The Googleplex Blog

Building Traffic and Making Money

SEO-the common abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization-is, as I've said before, "a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago."

That said, SEO has come of age, along with its slightly more respectable relative, CPC-or Cost Per Click-advertising via Google AdWords (or elsewhere).

Any business, no matter its size, needs to include an Internet marketing and advertising component as part of its business plan. For some businesses, this Internet marketing effort is the only advertising that is necessary. A key component of this marketing plan is crafting an effective SEO strategy.

In crafting your effective SEO strategy, it is necessary to walk a narrow line. Over aggressive tricks-sometimes called Blackhat SEO-do not work in the long run, except for scamsters. On the other hand, it is right and just to put one's best foot forward, and get as a high a natural search ranking as possible.

Contextually, SEO needs to be regarded as a component of online marketing and advertising. It's perfectly reasonable to allocate a percentage of resources to SEO at the same time as a CPC budget is formulated.

While there are some responsible and reputable SEO consultants, the field has not entirely emerged from an era of gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism.

In response, my electronic book Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money is available as downloadable PDF from O'Reilly, the publisher. It's not about getting rich quick, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. You can take this PDF to the boardroom and understand the technology issues underlying SEO (it won't replace your marketing consultant). If you are a do-it-yourself webmaster, my PDF should tell you everything you need to become a SEO whiz from a technical perspective.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization-affectionately called by its acronym SEO-is a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago.

In the SEO arena, gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism meets successful marketing techniques (and people who do make a great deal of money), and both meet the nuts and bolts of a technology framework.

Like a beautiful spy with limpid eyes and unknowable depths, or an iceberg with 95% of its mass hidden beneath the surface of an arctic ocean, SEO can appear wondrous, mysterious, and baffling.

Less poetically, the core of SEO is the art and science of promoting web pages so they are high in natural search engine rankings. (A natural search engine result is one that is not paid for, as opposed to paid advertising links that also appear on search-results pages.)

Extended SEO has come to mean the whole field of marketing in relationship to web properties-so it is not unusual these days to have an SEO expert propose paid advertising via Google AdWords or another program as an adjunct to core SEO techniques.

I?m pleased that my book Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs has been doing well (it?s shown up on Amazon?s list of computer bestsellers in the last few weeks).

My book is about the landscape of making money on the web: how to create content that will make money, how to monetize that content with Google's AdSense program, how affiliate programs work, how to effectively use Google's AdWords program to promote traffic, and how to program custom applications related to Google's advertising programs.

In other words, this is a practical book aimed at helping you make money, but it is primarily about effectively using technology. There are two chapters in the book (out of 16 chapters) that discuss SEO issues from a nuts and bolts perspective.

So I was pleased when O?Reilly (the publisher of my book) asked me to write a short electronic book specifically about SEO. You can download Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money as a PDF.

Like Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs, my SEO PDF is not get-rich-quick hype, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. It doesn't really tackle marketing techniques at a strategic level (which I am looking forward to doing soon).

Spider-Friendly Tables

Are you using tables to design your web pages? (These days, many webmasters prefer to use absolute positioning with CSS.)

If you are still using tables, here's an article with a good tip about how to design your tables so that search engine spiders "see" your content (and important keywords) before they see your navigation bar.

More on ODP

Jack Krupansky makes the following interesting comment regarding my post about the ODP's troubles:

I read your post on the Open Directory Project and agree with your assessment. I have four legitimate web sites and five blogs, but you won't find any of them in the directory, despite my best efforts. You'll only find one of them in Yahoo's directory since I simply don't have the budget to pay for "express" service.

Maybe part of the problem is that the original interest in taxonomy has been diffused as a result of the general success of Google and its anti-taxonomy textmining philosophy, and the interest in manual tagging, folksonomies, etc. Face it, it's easy to place Technorati tags in blog posts that link to web pages, so why beat your head against the ODP "wall".

The real problem: ODP needs leadership, but it's run by a dispersed mob. Communities are great, when they work, but when they're dysfunctional, they really, really suck.

ODP in Trouble

The ODP (Open Directory Project) is in trouble. A leading source of taxonomic information on the Web, the ODP relies on volunteer human editors to vet web sites for inclusion in the directory. Google, Yahoo, and others use ODP information (Google's use of the ODP as the basis for the Google Directory is explained in Chapter 7 of my Building Research Tools book). Inclusion in the ODP essentially means indexing status and traffic.

The ODP is run by Time-Warner's AOL's Netscape division in accordance with the Debian Social Contract. Part of the thought behind ODP is that "humans do it best": automated systems and understaffed editors at commercial search companies cannot keep up with constant change on the web.

Neither, as it turns out, can a volunteer system. Hundreds, or thousands, of categories are currently without editors. For those of us who want to get our sites into the ODP, there's an increasing feeling of lack of dynamism - and delay. When I told an editor that it could take 4-6 months to get into the ODP, and one needed to come back and keep trying if not listed the first time, the response was incredulity and bemusement. Bemusement that so static and clogged an institution should gate-keep the dynamic information model of the Web.

Now it turns out that worse may be afoot. Supposedly, ODP listings are being sold like a commodity - which (in a sense) they are - they beat buying an AdSense ad for effectiveness in getting indexed. And editors supposedly join the ODP to trash their competition.

For more on the troubles at ODP, see this article in SiteProNews, and the (incredibly entertaining if saddening) blog Corrupt Dmoz Editor by an ODP editor operating under the nom de blog "Ana Thema." Ms. Thema makes the ODP sound like the mob in posts like How to Bribe an DMOZ Editor. Some quotes from the blog, which may or may not be totally for real: "Links are a commodity. Links from DMOZ are a hot commodity. Everything in this world is a commodity: everything. If you disbelieve that someone would be so corrupt as to sell submissions into the ODP, then Dorothy, this is your wake up call."

And: "AOL/TimeWarner own DMOZ and they treat it like the dollar chasing b***h it really is. And you should, too. Sabotaging your competitors is not simply about deleting their sites from the categories, but a more subtle and ongoing process of destroying their relevance for important keyword phrases."

Of course, you may wish to read the post just to learn how to go about bribing the editors to get that all-important listing. Just kidding!

Go figure! I thought ODP was sluggish but idealistic. (I've been listed without paying a bribe, so the claim in the blog that a bribe is mandatory is false in at least some cases). It turns out it may be a cesspool. How bad is it? The Web community should find out, and take steps to get this vital institution back on the high road.

Braintique Press Release

Here's the link to the Braintique Press Release. Also, check out all the releases scheduled for the same day (1/15/2005). Braintique is about 30 down the list!

Press Releases

In the bad old days before the Internet and the Web, it used to be a relatively expensive proposition to submit a press release for distribution, running into thousands of dollars for an account with a wire service.

These days, it's easy to get a press release distributed for free using a service like PR Web. There are some gotchas:

• You must know how to write the press release in press release format (you can check out the PR Web FAQ or Google "writing press release" if you are unsure about this).

• PR Web tries hard to upsell you on increased distribution services (cost about $30 per release) to get your release out there.
  

It remains to be seen how effective this "vanity" press release system is: will my (or your) press release get any notice amid the thousands of daily releases that are now available? In theory, PR Web releases should get picked up by wire services, some news media, search engines, and online news services such as Google News. But of course the job of online news services is to only pick up items that are really news worthy, not someone's home made press release touting a dubiously better mouse trap.

I've submitted a press release to PR Web noting that Braintique is open for "business" and plan to use this as a test to see how effective the mechanism is. The press release should get posted in the next few days, and I'll provide a link to it then, and also let you know how well it works out.