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Overcoming the Heiro Effect in SEO

Posted by admin on February 1, 2007 in SEO Theory

The technology has already left the linkers behind.

In the movie “Other People’s Money”, Danny DeVito plays an investment fund manager who arranges a buyout of a struggling steel company. At the climactic stockholders’ meeting where DeVito makes his pitch, he stands before several dozen families who have held stakes in the small company for years and tells them, “The last company to manufacture buggy whips probably made the best buggy whips ever. But that wasn’t enough. The automobile put them out of business.”

You cannot halt or slow technological innovation and invention. In modern history, nothing has transformed the world faster than the principle of industrialization: reducing a series of complex steps to a repetitive process of simple steps. But you may be surprised to learn that Henry Ford did not really invent the assembly line.

Ancient Roman potters actually had a very efficient assembly line system where a dozen slaves would work together to produce an endless supply of pots. Every evening, a Roman legion on the march built a fortified camp from the ground up in the space of a few hours by assigning specific tasks to individual soldiers, so that the entire group completed the process in as short a time as possible.

Somewhere between the year 476 and the year 1700 we lost the ability to imagine production on a larger scale than whatever we have today. The Engilsh textile industry rediscovered what the Romans had once understood very well: if one person can do a great job, many people can do many great jobs, and many specialists can get the job done in less time.

Abundance produces sloth. Scarcity demands efficiency and competition. When the ancient Greco-Roman inventor Hiero demonstrated the first steam engine to a Roman magistrate, the magistrate (who had apparently been bribed by slave traders) supposedly rolled his eyes and said, “But what would we do with all the slaves?” But for a small group’s lack of vision, we might have colonized the moon and Mars by now.

People who are used to getting free, easy links don’t know how to make or earn links. For a while, that really didn’t matter. Even as the search engines began filtering out spammy link sources, the social media services became popular spam farms. But now the social media sites are implementing “rel=’nofollow’” and link gluttons are complaining that they have lost a lot of formerly trusted links.

If the SEO community had not turned its back on true search engine optimization a few years ago, people today would not have cared about being dumped by DIGG, nofollowed by Wikipedia, and filtered by Google. The lust for links has been a self-defeating philosophy that each year has cost many online business operators thousands of dollars (per business) in lost sales.

Before search engines became reliable sources of traffic, people sought out links for the sake of the traffic they could provide. Link baiters are beginning to see the value in link-driven traffic today, but many of them continue to wrongly wear the mantle of SEO. Link baiting is not search engine optimization. It’s just another form of Web site marketing. If you’re relying on link baiting to improve your search engine rankings, you’re pursuing an inefficient methodology. You should get more traffic from the links than from the search engines.

There’s nothing wrong with qualified, convertible traffic — assuming you get it. Link Baiting Optimization (LBO) is now being relabled and sold as Social Media Optimization. The optimization really has nothing to do with search engines or search services. The links may or may not help with search crawling, indexing, and ranking. Some people have even dropped the “optimization” from their self-applied labels and they just speak of social media marketing.

The only real drawback to link baiting is that it tends to be spike-oriented. Once the buzz wears off, then what? Spikes produce relatively little momentum, so in order to keep a campaign rolling forward you have to produce new spikes until you cross the threshold of brand value. When people see value in your Web site, they will send the traffic to you without your having to continually pique their interest.

The point of conversion for each venture is different. The second brand into the market may need twice as much traffic as the first to hit the conversion point. The third brand into the market may need five times as much traffic. The fourth brand may need ten times as much traffic as the first brand required in order to hit the conversion point.

Seatch engine optimization can carry a brand forward at a slower pace but its ride shuold be more consistent, less prone to spikes and dips (peaks and valleys in performance) provided:

• The SEO strategy does not focus on links
• The SEO strategy encompasses multiple search engines (including influential meta search engines)
• The SEO strategy diversifies its investments across multiple queries and content sources
• The SEO strategy embraces growth in relevance
• The SEO strategy complements other marketing strategies

As happens every now and then, people are once arguing about the value of search engine optimization.

We’ve come full circle more than once: we’ve invented the steam engine, abandoned it, rediscovered it, abandoned it, and now we’re trying to rediscover it once again. The problem is that many people in the SEO community to hang on to the outdated (and misguided) belief that they should be driving their search engine optimization with links.

You should be driving search engine optimization with goals: targets make the difference between failure and success. I still recall vividy the day Xenite.Org saw 25 visitors for the first time. It was a milestone. 25 visitors a day translates into 750 visitors a month. I projected that 25 out as far as I could, even up to a year, and when I had numbers that looked large, I realized they were still too small.

So my goal became 50 visitors a day. When I reached 50 visitors a day, I set my goal for 75 visitors. Then 100 visitors. Then 200 visitors a day. Taking the leap from 100 to 200 required a tremendous amount of energy because back then I did not understand what Web site marketing required. I succeeded in producing spikes and surges. Without having anyone label the process for me, I engaged in link baiting. Once in a while an influential Web site would announce some content on Xenite and send traffic flowing my way.

I grew tired of seeing the traffic die off after initial curiosity was satisfied. I reorganized my pages to cross-promote each other. I replaced my on-site advertising tools with tools that allowed me to run my own ads. And I learned about search engine optimization. I came to understand that search engines represent a nice alternative source of traffic.

But I have never lost sight of the fact that search engines, for all their wealth of traffic, are nothing more than an alternative source of traffic. As the SEO community retools itself for social media marketing, we have an opportunity to also reeducate many people who have been disappointed by link-driven tactics. There is more involved than links. There is more at stake than 1,000 visitors a day (or 10,000 visitors a day).

Sooner or later there will be another search engine update that smacks down thousands of Web sites. I remember when I used to get smacked down along with many other people. I learned that I would come back, but I also learned that if you expect change you are better prepared for it. When Hiero brings in the steam engine, you won’t feel compelled to bribe the magistrate to ask, “What would we do with all the slaves?”

Search engine optimization must embrace change. The failure to embrace change is what I call the Heiro Effect, the rejection of productive innovation in favor of a less productive status quo.

For a while it did make sense to pursue the cheap and easy links. They worked and people had no economic incentive to do anything else (because the efficiencies of more productive SEO are harder to achieve — you must actually learn something useful to do real search engine optimization). But now that people don’t know which pages will pass value, the economic incentive to drive search results with links has declined. There are easier ways to accomplish the task.

The people who adapt will have productive domains five years from now. The people who fail to adapt will just leave behind worthless domains for the 3-cent-per day crowd to scarf up.