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| Sep 10, 2007 7:47 pm |
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re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: Marketing help |
Laura Wheeler
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Reg, I think we are just defining things and selling them differently to our clients. You sell SERPs as a means of upping revenue. I promote the revenue increase and downplay SERP, because my clients typically don't understand what it is. And it is part of the puzzle, not the whole thing, so when I do a marketing guarantee, it includes SEO, but is measured by either traffic or revenue, because those are the things my clients can focus on and see as being important.
I have another issue here... This is NOT a contentious issue, I really want to know if I've missed something on it.
Ok... how good, really, are search engines at determining relevancy? I mean, they are computers, and while Google CLAIMS they do pay attention to it, I suspect this is just posturing on their part to intimidate SEO gurus into complying with Google's wishes of not manipulating results. They have been singing the "relevancy" song for about, what, two years now? My experiences and knowledge of search matching suggests that they cannot do quite as much as they imply. Here is why I think they may not be as on the ball about it as they want us to think they are:
I have longstanding sites that are interlinked. At one point, I attempted to make the links more relevant, and that meant categorizing the links and not interlinking as heavily. The pagerank on all of those sites dropped, and stayed down, even though backlinks from other sites increased - fewer links, but more relevant links. Some of the old links were so clearly NOT relevant, that if they HAD been cracking down on it, they'd have never given credit for them. But those links took the sites from PR3, to PR4. Without them, it dropped back down to PR3. I can, in fact, plug a new site into my network of sites, and give it an instant PR3, or PR4, depending on how many sites I link it in with, and it sticks. Relevancy has not made a bit of difference, only volume has. But these are also all sites that Google considers to be high quality, and the new site coming online is also high quality. Lots of tasty original content.
Now, there is more than just that single anecdotal episode. I've seen other things happen similarly, but logic tells me that they aren't as good as they say either. Consider:
I have a site on Diabetes Control. I have another site on Secondary Infertility. They are related sites, because high blood sugar can contribute to infertility. BUT...
Google judges things by keywords. We do not have infertility as a prime keyword on the diabetes site, nor is diabetes a prime keyword on the infertility site. Does Google consider those two sites to be relevant?
Or...
How about the classic "organ" issue... If you sell electronic musical organs, Google will NOT keyword match you with Pianos or synthesizers unless you put keywords in to make it do so. It will, however, match you up with anything else containing the word "organ"... and let me tell you, you'll either be shocked, or amused, or both, if you Google the term "electric organ", or even "electronic organ". So Google would consider sites about Organ Transplants, Penile Implants (seriously), Organ Donation, Bodily Organs, Harmonicas, and Organ Grinders to be relevant, but could potentially consider a Classical Music shop to be irrelevant.
Keyword matching is pretty inexact. It only gets it right about 50% of the time, in either direction, even when we get the search terms correct, and when a site is well optimized. You may feel it is more exact, and it CAN be, but isn't always. In order for it to be accurate, the sites must be optimized not only for their OWN content, but for the content of the linking sites as well. What a pain. People don't do that. Google can't expect them to do so, it is unsustainable. My conclusion is that I'll link for people - if I think the site visitors will enjoy it, I put it in, whether I think Google will think it relevant or not - because THAT is a normal behavior.
I have also heard people say that Google may penalize you for cross-linking your own sites. This is patently (provably) untrue. If they did, they'd have to penalize Yahoo, MSN, IBM, EWeek, and even themselves! It is an unsustainable claim - Google knows they have to follow the same rules with the little guys as with the big guys - if they start making different rules for different players, their entire search superiority crumbles. They DO consider normal human behavior. They know that a business with two lines will interlink those sites. They know that a site owner who has 35 sites WILL cross promote them, to not do so would be a colossal marketing mistake - why promote 35 things separately when you can leverage the marketing of one for the others? I think what they look at is QUALITY. Back to content again. If you have 35 sites that are all an excuse to get traffic to one site, and all of them have substantially the same content, or all of them have weak or low quality content, they do penalize - but they do that for all sites with weak content. If, on the other hand, you have 35 sites with good quality content that adds to the substance of the web, they are only too glad to let you leverage the marketing of one to benefit the others - this is, after all, a normal marketing reaction for good business people with honest and useful websites. This conclusion is, again, based on experience and on seeing it work quite well, over a long period of time.
On the linking issue, Kathy, would you say that to promote certain types of businesses, that it would be a good idea to host a trade show where multiple vendors of the same kind can create a bigger splash together than any one of them can create on their own? Sure, it means that someone across the aisle from you may be promoting the same thing you are, but if you get people in that you would not otherwise get, it benefits you. It may benefit your competition too, but if it gets you what you'd not otherwise have, then it is positive. The difference with linking is that you cannot see it as it happens in quite the same way, and it is a long term thing not a one time event. Google Analytics could tell you a lot of the visitor behaviors - where they went and when they left. It is similar to offline marketing - smart to collaborate for some businesses, not smart for others.
And... Link placement makes a huge difference. If you place off-site links in prime positions, they are likely to take people away before they use your site. But certain places, like the bottom of the right sidebar, or extreme bottom of the page, are "afterthought" locations. People only really LOOK there if they are NOT finding what they want on your site. They'll typically look at the left navigation, or top navigation, and the center of the page. They'll only look right if they didn't find what they wanted. So I place off-site links there - including ads that earn (on my infosites). If I am going to lose them anyway, I'll do so in a way I can direct! :)
Laura
Mom to Eight
Firelight Business Enterprises, Inc.
http://www.firelightwebstudio.com
http://www.westernhillsinstitute.comPrivate Reply to Laura Wheeler (new win) |
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