Have you tried searching for a name in Google recently? You’ve obviously done your own, but you done someone elses?

Taking Gordon Ballantyne – a former director of T-Mobile as an example. Google adds relevant information below the title but above the page/meta snippet:

The most interesting bit for me is that people’s Facebook listings where they mention a sample of the person’s friends.

Is this new? Has anyone else seen it? Also, what about an option to opt out, or amend? Do we have the right to opt-out? Should we care?

I just love Crazy Egg. If you’re not using it, and not taking heed of the information it provides, then you need a huge slap around the chops.

Here’s some quick insights from a couple of my sites.

1) Make It Blindingly Obvious What You Want People To Do!

It depends on what your goals are. Do you want to build a mailing list, or do you want SALES. Sales for me as I create specific, targeted campaigns to build mailing lists and 99% of my pages are sales-orientated. For my Easter eggs site, I want people in and out to the relevant merchants as quickly as possible (usually – I have other specific pages to build stickiness and increase the average time on the site). I make sure that I place the merchants with offers that are most likely to lead to clicks and sales at the very top of the page. I make them stand out so they cannot be missed.

I then create content that is either directly or very strongly related to those offers to draw people in. I might be writing about raw Easter eggs that a retailer sells but I won’t get any commission from. But if people want to also buy from Hotel Chocolat, Thorntons, Cadbury’s, Montezuma’s, Chocolate Buttons or Chocolate Trading Co., then I’ve got an offer for them.

I also try and make sure that I have a range of merchants that cross the whole spectrum of the niche (is that a bit of an oxymoron?) so I increase my chances of getting an affiliated sale.

But I don’t ram offers down the throat of people. I haven’t created a Made For Adsense site that has crap content (being objective) and surrounded it with “take a chance” advertising. I try and create meaningful content and place relevant adverts above it.

2) Advertise When You Deserve It

With my Chocolate Reviews site, I’m at a completely different stage, so I keep the advertising to a minimum. My objective is not to earn good levels of cash now, but to earn the respect of the community – the monetisation will come when the site deserves it.

I could try and monetise it to its fullest but as the site is not yet a year old and the diversity of links to it isn’t at a level I’d like and the amount of goodwill between the site, consumers, industry commentators and retailers isn’t sufficient; I’ll won’t even try rampping it up with even the smallest of banners in prominent positions.

This still staggers me today. Many affiliates jump on the banners bandwagon from day one. They don’t think about how that reduces the chances of getting natural links from unprompted, but relevant resources. To my mind advertising should be directly proportional to the perceived level of trust that others have with your site.

Nobody Clicks On Blog Roll Links, Right?

Wrong, you might think it’s a good idea to get as many links to your site as possible from blogroll exchanges. Bad Idea. Not only are they heavily discounted for ranking purposes but you leak traffic too from the reciprocal links.

I keep my blog roll links to a minimum and to the sites that I feel will drive relevant traffic. I also keep them to the one page on a site, and not every. My product reviews pages are there for a purpose and not to give other’s traffic. Keep that in mind when you set up your blog rolls.

4) Not All Visitor Types Do The Same Thing

Crazy Egg allows you to differentiate between users from different sources. It’s important to work out how they interact with your site if they come from paid or natural search, social media (I’ve hardly touched it with the Easter egg site, . Most of my social stuff has been for the Chocolate Reviews site), direct traffic or external links.

The thing is, you might be thinking that you get loads of social traffic. But they might just be reading some lovely bit of bait you’ve written then buggering off. Do you know if they click to buy? Wouldn’t it be good if you knew?

5) The Devil Is In The Detail

Click on the “List” option. Get the data out and analyse it. It’s interesting that for my Easter eggs site, most people click on the Cadbury’s logo (5.4% of all visitors) but they’re not by best converter out of the list. The volume of sales I get from them is far less than 3 of the others up there. So what does this tell you? Yes, I need think about things a bit more (including more Cadbury’s content!)

6) Sometimes You Can’t Over-ride User Intent

On my Tesco Easter Eggs most people actually clicked on the link to Tesco link, and not the options at the top.

But Tesco doesn’t really convert for me. So I recently changed the page and put a more prominent link to Cadbury’s which I decided was a merchant more aligned to Tesco than any of the other offers. The net income from that page has risen.

7) People Will Search When They Get There If They Think Your Site Is Relevant

As can be seen by the image – make sure you make the most of it. I’m changing the blog from Blogger to WordPress partly because I have more control over the search pages. I’ll be able to better monetise them and leverage them for SEO purposes. Your internal search pages are very powerful, don’t forget about them. Also make sure you know how many people actually use them!

We’ve all been told to forget the phrase “build it and they will come”. But we should also forget “build it and they will click”.

… let’s hope they don’t drown.

Over recent years I’ve come to believe that 95% of what self-proclaimed “guru’s” say is utter bullshit. They try obtain sycophants like Panini football stickers with the aim in having sufficient idolisers for adequately attended circle-jerks on request.

I couldn’t care less how many ‘friends’ I have on Facebook, I don’t need to write self-grandiose rubbish on my blog to please advertisers, I don’t feel the need to brag about the material things in my life. Thankfully I’m more than happy with the size of my penis and don’t feel the need to compensate in any way, shape or form.

I used to think that I was the only one that didn’t bow down in front of these Pied Pipers. But Chris Brogan in his book Trust Agents wonderfully sums up what I’ve been noticing for a while (pg:98):

“There are individuals in various segments of the online world who have risen to fame in their relative niche, have parlayed that fame into something a little higher up the social ladder, and have subsequently turned their backs on the very same community where they gained notoriety as One of Us. The fall is almost fast.”

And I’m not the only one. Just taking one of the points from Aaron Wall (one of the 5% to be trusted IMHO) he states in his post “Why Many Successful People Become Jerks” that “some people forget where they came from and become arrogant“. But it’s this bit that is the crux of what I’m saying and hopefully you’ll consider when you decide who to listen to or idolise and that’s the view of Clay Shirky (Aaron summarises) who describes popularity “as basically being an imbalance between the attention you garner and the attention you can give the market.”

So if someone talks about themselves more than they talk about others, then find the “unfollow” and “defriend” buttons. Even seek out the “remove RSS feed” option, put to the back of your mind and seek out those people that add value, put the industry first and openly talk about their failures as much as their successes. And if they start trying to belittle their followers then roll your eyes and think “this isn’t the guru I’m looking for” and move on.

[Update]
Doh! I should really put down a list of blogs that do add value:

• Affiliate Stuff
• One Little Duck
• SEO Bullshit
• SEO Scientist
• SEOMoz
• Blogussion
• Seth Goding
• Top Rank Blog
• Blog Storm

Image © sneakerphotography

So when did Google start labelling US .com’s with “United States” next to the URL?

I’ve just seen it on this search. (must work on my SEO evidently)

How will it effect the CTR for those .com’s? Or those that target all international markets with a .com but are located in one particular country?

So for most of you this won’t be the most relevant of posts I’ve ever made. But for some of you that occasionally look back at where you’ve come then it may be interesting.

Whilst on my way to check the location of a meeting I’ve got in the morning I realised that I’d beaten that path before. I used to walk that way to the Old Street Station when on my way home for providing Workthing.com with SEO consultancy.

It must have been about eight or nine years ago that I was last year – before the company went bump.

I started thinking about the strategies I was recommending. Then I realised they’re pretty much no different than I recommend today.

Here’s what I was suggesting to them:

1) Clear out the crap.
I suggested that they streamline the route from homepage to relevant content.

2) De-dupe
They used some microsites to target different recruitment niches, but they were too similar to each other. I tried to get them to create relevant content and use it on those sites (they already had great content on the main site)

3) Obtain more relevant links from industry authority sites to those microsites whilst trying to get more recruitment links to the main.

4) Focus more widely on relevant keywords and devise a format across sectors that will attract visitors that are more likely to convert.

5) Greater accountability of the data set and track goals more accurately.

6) Increase the likelihood that visitors would enthuse about the site and recommend it to others.

It’s remarkable that these six objectives are still 100% relevant today. So has SEO changed in the last eight or nine years? My view is that it hasn’t as much as people think.

To me SEO has always been about writing good content, content that focuses on your head terms, but extends into the tail. It’s always been about getting good quality links. Even when I first started link building in late 1997 I always tried to get links from relevant sites. I never tried to get them from totally unrelated, but highly-valued (in general) sites. I’ve always tried to account for my SEO actions and gauge the success of everything I’ve done. So to me, the core principles of SEO have not changed during the past decade.

All that’s changed is that you’ve got to work a hundred times harder because the competitive landscape is much tougher.

Here’s to the next decade.

Lee,

When will you be bringing out your book on internet marketing and the social media? The one all about ‘how to….’ that takes a complete novice through the hows and whys in a step by step format, such as:

• How to set up a blog
• How to write SEO relvant blog articles
• Where to publish your blog
• How to chose blog articles to write about
• How to make Facebook work for you
• How to make Twitter work for you
• How to set up your first twitter account
• How to choose the twitter topics to write about
• How to choose the facebook topics to write about
• All about google adwords
• How to choose relevant adwords
• How to organise your google adwords account to make it efficient and effective
• Where to link your adwords to your website and why
• What about other social media sites – what are they, are they useful

Then the advanced course – how to take all this info and turn it into a strategy for doing it for paid clients – how to find clients, what to charge, what to offer on a regular basis etc, how to write a proposal for the clients etc

If you could do it on a step by step basis, taking someone through from scratch how to sort it all out, with screen shots for each step, I think you’d be onto a winner.

You’ve probably got a lot of it written already, so you could get a £19.99 (or whatever) ebook going – back it up with a £199 course, and a £9.99 a month newsletter with the latest info and what you should be thinking of doing on a monthly basis.

Can I buy the first copy/newsletter subscription please?

PLEASE launch it asap, help me out and make yourself another great stream of income.

[Anon]

© Img Karola Riegler Photography

Elaine asked some questions earlier in the week. I’m not sure how many were rhetorical, but I thought I’d add my thoughts (anything to keep me away from the VAT).

• Should I search the ethernet for PR4+ blog posts, which don’t implement the ‘no follow’ and then try and figure out how to, sneakily, get my link in, so it looks oh so natural?
  
  - Sneakily? I’ve had some great success using the Majestic SEO tool and SEOMoz’s Competitive Link Finder in finding other blogs to get links from – I don’t’ take too much interest in page rank.

  - My biggest source of links is from retailers who place my reviews (testimonials) on their site and then link it.

  - I’m also working on another strategy which crosses the biz dev / link building objective by using Twitter to engage and then acquire commentary / links. I’ll expand on this later.

  - A few years ago I saw that it’d be more difficult to acquire links without offering something better than the average site. So I started going further down the content route with more emphasis.

• Should I be making fan pages on Facebook, My Space, Bebo, Squidoo and Wikipedia?
  
  - I get some traffic from Facebook and Wikipedia. It doesn’t help with SEO a great deal (well conventional wisdom says that – who wants to be conventional though?)

  - Don’t forget Flickr though – more on that some other day.

• Should I be creating numerous twitter accounts to cater for the wide range of products I could twit to unsuspecting followers?
  
  - Nope – one per site is good. Twitter is a massive element of my biz dev strategy. It’s paramount that I engage and illicit the support of my followers to grow my sites.

• Should I be writing numerous blog posts to my various alter-ego blogs and inter connecting them all?
  
  - there’s nothing wrong with inter-linking in a relevant fashion. I do it to some degree, but only when the link is valuable because the content I link to is of use to the user. I won’t do those stupid links in footers on their own.

• Should I be creating more niche websites on the WP platform?

  - I use Blogger, everyone knows that. But after some recent client work with WP I’m going to move a couple of new ones over to it and see how they get on. There’s some awesome plugins that would save me a massive amount of work, so they’re worth testing.

  - I often think its worthwhile extending your 2 or 3 main sites. You could use HitTail to extend your keyword range?

• Should I be searching out different hosts so that I don’t host my sites on the same IP address?
  
  - this strategy is only useful if you’re over-reliant on using your own link juice and you find it difficult to attract links naturally.

  - make your sites good enough and it won’t be a problem.

• Should I be signing up for the latest SEO/Affiliate conference, although they cost a fortune?
  
  - I was just thinking this. There’s so many good resources (like SEO Scientist) etc that I feel that often its not worth it for the education alone. But there is the value of networking.

• If I sign up for the latest SEO/Affiliate conference will I make myself ill worrying about networking?
  
  - Elaine worry about anything? Nah. You’re an expert!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below

Img © walkn