SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

Almost 3000 Sphinn visits from August 6th until September 5th

August was a very successful month for this blog, especially as it was during summer when many people are on vacation. Business blogging is one of the key methods of reaching an audience for an SEO company. SEO firms can’t rely on the major social sites like Digg, Reddit or even StumbleUpon as the audience there often is wary of SEO already due to the elusive nature of SEO: You only recognize bad, spammy SEO unless you are a search marketer yourself.

So what audience is a “target audience” for a SEO blog or more broadly for business blogging?

1. High profile experts of the trade?
2. Your peers in the industry?
3. Bloggers and social media users, in other words multipliers?
4. Advanced web users and webmasters?
5. Main stream internet users?
6. All internet users?

You have to ask yourself who the people are you want to reach before every post you write. I hate the term “target audience” as I’m not gonna shoot at anybody, I rather say “preferred audience“.

In August I had the unique opportunity to support the very successful SEOptimise blog team with 4 larger lists that go beyond the usual top 10 of this or that. Keep in mind that this blog is one of the most important SEO blogs in the UK according to the Google ranking at least, which in SEO circles speaks for itself. Also internationally it’s more often in the top 10 for “SEO blog” than not. Moreover the blog has more than 1200 subscribers. So it has undoubtedly already an audience.

Nonetheless I was able to reach much larger audiences, 5 to 30 times larger depending on the post. In this post I want to focus on the question why some posts “only” get 5 times as much traffic while others 10, or 30 times.

I experimented with my audiences this month. Although you can’t separate the above mentioned groups in such a clean manner you can decide beforehand which one is your preferred audience. Number 1 is the most narrow one, number 6 obviously the most populous one.

Addressing an audience is often as simple as naming it in the headline/title. Consider these three examples, they could represent the same list. Just the “target audience” differs:

• 100 Resources for Small Businesses
• 100 Resources for Web Developers
• 100 Resources for Geeks

You might want to change the description of each resource slightly but overall you can use the same resources for all three of them. When you use a very exclusive term (in the sense of excluding people) like “SEO” you will end up with a much smaller but probably more targeted audience in contrast to e.g. using “Search”. Which post is more relevant for general users:

“The Future of SEO” or “The Future of Search”?

Again, both can deal with the same topic, the first one will get a few hundred people to read it, the second one can reach thousands or more.

Beyond the headline there are of course other considerations: Do you take acronyms like “SEO” for granted or do you use terms that everybody can understand? Do you explain in a manner people outside the industry can relate to or not?

Blogging for the SEO industry is more difficult than for most others as explained above but still you have some places to reach out to: Niche social news sites for marketing, especially Sphinn for search marketing and beyond. Then there is Delicious representative of the larger web developer, webmaster and advanced web user crowd. SEO tools and resources can get popular there if they are useful enough for more than just the tiny SEO community. In fact most SEO tools and resources are but they fail to make the people believe they need them by disregarding the advice I gave you above.

Call it web tools and you get more people to use them than just the SEO tools.

In some cases you are better off by ignoring some audiences, you can’t satisfy everybody and some people just do not want to be content with your content

Nothing exemplifies that more accurate than the bizarre reactions of some “experts” to my last post on SEOptimise. This post gained 76 votes and had the same number of visits from Sphinn alone but multiplied with 10.

While the headline expressed that the post is about the “easiest” not the most advanced methods of getting links, these people were not satisfied with this explanation and repeatedly argued that the list is “stupid”, “basic”, “not fitting on a social news site” etc. The only thing that was stupid here was that I wasted my time trying to react to them. The sheer number of people approving of the post proved them wrong.

This post was both the most popular submission of mine in votes during my one year of participation on Sphinn (and I’ve been numerous times on the Sphinn fp), the most popular post written by me on Sphinn ever and the most popular SEOptimise post on Sphinn ever. It ended up on top of page 4 of the Sphinn “Greatest Hits”.

So you really have to decide, are you targeting these 5 people whom you can’t satisfy as they want to be “bigger experts” than you are, the 50 peers on Sphinn who approve of your post or the 500 visitors. Beyond that you might want to address the 5000 Delicious and/or StumbleUpon users depending on your topic.

All of the posts got what they deserved, a dozen authority links from blogs too. To be honest I also targeted the real experts of our industry and I got them too So you also can decide for both, 5 and 5k.

We are currently looking for search engine marketing professionals to work from our office at the Magdalen Centre in Oxford, UK.

The job roles available are for an SEO Executive and Pay Per Click Manager, this is a great opportunity for anyone keen to learn and looking to improve their experience in the search industry.

If you know of anyone who may be interested it would be great if you could point them in our direction…

This week I’ve seen a number of “hosted pages” ranking very well in some nice search results. By hosted pages I mean pages that are promoting a certain company but are not published on the companies website. Examples include Squidoo pages and forum threads etc

This isn’t anything new but what is interesting is how many links the pages have. I’ve seen forum threads with up to 100,000 links that are not auto generated spam links but paid links. Some people are going out and spending thousands buying links to somebody elses domain to make a single page rank well on Google.

The problem with this strategy is that it isn’t a long term solution. Google (if it spots the pages) will remove them without hesitation making all the links worthless. They can also pretty much wipe out thousands of link selling sites in one fell swoop.

Another issue is that the owners of these domains face being given penalties (like Squidoo got) to stop them ranking so highly. Google knows that a certain percentage of Squidoo lenses are spam so they can’t give the site enough authority to rank for competitive queries.

Imagine if this was your forum and somebody pointed 100,000 links at it and you started ranking for some major search terms. What do you think Google would do?

We have put our new search engine marketing agency website live today, but as always we are just waiting on the last couple of bits to be finished. Have a look around the site and let us know what you think. If you can also bear with us whilst we iron out the last few bugs and get the SEO blog looking like the rest of the site.

As I am going to try to start blogging – if I can get the time to do it and as you might have seen my name popping up in relation to SEOptimise, I thought I should explain my appearance with some background on how I got here.

I joined SEOptimise in May this year from Purple Label, an award winning Oxfordshire based dry cleaner. Not of course your average dry cleaner – I hope! When I started the business with Louise Ramp in 2003 we had a real vision of changing an old and tired industry. After all the dry cleaning market was changing, people now had the choice not to dry clean, with machine washable suits (please don’t buy one) and the more casual work etiquette, Rand’s yellow trainers for example, although I’m sure he could get away with wearing them with a suit. In addition, the people who use dry cleaners regularly tend to be in high profile jobs. I remember thinking we did have a low profile but high spending regular customer – who always turned up in an old saloon, until the week he turned up in his super car! So the theory was that a well-marketed company that had an appealing brand image would be able to rapidly gain market share.

Unfortunately, Purple Label did not work out; Louise was diagnosed with leukaemia in January 2004. The business took a back seat for her, but left me working 80-100 hour weeks to keep the momentum of the first year. When Louise returned to work at the start of 2006 it had lost some of the impetus (at least in my eyes). We had started an on-line product side to complement our online ordering system for dry cleaning selling hangers and any other products we could find related to clothing, we were about to sign a deal with whirlpool to bring through a new - niche - product, and we had appeared in The Sunday Times and The Financial Times.

So why did I decide to leave Purple Label? Good question, I had met Kevin Gibbons who was running SEOptimise and I had developed a great interest in search marketing after spending a couple of years optimising the product side of the Purple Label website, it fitted with my degree in mathematics and interest in this area. Prior to Purple Label, I had worked with companies like Cisco and enjoyed working with the latest technology. Purple Label was getting crowded at the top, as Louise was away for so long it had changed into a business that only needed one director. In addition, most importantly, Louise was better and was in a position to run the business on her own.

So if you need to know how to iron a shirt or what to know how to get chewing gum off your favourite trousers, just ask. My biggest regret is when I left they shut down the online product side which I though had real potential.

I’m looking forward to working on SEOptimise and moving the company forward, my first aim was to achieve Adwords Qualified Company status for SEOptimise which we did far quicker than I anticipated, we have also started to build a relationship with Google. We also have a new logo, stationery and a new website coming soon. Combine this with some very interesting client wins I definitely feel my decision was the correct one.

This week everyone seems to be adding their own Facebook SEO groups, I’ve counted at least 7 new ones so far. And as if there’s not enough already I’ve added one for SEOptimise too!

Here are the ones I’m aware of so far just from the last couple of days, if anyone spots more let me know and I’ll add them to the list:
SEOptimise - Facebook Group
Search Engine Land - Facebook Group
Sphinn - Facebook Group
Marketing Pilgrim - Facebook Group
SEO by the Sea - Facebook Group
Stuntdubl - Facebook Group
SEO 101 - Facebook Group
Viperchill - Facebook Group

Thanks to everyone who’s joined the SEOptimise group so far (and apologies to everyone annoyed with yet another SEO group!). I find site’s like Facebook and LinkedIn a great way of connecting with people within the search industry and also staying in touch with old friends so feel free to join the group or add me as a friend.

Thanks for everyone’s help with the logo design concepts vote, we decided to go for #5 as voted by you. We now have 3 versions of this logo to choose from and quite like all of them in different ways so any help again would be great.

#1:

#2:

#3:

Once again you can vote for more than one logo if your just as indecisive as we are:

We are currently in the process of upgrading the SEOptimise website, the first step is to get a more professional logo.

Instead of making it easy and just giving us a new logo design, Logoworks have given us 7 to choose from instead!

Here they are:
1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

I’ve only run a poll once before on here and I’m not expecting a major response but any help with this would be great, at the moment my favourites are 5 and probably 2 as well.

You can choose more than one logo if you can’t decide!

I’ve just noticed my Technorati favourited by figures have jumped quite a bit recently, it’s upto 64 members now but the last time I checked it was 2, and one of them was me!

100 members would be a good target to get, if you’d like to add SEOptimise to your Technorati favourites please click the button below. And while your at it why not subscribe to the RSS feed, connect to my LinkedIn profile and join the MyBlogLog community and Blog Catalog neighbourhood too

Update: The large increase in favourites has come from this evil, lazy or smart plan, cheers Andy!

I’ve been tagged by Joe Williams so it looks like it’s my turn to list 5 reasons why I blog!

• 1) Improve search rankings
  It’s no secret that one of the main reasons I write this blog is to help improve the site’s search rankings. Providing original content about the latest search news can lead to many natural incoming links, helping to improve search rankings for a range of long tail keywords for individual posts as well as giving a boost to general results for the whole domain.
• 2) Keeping fresh with the latest news
  Because the search industry is continually changing so rapidly, I think it’s very important to have a website which reflects this. Showing readers that you know about the latest Google algorithm or AdWords quality score update and the impact this will have upon results. I’ve found that writing a blog has also encouraged me to keep up-to-date with what people in the industry are writing about, learning different bits from each which I can incorporate into my own blog.
• 3) Storing useful information
  In a way I sometimes use this blog as my own social bookmarking site to help remember links which I have found important or interesting. This helps me out massively when in a couple of weeks time the information might become useful and I’ve completely forgotten who wrote about it, tracing back through my archive normally means I should be able to find it again fairly quickly.
• 4) Networking
  Writing a blog has been an excellent way of networking with other bloggers. Creating content which is getting noticed can grab the attention of people within the SEO or pay-per-click industry from around the world and in some cases can lead to very useful contacts who you wouldn’t have known otherwise.
• 5) Generating regular traffic/subscribers
  This blog has been running for just over a year now and although the subscriber count is very low in comparison to the leading blogs, currently 278, it is still a very effective method of gaining regular readers. While I don’t make any money from the blog in advertising, the additional traffic generated from readers has alternative benefits in terms of how the increase in traffic can potentially lead to users which may bookmark posts, link to a story on their own blog or could perhaps be a potential client.

It’s getting a bit difficult to find blogs that haven’t been tagged for this by now but here’s a few which will hopefully join in:

• Pronet Advertising
• SEO Home
• eWhisper
• PPC Blog
• PPC Discussions
• The PPC Book