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Footprints in the Web

Posted by admin on December 16, 2006 in SEO Theory

There is an amazing lack of imagination in online marketing techniques today. 8 years ago it was all about innovation. Now it’s all about beating the same methods to death regardless of how ineffective they have become. That’s because as the industry grows it fragments into sub-populations.

• There are the dinosaurs, behemoths in the industry who carry the weight of precedence and preeminence. They speak at conferences, or they write books, or they rule their own Web communities and nurture little dinosaurs in their own images. They are not outdated or behind-the-times or evolutionary dead-ends. They are simply what they are: larger than life, bigger than most SEOs, and they no longer need to grasp for attention.
• There are the shooting stars, here today, maybe here tomorrow. These are young, hungry SEOs who buy into all the latest fads. If they have enough passion (and most of them do not) they will make those fad ideas work. This is the “Social Optimization” crowd.
• There are the hangers-on, the secondary SEOs, many of whom run their own businesses, probably make decent money, but they have not yet emerged from the classic “feast-or-famine” phase of independent consultancy.
• There are the corporate lingerers, the large firm SEOs who do the dirty work that makes their bosses look so grand. These are the industry grunts, the soldiers who make the impossible customers happy or who struggle to make the impossible customers happy until those impossible customers drift off to ruin some other SEO’s day.
• There are the wannabes, gonnabes, almost-weres, never-could-have-beens, and ought-to-something-elses. They flood the forums with requests for help only after they have screwed things up, gotten in over their heads, or just because they don’t know what else to do with their time (hint: You want to be good? Stop puttering around in forums and create Web sites).

Each day brings a new wave of hopeful applicants for the title of “search engine optimizer”.

Most of them will self-appoint themselves when they master the holey mantra of “Thou shalt build links for anything else requires brain activity.”

Not all search engine optimizers are self-appointed. Some are recruited, trained, and annointed into the industry by the burgeoning tax masters who take credit for all that their little peons do (this is what entrepreneurs do). The semi-formally trained SEOs attend conferences, take seminars, participate in workshops, pass through apprenticeships — in short, they get whatever training is available even though there are no formal standards to help them determine which courses are reliable.

Let’s assume, however, that the people who offer these courses know something about marketing. After all, they persuaded you to part with your money.

But after all that, everyone pretty much looks the same. We work with Web sites. We talk about getting links. We watch search engine rankings. We do keyword research. BLAH-blah-BLAH-blah-blah-blah-BLAH.

There is more, dear friends, to search engine optimization than that. Let’s skip over the inevitable competitive analysis discussion, however, to look at the retroactive analysis that is almost never discussed on your favorite SEO blogs and forums. In fact, I’m pretty sure that no one in the industry says anything about SEO retroactive analysis.

It’s a bit like performing a competitive analysis on yourself. It’s like looking back over your shoulder and seeing where you’ve been and how you got to where you are today. It’s the equivalent of looking to see if you have left footprints in the Web.

We all leave them. There are no SEOs or marketers who don’t leave footprints. Take Rand Fishkin, for example. Rand Fishkin is Mr. Linkbait. His marketing philosophy boils down to “Make your Web site so intriguing and fun that people cannot resist the temptation to tell others about it”.

It’s a good marketing philosophy. But it leaves footprints all over the place. Link baiting has been challenged as an appropriate name for this type of work because it sounds too much like you’re trapping animals. Technically, it’s the perfect description. You’re hunting links and you “capture” them when people point their links to your bait with full and complete trust.

The question many newcomers and sideliners ask is, “How do these linkbaiters get their links in the first place?” The obvious answer zooms right past them. It’s quite simple, actually: Link baiters tell people about the bait. There are a hundred ways you can toss out lures. The more people you know, the more lures you can cast. Link baiting thrives on networking. Social bookmarking was probably designed by link baiters.

You can identify a link bait footprint by the enthusiasm a successful campaign engenders. True link baiting is more stealthy than most people recognize. It is most effective when those who link don’t feel like they are giving in to link bait. Hence, “link bait” has become a dirty expression among SEOs who lob it at anyone who publishes content they object to. “Oh, he’s just link baiting — ignore him”. Sorry, but good link bait is not that easy to detect (or to ignore).

Spammers leave footprints through their nasty little uninvited links, or through their unauthorized, unwanted autogenerated content. Doorways, Mushblogs, Scraper Sites — call them what you will, the spam pages are huge spatterings of massive footprints across the Web.

Content manufacturers turn out such massive volumes of new content they attract plenty of linkage on the lee side of the marketing formula. They accrue linkage on the basis of the marginal usefulness of each page of content. Amazon, eBay, and a few others are content manufacturers. They have brand value. They have affiliate programs. They have overwhelming Web presence. They don’t really need search engine optimization.

Truly innovative search optimizers change their strategies year by year. The reasons for changing strategies include: changing search indexing rules, changing Web content, changing user interests, changing clientele (market profile), and competitive encroachment.

One of the most common mistakes SEOs make is they copy what other SEOs do. If Joe-Bob LinkMonger gets up on his blog and writes, “I’ve got 3 .EDU links per day over the last week”, all his buddies slap him on the back, say “Well done, Joe-Bob”, and they go out to get their own .EDU links. After all, Joe-Bob was so proud of himself for getting those links, it must be a good thing.

People submit articles to article distribution services because they read on blogs, forums, and tutorials that they should submit articles.

People drop links in forums because they read on blogs, forums, and tutorials that they should drop links in forums.

People send out emails asking Webmasters to give them links because they read on blogs, forums, and tutorials that they should send out emails.

People create fake profiles on free Web service sites to get links because they read on the Web that this is a “good” way to get links.

People talk about PR, “quality links”, “relevant links”, and “social tagging” because that is what they read on the Web.

“If someone else wrote it on the Web, therefore it must be a good idea” is not a justification for doing what everyone else does. When you’ve gotten your site to number 2 in the SERPs and you want to be number 1, going out and asking for links from all the sites you think helped Mr. Number 1 won’t make your site any better or more relevant than his.

There are things I do because they still work. Not because other people say they work. I test everything. I trust nothing. I know more about what doesn’t work than I do about what may work because I have more data to consider for the stuff that doesn’t work.

There are things I do because they may work. Many of those ideas drop by the wayside quickly. But you have to try something new every year (every few months, in fact) or else you end up following the crowd and chasing Mr. Number 1. If I want a SERP, I won’t be satisfied with less than the 1st position. I’ll make adjustments to capture it.

But part of determining what works includes looking back at what it leaves behind in the process of working. Maybe I don’t want to leave such a wide footprint. Maybe I don’t want to leave so many. After I consolidate rankings, I often make changes in order to reshape the footprint I leave.

When I look at how other people optimize their sites (and by the time they come to me, many people are very frustrated), I often find that their strategies have little depth. They mostly rely upon linkage. There is more to search engine optimization than linkage.

A few people get that. Most don’t.

You can often rank on the basis of linkage, but the amount of work it requires to do that is tremendous. And you leave a huge swathe of footprints across the Web when you do that. When you’ve finished your latest SEO campaign, stop and look back at how you altered the Web with that campaign. You will see it in the SERPs. You will see it in the Web sites you optimized. You will see it in the Web sites you changed.

Ask yourself, “Could I have done this more quietly?” If you can answer that question with a “yes”, you’ll begin to see past all the shallow “101 ways to get links” advice that leads you on the merry-go-round of second-rate SEO.

If your strategies and tactics are based on what everyone else says they are doing (or that you should be doing), you’re putting a lot of people ahead of you by following in their footprints.

How competitive does that make you?

Now do you understand why you’re struggling to reach and maintain Number 1? If you’re there, good for you. I only wrote this post for the people who just realized they’ve been following, not leading.