When it really comes down to it….
By murph
Sometimes it can be hard relating certain aspects of the Internet marketing business to those in another person’s/client’s industry. For example, it’s true that the end product of an SEO/SEM/PPC/social media campaign for a client should be an increase in leads that they are obtaining. Not an increase in traffic, an increase in SERP, or an increase in blog comments or e-mail questions, but an increase in business. But as Internet Marketing professionals, is your website your number one source of leads?
I’m sure that companies who have been established in the industry for a long period of time, have a large portfolio of clients, a web site that has been developed over the past however many years, and rank for almost every major keyword related to their industry get a fair amount of leads from their sites. But for everyone else, when it really comes down to it, isn’t word-of-mouth still the most powerful lead generation tool available to Internet Marketing professionals?
A client once said to me, “well I just did a Google search for Baltimore SEO and figured if you showed up on the front page, you knew what you were doing and if you didn’t, why should I work with you if your own site can’t rank??”. While some people do still think like this (probably most of the time because they don’t know who else to turn to for their Internet marketing efforts and a Google search is the most time-effective method) it’s still my opinion that, in the Internet Marketing AND web design industries, referrals, grass-roots marketing, and networking leads to more clients than ranking for keywords and running PPC ads.
It can be hard to explain this to others not in the industry as well as clients because 1) they don’t understand the level of competition and amount of effort that is involved with ranking for certain keywords (it’s no secret that my operation is a one-man show and I barely have time to write on this thing let alone promote it… like I’ve said before, it’s like the auto mechanic driving around an old beat up hooptie), 2) with all of the smoke and mirrors and dishonest practices that many in the Internet Marketing world practice these days, a trusted referral from someone they know is more valuable than paying a high retainer in exchange for a lot of empty promises.
Does SEO/SEM work for almost every other industry? Of course, if done correctly. But in our own industry? I’m not so sure.
It’s pretty obvious that I recently started targeting the keywords “Maryland Internet Marketing” and “Maryland SEO” to see if traffic improves, but believe it or not, this is mainly used for me to share whatever knowledge I have and help network with others in the business.
I’d love to hear from those who have been in the industry (SEO as well as Web designers and firms) for a while as well as newbies who are ranking well for their keywords… are you getting quality clients from your site or do you agree that nothing beats rolling up your sleeves and spreading the word?
-Murph
ps In “soccer” news, USMNT vs Cuba this weekend at 7:00 pm at RFK, I’ll be there covering the match, watch it on ESPN classic and cheer our boys on as we cruise through qualifying!
Topics: SEO Tips | No Comments »
DC SEO meetup
By murph
I just realized I never posted this… I’d like to take the chance to thank Miles Fawcett (now of Urban Alarm ) and the rest of the Washington, DC Meetup group who met on Tuesday evening at an awesome little Irish bar in Dupont called James Hoban’s . There were quite a few people there with some great SEO knowledge and was a very laid back and informal networking meetup. Jason Glovier, aka the web honcho has a great Internet Marketing package for anyone in the real estate world, while Steve Chafe did an awesome demonstration on the power of the internet business promoter tool .
Sorry to anyone who I didn’t get a chance to meet, hopefully we’ll get a chance to chat during the next meetup. And even though I rushed out and went sprinting through the rain and metro, I still missed my stupid train and ended up at Uno’s in Union Station arguing with a bunch of Cowboys and Eagles fans. No Westbrook this weekend= no annoying “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants this weekend. Wow, you guys can spell the team name, very creative 
Cheers,
George
Topics: SEO Tips | 1 Comment »
Is Google not happy about the Dofollow revolution?
By murph
Okay so a lot of blogs have decided to add dofollow plugins to allow visitors to express their opinion and actually get a link out of it. I decided to be one of them and even advertise my blog as a dofollow resource for links by listing on dofollow directories, and guess what happened 3 days after I did? My pagerank dropped from 3 to 2.
Take a look at this dofollow blog directory and see how many of these sites have lower pageranks than what is listed. Coincidence? Me thinks not. Is Google really penalizing sites for coming out of the closet as dofollow??
Topics: SEO Tips | 8 Comments »
Bruce Clay Interview
By murph
If you haven’t read this inverview with Bruce Clay by StoneTemple, you need to. Quote of the week: “The best way to succeed on the web is to do things naturally.”
Topics: SEO Tips | No Comments »
Use SearchStatus plugin to see nofollow links and more
By murph
If you’re using Mozilla Firefox as your browser, one plugin that I couldn’t live without is the SearchStatus toolbar plugin. It will show Google pagerank and Alexa rank for all pages, highlights Nofollow links, and more. If you don’t have it, you should.
Topics: SEO Tips | No Comments »
How important are domains and URLs?
By murph
I’ve been telling everyone that will listen over the past few weeks about the importance of having your keywords in your domain and URLs. I spent a few hours last week rewriting a client’s URLs and doing 301 redirects for all of their pages, and they saw a dramatic increase in ranking position. Then, yesterday, Google announces that rewriting URLs from dynamic to static shouldn’t be done and that it is a myth that dynamic URLs cannot be crawled (thanks to Mike from Groove Commerce for bringing this up last night at the meetup).
I find this a little hard to believe, and judging by some of the comments that were left:
1. Ready for the controversy? I think this is a ridiculous article coming from you guys! To say we shouldn’t rewrite URLs because we may rewrite irresponsibly. Seriously?
2. I have to agree. This article is very confusing to say the least. Rewriting brings huge benefits for keyword rich URLs over a standard query string every day of the week.
3. Clever guys, to do your 2009 April fools joke in September of ‘08!
4. and of course: Isn’t it sort of ironic that this very blog post has a rewritten URL?
I’m not the only one. Do a Google search for almost anything and I would be willing to bet that one of the top five results have that keyword in the domain or URL somewhere (depending on the competition of the keyword of course).
Example? A search for Maryland SEO; the usual suspects who have been ranked for years with great content and backlinks are there, along with a few new sites which do happen to have some good onsite content and links, but SEO is in the domain.
On-page SEO factors like meta, keyword, and alt image tags, internal link structure, titles, and content are all very important, but in my opinion, the most important on-page factor currently is the keyword placement in URLs and especially the domain.
Baltimore SEO was the strategy at first, but after thinking hard about what keywords I want to include in my next site, I think it will be a good chance to test this theory. Stay tuned.
Topics: SEO Tips | 6 Comments »
Baltimore SEO meetup group
By murph
I’d like to take a quick minute to say thanks to Jon Payne of Ephricon and everyone else who attended the Baltimore SEO meetup group this evening. I met some great people in the Internet Marketing world and shared some great ideas. This being my first SEO meetup group I’d like to thank everyone for their insight and hope we can do it more frequently. If there’s one thing I realized after meeting everyone, it’s that I better start actually promoting this blog and taking time to market myself a bit more with all of the hungry SEO’ers out there! Cheers, -G
Topics: SEO Tips | 3 Comments »
Cherry Picking links: mmmmmm, cherries!
By murph
Everyone in the Internet marketing world has seen ProspectMX’s link building chart and the extra cool graphics and info that the chart contains. Towards the bottom left hand corner there is a topic called “cherry picking links”, which is the method of finding high authority sites that are linking to sites which are competing for your keyword(s) and trying to obtain the same links.
Is this really an effective link building method?
Absolutely.
When initially launching a link building campaign, there is no more effective method than seeing what sites are linking to competing web sites who are ranking for your keyword(s).
I was browsing SEO blogs this morning and came across David Wallace’s notes from SBM Unleashed from Linda O’Neil’s talk on building quality links. Linda shared some great tips and tools, one of my favorite being SEO Book’s Hubfinder 3.0 (which ProspectMX also refers to in the link building chart).
This is a great cherry picking tool. It:
is web based software which looks for hub pages using the Yahoo! API. It allows you to find sites which link to common resources that you manually enter, or resources that rank well in Yahoo! for a specific term.
(It searches Google as well). In other words, it finds sites which are linking to at least two of your competitors and showing you where the links are placed. These can be directories, other sites, blogs, and even blog comments. And most likely, you can get linked from the same site in a few minutes.
This is a great method to use to find those niche directories and blogs which are relative to your product offering, service, or content. It doesn’t matter if you know about every widget and web 2.0 SEO tool in the world, if you don’t take the time to see what competition is ranking for, you’ll likely always be playing catch-up in my opinion.
There are many other tools out there to find out who is linking to your or your competition’s web site, my favorite being the Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Cherry picking links may not be the most creative link building technique, but it should always be the first step when looking for quality, RELATIVE, high authority links. Because you know I’m all about quality over quantity.
Topics: SEO Tips | 4 Comments »
Oktoberfest Flashbacks-Baltimore beer festivals just aren’t the same
By murph
With everyone in the SEO world ranting about the upcoming Seoktoberfest, I decided to share my photos from my trip to Munich last year as a change of pace from SEO. I was lucky enough to spend a few days at Oktoberfest, but didn’t speak to anyone about SEO or anything else work-related. It’s called vacation FOR A REASON! 
Check out my 2007 Oktoberfest pics on Flickr
Topics: SEO Tips | 2 Comments »
SEO is dying to a lot of people
By murph
I, like everyone else in the industry, am getting frustrated with the term SEO being synonymous for “give some money and I’ll make you number 1″.
I spent most of last week submitting proposals to prospective clients and it’s amazing how many I saw from other cheaper, overseas “SEO firms” who made this statement. Then, when you go on the SEO “firm”’s website, look at their case studies and client testimonials, and see the backlinks that the “firm” achieved for the client, it’s almost laughable.
I’ve always followed the motto “quality over quantity” whenever I work on an SEO project, and believe that taking your time to learn more about the client’s product or service so that you can continue to create new and useful content and knowingly promote it is worth more than a half-assed link building campaign.
SEO Guru (who named the industry Search Traffic Optimization, not sure I’m running with that) shared a post by Marissa Myers this morning where she makes an argument that, with Google’s recent changes and penalties, SEO is dead. I’m not sure if I agree or disagree quite yet, and only time will tell.
This blog was named Baltimore SEO by Murph because SEO was the buzzword at the time. Now that anyone who considers themselves an SEO consultant or firm has to put up with the stereotypes of being snake oil salesmen thanks to a few bad apples in the industry, it seems like the time to rebrand and find a company description and offering that not only describes the good intentions and moral techniques, but also that people are actually searching for.
My opinion? Some SEO/whatever you want to call it techniques will never die. Keyword analysis has always been top of my list of important Internet marketing techniques, and I don’t see that ever changing. Why go after keywords that nobody is searching for? Baltimore SEO gets maybe 500 searches a month, and although this blog and my website get a decent amount of traffic, it continually dies down now that the SEO craze is dying off like Starter jackets and hypercolor shirts.
Good content development and, in some part, optimization, can never be replaced.
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it (and sometimes it feels like everyone does). Taking the time to develop a website and content which is fresh and meaningful is tedious, boring, and frustrating at times, but is worth it in the end. A well developed website with less links should always rank higher than a half-assed website with 1,000 links, and it seems like Google is noticing that. And since I haven’t dropped a tip on here in a while: keywords in the URLs and titles seem to be more important lately as well, but we’ll see if that changes soon.
Online marketing, Internet marketing, lead generation, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, traffic generation…. brand it what you want in my opinion. Convincing good, patient prospective clients who see the value in taking the time to develop a strategy that you can help their business in the long run is where business relationships happen in this industry.
Most people I talk to in the industry said that they didn’t get their leads from their website or blog, or from mass e-mailing or whatever guerilla marketing techniques others use, but simply by referrals. Is taking an hour or two each day to update your blog, read and comment on recent blog posts by others in the industry, and other self-promotion methods such as social media important? Absolutely. But is it going to make you successful overnight? Probably not.
Networking and building relationships help bridge the gap between old-school grassroots business marketing and modern technology, and shows that no matter how fast the web 2.0 world and SEO/SEM/whatever seems to be moving, nothing will replace a good work ethic and a lot of patience.
Coming soon: New BizPro site, stay tuned.
Topics: SEO Tips | 2 Comments »
