Lisa Barone wrote an interesting piece entitled "Are SEOs Responsible For Rankings Or Money?". At a recent SMX conference, Matt McGee posed the SEO myth "SEO is about rankings”. Lisa was relieved when the panel concluded that SEO was really all about the money.

I agree, but then all business activity is ultimately about money. We could say car racing is all about money, but it's also about engineering. It's about skill, excitement, and winning the game.

So what is SEO these days, anyway?

A Very Brief History Of SEO

Back when SEO started, SEO wasn't called SEO. It was probably best described by those who did it as a form of hacking.

The first search engines weren't particularly clever, so it was relatively easy to figure out their sorting algorithms. There was a time when Infoseek's algorithm was almost entirely based on keyword density and keyword position.

Whilst this hacking was still ultimately about money, it was as much a game as anything else. I'm sure many old school SEOs remember those days with a sense of nostalgia. It was more of a pure technical pursuit back then.

As search engines got more sophisticated, and more money flowed online, the nature of the game changed. SEO moved beyond technical hacking to an exercise in making connections.

In Googles early days, you could buy a few high PR links - or beg for them - and that was enough to get you ranking top ten in most keyword areas. Buy a few more if you really wanted to go hard. Saturate the long tail with auto-gen, just like your competitors were doing, and it was game on. Some may say we haven't completely left this phase, but the sun is setting on this approach.

These days, a more holistic approach is required. The search engines, Google in particular, have become more and more oblique, which means systematic technical approaches are less effective than they once were. This begs the question - what is a client hiring an SEO to do, exactly?

BTW: For those who want to read deeper on a history of SEO, check out this excellent Danny Sullivan interview. He knows more than most about the history of SEO.

Explaining SEO

Ever had trouble explaining to people what you do?

I've worked out a succinct answer that is easy for non-technical people to understand. When people ask me what I do, I tell them "I'm a drug dealer".

It isn't true, of course, but I just figure it's easier for people to grasp. If pushed, I'll launch into a detailed explanation of SEO, internet advertising and web publishing models - an explanation which is universally guaranteed to be met with the response "huh"?.

Often, they'll conclude: "so you rank web sites in Google, then?".

To which my reply is "well, that's part of it". As I explain further, I'm still not sure I'm making any headway, so figure it's time everyone had another drink and talk about something else.

The SMX panel is right. SEO is not about just about ranking websites, it's about so much more. Some SEOs, myself included, use SEO as part of a business strategy, a strategy that is just as much about publishing, domain names, brand building, marketing and traffic acquisition. It involves metrics, tracking, conversions, split/run testing, adwords, adsense, writing, researching, managing and changing the light-bulb in the office when it blows. The commonality is that it is oriented around the search ecosystem. Except for the light-bulb.

Some SEOs focus on very specific areas. It is their job to take a site from nowhere in the search engines to achieving desirable rankings. Their job ends there. I suspect such a role is becoming less common as search companies like Google extend their tentacles into every corner of the web, and search consultants invariably follow.

Ask ten different SEOs what they do, and you'll probably get ten different answers. None of which the lay person will likely understand, unfortunately.

Learning SEO Today

If you're starting out in SEO now, I don't envy your challenge. If you're reading this, and you're an SEO veteran, please feel free to add your comments below. What is your advice to those starting out?

Here's mine. ;)

It helps to understand the big picture first. The reason people engage in SEO is ultimately about making money. Even a non-profit may make money from SEO by saving money they would have spent on some other marketing channel.

They want people to find their web site. They want people to connect with them, rather than their competitors. They want people to do this so they can convert these people to buyers, of their goods, their services, or their ideas. If a site were only to rank - say, on keyword terms no-one searched for, or that weren't directly applicable to the objectives of the business, then the SEO work is largely useless. It matters not if a site appears in Google's index. If no one visits via a search in Google, then all that's happened is the bandwidth costs have increased i.e. Google's spider visits and digests pages, and the ROI for the SEO spend looks dire.

So SEO isn't about rankings.

The rankings must translate to something tangible. In most cases, this means gaining qualified visitor traffic. To get this traffic, a site must do more than rank, a site must appeal to visitors. A visitor who clicks back isn't really a visitor. To appeal to visitors, the SEO must first understand them. What do they want? What problem do they have?

Once the SEO understands visitor intent - and they can do this by getting clues from the search query itself, and testing pages against alternatives - they then direct that visitor around the site in order to turn the visitor into something else i.e. a buyer, a subscriber, a reader. Some might say this goes beyond the job description of an SEO, however whether an SEO works on this part or not, they do need to understand it. If the client doesn't see a positive benefit from an SEOs work, they are unlikely to keep paying for the services.

So, yes, SEO is about money. But it is also about the long process by which money is made.

Posted by randfish

Last night at the SEOmoz meetup in Avi Wilensky's incredible office space, a frequent topic of discussion both during the presentations/Q+A and in small group networking before and after was the propensity for Google (and Bing) to bias towards exact match domains in the rankings.

How big an issue is exact-match domains? Let's look at some data from our correlation analysis from real run academy websiteAdvanced earlier this year:

Just by itself, exact match is remarkably high in correlation to rankings. No other on-site/on-page factor we examined even came close. Granted, that's not causation, and it could be other factors influencing those impressively high rankings. Let's get a bit deeper and more granular around the issue:

Holy what?! Actually, this probably isn't very surprising to most SEOs. The second highest correlation we found of anything - links, on-page elements, URL factors, keyword usage, third-party metrics  (excluding only Page Authority scores, which are specifically designed to predict Google rankings) was exact-match .com domain names. Yeah - it's powerful stuff.

We can also look at the raw prominence (less interesting for determining what might help a page/site rank, but useful for this application:

That's saying that more than 1/4 and nearly 1/3 SERPs contain an exact match domain in the top 10. The only thing more prominent?

 

No surprise it's keyword-in-the-domain matches (but not necessarily exact). So, in the first pie chart set, we'd say that for the query "org chart" only orgchart.* type domains would count. In the second, something like myorgcharts.com, greatorgcharts.net, etc. would fit the pattern. These appear in around half of all SERPs on both engines.

The question is, with search results in so many sectors becoming so overrun with obviously over-SEO'd, spammy, manipulative and sometimes, downright poor quality exact-match domains, is Google bound to take action?

Blueglass' Chris Winfield argued that Google is bound to giving outsized benefit to exact match domains because of the brand intent behind so many queries. Since a search for "Alaska Airlines" or "MSN" or "NY Times" is likely to want exactly those websites in the first position, Google's overcompensating in the broader algorithm by biasing towards these exact matches. Many in the audience agreed (and I personally find this viewpoint credible, too).

Interestingly, some of the more experienced, ear-to-the-ground SEO types indicated that they'd heard (or believed) that Google would soon be taking action against exact match domains. One person, who wasn't at the event, but whom I trust a great deal (and will remain anonymous) indicated they thought the next 6 months would bring about this shift.

Personally, I'd welcome it as both a searcher and an SEO. I think Google's relied on exact match for far too long, and it would give them a substantive quality boost over Bing to have more subtlely in the domain matching algo. But, as always, I'm curious to hear what you think - is this really a weakness/problem? Should Google take action? Do you think they will (particularly given the poor track record of improvements like this in the past year or so)?

A completely unrelated p.s. Linking to Twitter profiles (as I did at the start of the post) is curious. Notice that the URLs if you're logged into Twitter look like http://twitter.com/#!/aviw instead of http://twitter.com/aviw. Now,this could be an incredibly dumb move, but actually, both Twitter and Facebook are using Google's new AJAX crawling protocol. Not as SEO-ignorant as they look, eh? :-)

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In yesterday’s post, we spoke about why you would want to change your content based on traffic intent. In today’s post, I’m going to give you a basic framework about how to do it. This post is written as a Thesis Tutorial, because working with Thesis is just easier (see my Thesis review), but you [...]

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thesis Tutorial: How to Conditionally Change Content

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A few weeks ago, Brent Payne made a post about “whitehat cloaking” and changing your content based on referring website. He asked for some feedback on Twitter, causing some follow up discussions. I had a few people asking for examples about how to do this. In this two part post, first we’ll look at some [...]

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Change Your Content Based on Traffic Intent

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Advertisers:

1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
4. Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
5. Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
6. Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
7. Majestic SEO - Competitive back link intellegence for SEO Analysis
8. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
9. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
10. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
11. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
12. TigerTech - Great web hosting service at a great price.

So the conversation in tech media of late is that Facebook is set to become a bigger cash cow than Google.

Why?

People spend more time on Facebook. Facebook has users locked-in (kinda). Facebook "owns" the social map. Facebook is popular. Facebook is everywhere. Facebook is big.

Uh-huh.

Facebook may be all those things, but when it comes to translating "viewers" into revenue, Google currently wins hands down.

Google wins because Google's advertising is closely aligned with the users primary activity, which is to seek topics and click links. The primary activity of a user on Facebook is to socialize. Translating this activity to a commercial imperative, in a way advertisers find profitable, is the challenge Facebook faces.

The primary user activity on Facebook isn't yet as conducive to effective advertising as the topic-matching system used by Google. This shows up in the revenue data.

Google's revenue, with supposedly fewer users than Facebook, is $23.531 billion - and rising. Facebook, with more users, who reportedly spend more time on the site, has estimated revenues around $1b. Admittedly a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison, but useful to get the two entities in perspective. Facebook is nowhere near Google in terms of advertiser revenue.

In short, being popular doesn't necessarily translate into revenue, or marketing value. Ask any popular blogger who is blogging on a non-commercial topic. It can be difficult to convert some audiences, and some activities, into revenue and advertiser value.

As a commenter, Chris Norstrom, on the TechCrunch page I linked to above pointed out:

500 Millions users does not mean those users want to accomplish EVERYTHING on your site. Facebook already tried their own version of "yahoo.Answers" and it failed. People come to facebook to lol with friends and waste time, nothing more. Not to check inboxes, not to ask questions, not to participate in groups, not to rate stores or check into places, not to send or receive money, not to edit documents.

Is he right, do you think?

Like Button Replacing The Link

Some commentators have suggested that the "like" button on Facebook will replace the link

Enter the Like button, the social solution to search, and the replacement of the link as a voting mechanism. The people as a whole are more effective at determining what content is relevant and most of those people are unfortunately not effective at creating links

A "thumbs up" system doesn't say much. It may help people find out what is most popular amongst the heard on any given day, but as anyone can see from Digg, exploding pancakes doesn't mean much, popular as the topic may be. I suspect Facebook users will use the Like button even less when they come to realise it's a form of permission marketing.

Google, on the other hand, is oriented around topical queries. Relevance is decided by alorithms that measure over a hundred different factors. It's fair to say that if a simple "Like" button worked as a means to determine relevance, Google would have implemented it years ago. They pretty much have one, but who really uses it?

In short, user voting is fraught with problems. It won't replace sophisticated algorithms. The link, the basis of the web, isn't going away.

Fit The Message To The Medium

Which, in a rather long-winded way, brings me around to my point.

The Google vs Facebook contest doesn't really matter as far as marketing is concerned. Both environments are valuable to marketers. Both need to be approached in different ways.

As we discussed in Google Keyword Research Tool: Not Popular, search is suited to concepts and services of which the searcher is already aware. Facebook is better suited to distraction media, viral campaigns, and marketing targeted at specific demographic groups.

Facebook may be useful at introducing people to new concepts - especially if those concepts fit into an existing social activity, as defined by members of a specific demographic i.e. the group "Porsche Owners Club" may be interested in new Porsche merchandise, whether they're actively seeking it or not.

Keep in mind the core function of Facebook. The Facebook user isn't likely to be actively hunting for something. They are killing time, or socializing. As a result, Facebook is less suited to direct sales, as it is difficult to determine which phase the buyer is at in the sales funnel. Facebook is more suited to brand building and awareness campaigns. It is suited to relationship building. Adjust your marketing approach accordingly.

For further reading on the specifics of Facebook marketing, SEOMoz offers a great overview of marketing approaches on Facebook.