics, like back links, link wheels, auto-posting to forums, blogs, etc. (what we would call spamming), automatically re-writing scraped text and re-posting (spinning), and all sorts of other ugliness. It boggles the mind.

For a given topic or category, there are some number of legitimate sites and services. And what I’d like to be able to see in the search results would be a reasonable and fair competition among those legitimate sites. Say there are 1,000 legitimate sites that would be appropriate in the top-1000 search results, where those sites should be ranked by a search engine and ordered fairly. What happens in real life is the bogus “search engine manipulated” sites increase that by some rather significant factor, so now there are maybe 10,000 sites being ranked by the search engine and those 1,000 legitimate sites are hiding somewhere in the 10,000 search results. And to make matters worse, the 9,000 bogus sites will often be better at applying ”search engine manipulation” so that they get ranked higher than our original 1,000 “good” sites.

The Panda update shows that it is not easy for Google to identify the 1,000 “good sites” from the 9,000 “bad sites” through automation (and whatever other techniques they may be applying). Most attempts to fix it tend to throw the baby out with the bath water. The “bad sites” are better at “cheating” since most their energy is spent on SEO / SEM whereas most the energy of the legitimate sites is spent operating their service, improving the customer experience, and supporting their customers.

Getting your site seen among the 1,000 competitors is hard enough. But when you have to also compete with 9,000 “bogus” sites, it’s absolutely mind-numbingly frustrating. Instead of devoting your energy toward your customers, you end up having to devote a lot of energy to try to beat the tricksters. This sucks as a user and as an operator of websites and online services. As a user, I’d rather see a site that is poor at SEO / SEM but has related content than the bogus sites that are better at “search engine manipulation.” And as a site operator and service provider, I’d rather spend all my energy improving the service and supporting customers, instead of campaigning in the SEO / SEM battlefield. But that’s not how it works in real life.

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How to Improve PageRank Using 140Plus.com

There are many great reasons for businesses to use 140Plus.com but one clearly stands out: increasing your keyword rankings and growing your organic search traffic. 

140Plus.com makes it easy to increase the number of terms that your website can rank for without cluttering your site with extra pages that might make your site bloated and hard to navigate.

Below is a step-by-step guide for using 140plus.com as a highly effective and easy to use tool for SEO and traffic building.

1) What do I write about?

The most common road block to getting started with 140Plus.com is deciding what to write about. The answer is simple: write about your keywords. Since you’ll be using 140Plus.com to write about your industry and niche, it will be a natural place to create content around a wide variety of keywords.

2) Identify keywords (be realistic)

As an example, let’s say you want to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site for searches related to the term “pagerank.” Let’s face it, unless you’re Google or Wikipedia, you’re not going to be taking the #1 search engine result for the term “pagerank” anytime soon. That’s okay, you can still get crafty and take a sizable chuck of traffic by thinking about the way people search.

Most experienced Google users understand that using general terms isn’t going to get the results they want. Instead, people typically search for keyword phrases, for example: “increase pagerank,”, “improve pagerank” or “how to improve pagerank.”

I might never get the #1 spot for the term “pagerank” alone, but there is actually a chance that I could rank for the keyword phrase “how to improve pagerank.” Granted, it may not have a high search volume, but if you can rank for a dozen or more of these kinds of keyword phrases related to the term “pagerank” you’ll end up with a significant amount of traffic.

3) Optimize your post around your keyword (Page Title, URL, H1)

The most important places to included keywords on any page of your site is in the page title, the URL and the H1 tag. This means that if you’re trying to rank for “how to improve pagerank” you need to make sure that phrase, in that order, is in all three places.

You also need to make sure that this phrase appears first. A common mistake is for a company to put it’s name before it’s keywords in page titles. For example “140Plus – How to Improve Pagerank.” Instead you would want “How to Improve Pagerank – 140Plus.”

Fortunately, 140plus.com handles this for you automatically. Once you’ve identified your keywords and ensured they’re part of the title of your post, 140plus.com ensures that the page title, the URL and the H1 tag are automatically optimized for search engines for you.

4) Publish your post

Finally, publish your post. 140Plus automatically arranges your page into a clean, search-engine friendly format, while automatically publishing to the web, to Twitter, and to Google. Depending on how frequently Google and other search engines scan your 140plus.com site, it could take a few days or longer for your pages to be indexed and show up in Google. A simple tip to get your 140plus.com pages into search engines faster is to publish more often. When Google notices that a site is getting updated daily, it will scan the site more regularly.

This is another place where 140Plus.com does some for the work for you, automatically posting to Twitter and posting your RSS feed to Google, leveraging the real-time social web to help your 140Plus.com posts get indexed faster.

140Plus.com gives your site more inbound links, which increases pagerank and improves organic search results to greatly increase traffic to your site. 140Plus makes it astonishingly easy to publish content to the new real-time social web. No set-up or configuration required. Just publish your content and share the link in seconds.

The world’s simplest Twitter-integrated, SEO-optimized pages.

5) Check the results

Try an experiment: If it’s been more than a few hours since your post has gone live, open up a new browser tab and do a quick Google search for “how to improve pagerank using 140plus.com.” Does your post show up on the front page? If so, do another search for “how to improve pagerank.” Does it show up again?

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SEO revisited in brief

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those things that keeps circling back into my life. On the one hand, SEO sort of makes you feel dirty when taking part in it. On the other hand, as a research topic, it can be fascinating.

I have worked on SEO in various capacities, from a number of angles, over the years. Much of the information I’ve gathered I cannot share under NDA or otherwise. However, I find some of these results so unexpected, I have to share, in at least general terms.

When you mention SEO, a lot of people roll their eyes. It is so yesterday. But the reality is, you cannot get away from it. A slight change in Google ranking can mean a difference of thousands of visitors per day and potentially a lot of money. It was worth enough for J.C. Penny, a $17.8 billion company, to allegedly risk so-called black hat SEO practices to improve their ranking.

Everybody in SEO knows its easier to get ranked highly than it is to stay ranked highly. It’s difficult to say if this lowering of rankings for some sites over time is due to algorithms or manual intervention – it’s probably a bit of both.

Fresh content will move up quicker, with Twitter and other social media, and Blog “juice” helping a lot in the short term to move a site up in the rankings – and Google says as much. However, we also notice some very stale content stays at the top of the results seemingly forever.

Speaking of Social Media, here’s the result of many hours of analysis of vast amounts of data collected over many years boiled down to one sentence: In terms of “free” (viral/guerrilla) marketing, Twitter gets you many more vistors quicker but Google gets you way, WAY more vistors in the long run (if you can move up the rankings). You’re welcome. In other words, Twitter is great for some initial buzz and driving some traffic to your site/service almost immediately, but it peaks fast. Google (and Facebook) on the other hand are harder nuts to crack and take more time to build effect, but once achieved, these “old school” media services blow Twitter away in terms of drivers of traffic. Maybe the days of the web search engine are numbered, but for now, it is still the absolute king in terms of driving traffic.

If that doesn’t blow your mind, here’s secret for SEO success #2 (and this is for real): If you’re on a tight budget, focus on keywords with a large volume of queries but that don’t have much competition (i.e. they aren’t targeted). Forget the most hotly sought after keywords with a lot of competition. For every one of those, there are some keywords that get a lot of hits too (often almost as many as the highly coveted keywords) but are not targeted very much, if at all, by other sites. Implementing this trick alone properly will get you significant results, if you’re not already doing it, and is worth the price of reading this post. (Of course we’re assuming your site is actually related to these keywords and is worthy of clicking and is useful to the visitors etc.).

SEO success secret #3: Blogs still have a powerful effect on rankings. Twitter has a huge valuation and blogs are supposedly in decline, but they still have a much greater impact on search engine ranking than Twitter does. Don’t ask me why, but the data doesn’t lie. However, a blog with Twitter integration (like our 140plus.com service - gratuitous plug) has far more effect than a blog that isn’t in some way linked with Twitter. It seems like Twitter, Facebook, and other social media mentions help keep your blog appearing more relevant and fresh to search engines.

And finally, one thing I’ve also learned in this is that, frankly, Google results kind of suck. Google introduced a supposedly big change earlier this year that received a lot of press. Google said the change was ”designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites” which insiders claimed really meant going after so-called “content farms” – I have a whole contrary post to write about that subject some day – but back to my point. In testing results for lots of keywords, I can tell you that there is still plenty of “pollution” in the Google results (and Bing and Yahoo too for that matter). Every Google search result page has at least a couple of sites that have essentially nothing to do with the search query – but there it is, getting a coveted high ranking.  This may be because of the issue stated above where it is relatively easy to move up the rankings in the short-term, so there are always a few sites that have successfully gamed the system but have not been detected yet, so they temporarily have an artificially high ranking and thus appear in the top Google results.  However, some sites seem to manage to stay in the top rankings despite not being relevant or useful.

Anyway, hopefully you find this information interesting, as I do.

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Introducing 140plus.com

I’m in the process of shutting down one service (Twitmart.org) and at the same time firing up a new one at 140plus.com.

I essentially put 140plus.com together for my own needs but made it general enough for anybody to use. I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the 140plus.com domain for a while and finally decided to go ahead and deploy this rather modest idea on that domain.

Basically, I am always spinning several plates at the same time in the form of ideas and projects I’m working on. These often have a Twitter ID associated with them. 140plus.com lets me have a simple blog for each of these using just a Twitter ID without having to go through the setup of a full Blogger or WordPress blog.

Blogger and WordPress invite one to customize a blog – the urge to do so is often overwhelming – soon you can find yourself spending an enormous amount of time on the look and theme and widgets and other options on your blog. 140plus.com is the anti-Wordpress in that regard. There are NO VERY FEW customization options with 140plus.com. With one click to sign in using your Twitter account (using Twitter OAuth), you have  your blog setup at http://YOU.140plus.com and are ready to start writing posts.

140plus.com Admin Dashboard

140plus.com blogs can choose from a few basic themes with pre-set layouts (the default and most common theme is derived from the Kubrick design by Michael Heilemann – at some point, this might change). You can set your blog title, define some keywords, and add a few links off your blog page, and that’s basically it. All of these settings are optional and automatically default to reasonable values if not set, so never need to be touched, if you don’t want to.

Another way to look at 140plus.com is as a “Twit Longer” type service, where you can post items that don’t fit in 140 characters to Twitter.  When you post a new entry on your 140plus.com blog, the title of the entry is sent to Twitter, with a link to the full post.

Sample 140plus.com Tweet

Check it out and let me know what you think: http://140plus.com

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