I just came across an article from Newsweekly, while being almost a year old, is still incredibly relevant.

The article discusses a shoe store that hired a prominent Search Engine Marketer to optimize their website and received fantastic results from the white hat, ethical marketer known as Fishkin.

Then the techniques of a black hat SEO are discussed and back to Rand Fishkin for an example of a “gray hat” SEO technique that he used on a particular site which achieved positive results, was negatively affected by the Jagger Update, and has once again resurfaced in Google:

For example, for clients such as Seattle loan company Avatar Financial, Fishkin pays Internet ad companies to display text links across a network of sites such as The Miami Herald, betting that major search engines misinterpret these ad links as legitimate measures of popularity. Search engines say they are working on ways to discount these SEO shortcuts.

This article would definitely lead me to believe that although frowned upon by the likes of Google, purchasing text links can help.

According to Matt Cutts, a Google engineer who blogs frequently on the subject of SEO:

Rand, those paid links from the Harvard Crimson and elsewhere aren’t helping the site. In fact, it looks like you bought links from the same network that the other two sites at the site clinic were buying from. :) And I doubt Rand was expecting any direct PageRank impact from Avatar’s prweb.com press release. But what is helping is good content like the articles about non-conforming loans and the new blog on that site. That’s why when I see strong links from Yahoo’s directory, Dmoz, and Wikipedia to Avatar, I’m not very surprised.

So Matt says that those paid links have not helped Avatar to achieve their ranking - rather that ranking was achieved through the use of content, which in turn generated links from Yahoo, Dmoz and Wikipedia…

What to believe? For a long term strategy I would also choose content. Avatar content is gained through a blog as well as articles. There are over 30 articles in the directory of avatar.com/articles and over 500 blog posts in avatar.com/posts. One source of “content” that I stumbled upon has me thoroughly confused :-) How does CakePHP tie into hard money loans?

Last comment…the page titles have not been thoroughly optimized in that most of them start with the company name rather than a keyword rich phrase. The content articles however, do contain “hard money” in several of the titles.

Hard to determine exactly what is putting a site in a top position…but one thing is for sure, it involves lots of hard work!

Yesterday was the last day for the live presentations at Ecomxpo and what a fabulous day it was once again!

An “on demand” webcast gave pointers on getting your ecommerce site ready for the holidays. Want to know why you should bother? Because (according to the National Retail Foundation) 1/5 of all retail sales in the US take place during the season!

The fastest growing marketing mediums for ecommerce retailers are search and email, followed by banners and print. Search is growing so fast (46% increase expected this year) that if you are not using doing SEO or PPC on your site …. your competition is doing it on their website.

What you can do with your site for the holidays?

• Revise your list of keywords by adding holiday keywords to your existing phrases. An example of this would be optimizing for “office products and gifts” if you previously optimized for “office products”; to “holiday cards” instead of your usual “business cards”
• Optimize the pages of your site, paying special attention to putting these holiday phrases in your page title so they will be visible while the user is still at the search engine
• Offer incentives such as express shipping or free gift wrapping
• Tie campaigns together – i.e. have banner that conveys free shipping if you mentioned free shipping in your PPC ad
• If you are doing PPC, determine your maximum bid range (this is good ebay advice too!) and avoid overspending. Some retailers may be spending more money per click than you are but they are likely PPC rookies and will not be able to sustain this spend for the long haul. In offline marketing we understand that customers need repeat exposure to our brand before they buy – the same is true with online marketing. So keep your ad in 2nd or 3rd place, have compelling creative to ensure a high click through rate and keep tweaking your landing page to increase your conversions – you’ll be way ahead of these competitors who will have overspent on their Christmas campaign and think PPC is not worth the money!
• Take campaigns offline on time and put up post holiday campaigns. Here’s a tip for Canadian marketers – take down your Christmas campaign late in the day on December 25 and put up a Boxing Day campaign. One company that does this well is Future Shop who updates campaigns at midnight EST quite often! Another tip for Canadian marketers – US shoppers are focused on their Thanksgiving and Black Friday more so than Christmas Shopping right now (late October) – market to their needs!

Check for more ecomxpo updates on podcasting and linking!

Although I only caught one presentation today it was absolutely fabulous! The presentation was entitled “Search Optimization: What’s Next?” and started off with 11 Search Informed Trends:

• long tail
• mashups
• micro-formats
• mobile search
• Q&A
• Social Search
• RSS
• Tagging
• User Generated Content
• Social Media
• Virtual Worlds

Some further information about a couple of these items:

Long Tail: Referring to the act of optimizing your website for keyword phrases that are specific in nature and utilize several words. An interesting statistic is that in the US 20% of queries have more than 5 words meaning that people are getting more specific with their searches. More information on the Long Tail comes from Chris Anderson’s book entitled… Long Tail

Mashup is defined as a “website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience”.

Mobile Search: Searchers are averaging 4.2 searches/month whereas at a computer they average that per day! I believe Microsoft was quoted as saying that over the next 5 years 80% of local searches will be conducted from mobile phones.

Podcasting was a large portion of this presentation and discussed the relationship between search and podcasting. Some of the messages to be taken away:

• Search is needed to help your future audience find your podcast before they can listen to it
• iTunes has 40 million customers downloading music - this is where you want your podcast to be found
• Podcasting directories are essential to having your podcast be found. There is much less competition in podcasting directories compared to search engines - a great example was given on the phrase “Sarbanes Oxley”. There are 30 000 Google results and 3 iTunes results.
• Like search, content is king for podcasting. The tags and descriptions used to describe your podcast are very important - like PPC ads you have limited space and must be optimized!

Well that’s what I took away from eComXpo Day 2 - it will be interesting to see what others have taken away!

Although I only caught one presentation today it was absolutely fabulous! The presentation was entitled “Search Optimization: What’s Next?” and started off with 11 Search Informed Trends:

• long tail
• mashups
• micro-formats
• mobile search
• Q&A
• Social Search
• RSS
• Tagging
• User Generated Content
• Social Media
• Virtual Worlds

Some further information about a couple of these items:

Long Tail: Referring to the act of optimizing your website for keyword phrases that are specific in nature and utilize several words. An interesting statistic is that in the US 20% of queries have more than 5 words meaning that people are getting more specific with their searches. More information on the Long Tail comes from Chris Anderson’s book entitled… Long Tail

Mashup is defined as a “website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience”.

Mobile Search: Searchers are averaging 4.2 searches/month whereas at a computer they average that per day! I believe Microsoft was quoted as saying that over the next 5 years 80% of local searches will be conducted from mobile phones.

Podcasting was a large portion of this presentation and discussed the relationship between search and podcasting. Some of the messages to be taken away:

• Search is needed to help your future audience find your podcast before they can listen to it
• iTunes has 40 million customers downloading music - this is where you want your podcast to be found
• Podcasting directories are essential to having your podcast be found. There is much less competition in podcasting directories compared to search engines - a great example was given on the phrase “Sarbanes Oxley”. There are 30 000 Google results and 3 iTunes results.
• Like search, content is king for podcasting. The tags and descriptions used to describe your podcast are very important - like PPC ads you have limited space and must be optimized!

Well that’s what I took away from eComXpo Day 2 - it will be interesting to see what others have taken away!

I did manage to catch a couple of presentations today and they were phenomenal! I listened to a presentation on monetizing podcasts that had several women on the panel who detailed how they were doing it.

I confess that I did not take notes but did hear the word affiliate tossed around alot, AdSense and nation wide sponsorship. Sponsors are mentioned at the beginning and/or end of a podcast.

One idea that was quite intriguing was a woman who wanted to have a baby radio show (podcast?) but didn’t want to come up with all the content…so she found other mom’s who are interviewed for the show and share a wealth of information with the listeners - this woman gets to run a podcast and not have to also create all the content!

One panelist that I recall is www.wahmtalkradio.com - checking in there will likely enlighten you in regard to podcast monetization :-)

Another presentation that I enjoyed was from the gang at Google Analytics where they demoed some reports, discussed the Google Google Website Optimizer and answered questions at WebmasterRadio.FM after the presentation.