During the past eight years, I’ve learned a lot. I’m still learning new things every day, and I hope this will continue for years and years. When I was thinking about some of the things that I’ve learned thus far, I decided to write eight of them down.

 
1. People with the biggest mouths are not always right. Nor are people with the most experience, the best reputation or the most followers. The sole fact that you have eighteen years of experience doesn’t mean shit, except that you’re probably older than me.

 
2. Google makes the rules in SEO. If you’ve always blindly obeyed these rules, you’ve probably been thinking “Just wait until Google fixes things tomorrow, you mean spammer!” every day, for the past six years or so. Ain’t life a bitch?

 
3. Trial and error is the best teacher. Not an eBook, not a forum and certainly not some kind of 3-day online course. However, you can definitely use some of these sources to come up with ideas for things to test and try yourself.

 
4. Getting things done is the most important thing in online marketing. You can analyze things, write reports or fine-tune stuff all day long, but things don’t change unless you get shit done. Hit that publish button, press ‘send’ or kick someone in the nuts to make things happen.

 
5. If you never question anything or anyone, you don’t deserve to know the truth. If you want to believe that links don’t matter, or that 20,000 people a month are really searching for “ski chalet Miami, FL”, be my guest.

 
6. White hat link building is just the search engine friendly version of plain old marketing. You can talk about dofollow and nofollow all you want, but if you don’t know the principles of marketing, you’re doomed to fail.

 
7. Most SEO conferences are a just a nice way to see something of the world and to make your boss pay for your beer. Most of these conference’s networking events, on the other hand…

 
8. Paying for something only is a bad thing when the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s called ROI, and it not only applies on the CPM campaigns you’re managing for your clients, but also on the tools, forums, PR services, books, people, web hosting and many other things you use yourself. Don’t be a cheapskate.

 
Bonus lesson. Never, ever trust someone who calls him or herself a guru. If gurus are a disease, than social media gurus are a nasty STD. Okay, I didn’t need the full seven years to understand this one, it’s an important one to keep in mind ;)

 
Do you have any other important lessons to add? Like I said, I always love learning new things :)

This post, 8 Lessons I’ve Learned From Doing SEO, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Although topping the SERPs was much easier in the past, we still live in a time where small websites still stand a chance. In about five years, developing a website from scratch and making it profitable within two years (without touching AdWords), will be pretty hard. Why? Because within the next 5 years, most large companies will finally “get it”. These companies will finally realize what they have, how they can use it, and what they can do with it.

Domain age

A lot of Fortune 500 company domain names were amongst the first 10,000 domains that were registered. Do you seriously think that it would be hard to outrank your 1999 lcd tv related domain? Think again. Take a look at Philips, for example. This manufacturer of electronic appliances registered their domain name back in 1987. Try outranking that.

Links

Websites that have been around since the mid 1990s, have probably been attracting links since the mid 1990s as well. Not only will 15 years of link attraction result in a LOT of links, but a lot of OLD links as well. With Philips again as an example, you’ll see that they have over a million links pointing to the .com domain alone. They have around 75 tlds with unique content and unique links. Another great example is Nike, with just under 2 million links.

Now think of what would happen if they’d actually start leveraging these links, let alone optimizing them. No matter if they keep or ditch the Flash, I’m pretty sure that Nike would finally be topping the SERPs for ‘running shoes‘. And this is even without having to obtain new links…

Content

The problem with most Fortune 500 websites isn’t a lack of good content, but the enormous amounts of country selections, Flash, redirects, session IDs, CMS URLs and other search engine barriers blocking this content. If these barriers are removed, not only search engines will be able to find (and rank) a lot of extra content, but visitors will find it as well, through these search engines. The same goes for the linkerati.

Press

I mentioned links before, but the ease of getting attention in the media is worth mentioning as well. If you have developed one of the most brilliant products or services ever, you will find that -even then- it’s pretty hard to get attention or coverage in the media. For some companies, there are entire (and popular!) websites dedicated to news and rumors about new products. Even bad news, such as a big layoff, can result in hundreds of new links from authority news websites.

People

Whether it’s a team of link developers, web designers or marketeers, large companies have lots of them. Bunches of ‘em. And if they’re still short of well-skilled personnel, they tend to just hire a few extra, either directly or outsourcing via an SEM agency. Large companies have complete departments that can develop stuff in a single day, that would’ve taken you (or your team, if you’re lucky) at least a few weeks.

Money

Massive paid link budgets? Not a problem. Developing a kick-ass piece of linkbait for several thousands of dollars? Not a problem. Hiring top notch experts from every internet marketing related field to provide input? Not a p… you get what I mean. Don’t you just love it when money isn’t an issue? Well, for most large companies, this almost seems true. They’ll probably have to convince only a few folks and the money tap will be turned wide open.

Being small has advantages…

Like I’ve mentioned before, being small has its advantages as well. Massive companies will never beat a small business owner on passion, dedication or speed. This is where small websites still have an advantage, but that’s about it.

My advice for everybody who is thinking about developing a website? Do it now! Before all large companies suddenly “get it”.

This post, The Day All Large Companies “Got It”, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

First of all I want to stress out that I personally couldn’t care less about this penalty and this is not an “I want my PageRank back!” scream. I wouldn’t even care if Google turned it into a PR0, a greyed out PR or even a red or purple PageRank, but I do care about the reason why. If this PageRank penalty is because of the links in the footer (it actually is my only website that’s 100% clean :P ), it’s wrong for several reasons.

1. Lots of WP templates work with ‘sponsored by’ footer and/ or blogroll links and lots of mom and pop bloggers have never heard of either paid links, Matt Cutts, or even Google. Others may think that PageRank is directly related to their rankings and will turn hysterical if they see that their PR has been lowered because of factors that they don’t know is wrong.
In stead of lowering the rankings of the advertisers, Google thinks it’s more appropriate to lower the toolbar PR of template users who -in some cases, not in my case!- don’t even know they’re doing something wrong.

2. How about ‘designed by’ links? Can your PR get lowered because of linking to your website designer as well? This is pretty much the same.

3. This actually is a penalty for linking to irrelevant websites. Besides using the WP template, I never accepted any form of payment or whatsoever, so technically, the links aren’t even paid ones.

4. Indirectly, Google’s telling people which website template they can use and which ones they can’t. It’s either breaking the template’s conditions of use (leaving the links up is mandatory), risking a lowered PageRank, or following the Rules Of Google.

Some have suggested to nofollow or remove the links in the footer and to do a reinclusion request, but I’ve decided not to. In stead, I’ll do exactly what I said I will do my footer; I’ll leave the links up (which is mandatory when you use the template) until I have a new design. Do you have designing skills that rock and some spare time? Drop me a note and you might just end up with a ‘designed by’ footer link. From a PR2 blog…

Until then, does someone have a green pen, so I can fill up the void on my toolbar?

This post, Does Someone Have a Green Pen?, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

When you read these guidelines (I’ve read it before, but it’s great to read it again as an eye opener), there are a few things you might pick up and use when you’re building links. These tips aren’t ground breaking and it also isn’t a complete list, but it’s nice to see these things confirmed by an official Google document.

1. Go for niche directories in stead of general ones.
The best links you can get are from websites that get lots of ‘vital’, ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’ ratings. Niche directories will not only pass more relevant traffic, but will also receive more positive ratings because of their specific focus. Therefore, you should definitely focus on niche directories and only the top general ones; getting hundreds of general directory links is just not worth it anymore.

2. Get links from your country.
If you’re looking for a book store in the US, the web shop of Amazon.co.uk will be rated as ‘not relevant’. And so will your link on that UK website probably (partially) as well. However, focusing on getting as much links from your country doesn’t mean that a link from BBC.co.uk isn’t valuable ;)

3. Go for news groups, but keep it informational.
For informational queries, newsgroups which are focused on the subject and provide helpful information will receive a ‘useful’ rating. This means that these newsgroup pages might show up in the top of the SERPs, so if your link is on that page, it might receive a lot of click troughs. Remember to keep it useful for the user though, because the page might not get a ‘useful’ rating if you’ve spamming the page.

4. Offer to write FAQ’s.
Informational pages such as FAQ’s can get ‘useful’ ratings. If you offer to write an FAQ for a website you’d love to get a link from (and of course include a few links to your own website), you might be able to score a few links from a valuable, ‘useful’ informational page.

5. (Not link building related) Bonus Tip
Do you have an affiliate website and you don’t want to get labeled as a ‘thin affiliate’, which is considered as spam by Google? Adding a ‘become an affiliate’ link to your footer might help ;)

This post, Link Building Tips You Can Get From Google’s Guideline Document, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Big vs Small; image by Somun

Speed

If you’re small, you’re able to make quick decisions. There’s no need to fill in action request forms, organize a two week lobby and there’s no other time consuming, decision slowing process necessary. If you spot a trend, you often see only small companies respond to this trend. Big companies follow much later, because of their long lines and exhausting processes.

Speed is not only an offensive factor, but smaller companies can use their size in their defense as well. When someone discusses the brand of a large company, this company usually has to decide if they should respond. When this decision finally has been made, the right division should be determined (communication, PR, customer service, …) and a plan will be made. Once this plan is ready to get executed, the discussion will most likely have either exploded or died.
Smaller companies, on the other hand, are able to react fast. In stead of damage repair, these companies may even be able to turn the bad press into good press. What’s not to like about a company that responds to (and solves!) critique really quick, right?

Centralization

Big companies have lots of different divisions. Each division has its own goals, which means that there are different points of interest. While division A has goal X and division B wants to reach point Y, a small business only has one or a few different goals. This means that you can work towards the same goal, in stead of discussing and finding some point in between.

One of the disadvantages of being a small company is that you have to be very picky with selecting new people. You can’t afford it to hire 20 different specialists, but you’ll have to settle with only a few employees with a broader range of knowledge. While it can be very hard to find these people, having only a few employees can also be an advantage, because it’s a centralization of knowledge. In stead of organizing meetings with each of the 20 specialists (who also have their own agenda and focus) for every decision that has to be made, you can decide things on your own or with your small team.

A centralization of knowledge also means control. You probably won’t end up fixing other peoples mistakes, such as adding a noindex tag to the website’s homepage or explaining the web design team why launching that new 100% flash design probably wasn’t a good idea. You know about the company’s plans, so you hopefully won’t come across surprises like that.

Passion

This probably is one of the most important advantages that a small business has over a big company. In stead of being goal or wallet driven, smaller companies tend to have a spirit and passion that’s above average. You can find people that enjoy the fact that they’re checking out new trends even in the weekends or on a holiday and that are always looking for things that might improve a process at the base of almost every small company. Real dedication, commitment and drive is what made lots of small companies big and is the key to success.

This post could have been about general marketing, but I didn’t title it “Big Company Internet Marketing” for no reason. At this moment, knowledge is one of the factors where small companies can still easily outperform the giants. PR divisions that don’t know anything about the effect of links, web designers that still don’t design SE friendly and copywriters that don’t do their keyword research will soon be a thing of the past. Until then, use it to your benefit. Like I mentioned before, being big -obviously- has its advantages, but it really isn’t that hard for a small company to exploit the points where they’re better.

This post, Big Company Internet Marketing: Why Being Small Can Be Better, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Daily Roundups

SEL’s SearchCap: The Day in Search (Recommended)
 Search Engine Land lists all SEL posts, as well as other interesting industry pieces and links to all posts that made it to Sphinn‘s front page that day.

E-Marketing Performance Team Reading List
 Stoney deGeyter lists whatever he and his team came across that day.

Search Engine Roundtable’s Search Forum Recap
 Barry, Tamar and the others hunt search related forums on a daily basis, so you don’t have to!

Raven’s SEO Daily Readings
 The Raven SEO Blog lists the most interesting SEO headlines every day.

Weekly Roundups

Pronet’s Social Media MarketingWrap Up (Wednesday)
 Muhammad Saleem stuffs a week of SMM into one post every Wednesday.

SEOmoz’ Roundup Thirsday (Thirsday, duh…)
 Not only search related stuff, but other items get listed (and rated) every week as well.

Web Strategy’s Weekly Social Networking Digest (Thirsday)
 Jeremiah Owyang digs up the best of social networking every Thirsday.

SearchRank’s Weekly Rap-Up (Friday, Recommended)
 David Wallace lists all search related stuff he feels is worth mentioning every week.

The Mad Hat’s Friday Tea Time (Friday)
 Aaron tries to cover what happened in the world of search in his very own way.

SER’s Search Buzz Roundup (Friday, Recommended)
 Tamar does a great job listing every newsworthy search related item every week.

Bruce Clay’s Friday Recap (Friday)
 Lisa Barone reports the best SEO related stuff every Friday. Oh, and what she learned at BoingBoing as well…

Marketing Pilgrim’s Linky Goodness (Friday)
 It’s not SEO News if it didn’t got listed in one of MP’s weekly roundups.

Get Elastic’s Bloggers Digest (Friday)
 From Ecommerce to Email Marketing, Linda Bustos lists it all in the weekly Bloggers Digest.

Wiep.net’s Link Building this Week (Friday)
 I try to recap whatever happens in the link building niche on a weekly basis myself as well.

Vandelay Design’s Weekly Links (Usually on Saturday)
 Steven lists the best design, blogging and SEO related posts every week.

Daily Blog Tips’ Link Tips (Sunday)
 Everything a blogger needs to know can be found in DBT’s Sunday Link Tips.

Pandia’s Weekend Wrap Up (Sunday)
 Your weekly dosis of Search Engine Headlines.

Monthly Roundups

Small Business SEM’s Best posts of 2008 (Recommended)
 Last year, Matt McGee of Small Business SEM bundled the posts from his Best Posts of 2007 and organized the SEMMYS. This year, he takes of with the Best posts of 2008.

Yellowhouse Hosting’s This Month in SEO (Recommended)
 What started as a weekly SEO roundup, turned into an in-depth monthly summary of everything what happened in the field of search. If even following just roundups is too much for you, I suggest reading only this one. The signal to noise ratio is excellent and Steven (aka VanGogh) describes almost every post for optimal readability.

If I missed one, please let me know…

This post, Rounding Up the Recaps, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

1. Be linkable
This is not only necessary from a search engine point of view, but also if you want to attract more links. Session IDs, password protected pages and frames are potential killers of a great link profile. Be sure to be linkable. I’m not going into depth here, if you need more info about this subject check out this part of SEOmoz’ Beginners Guide.

2. Sell great products
Don’t settle with regular or good products, sell great products. You know, products that make you want to tell others “Hey, check out this product I just bought. It’s amazing”.
Selling really crappy products might get you a few links as well, but I don’t think these links are the ones you’re looking for…

3. Provide great service
Don’t settle with a regular or good service, but provide every customer with a great service. Small customers as well. You know, a service that makes you want to tell others “Hey, you know about the problem I had with that product I recently bought. You’ll never going to believe this”.

4. Encourage linking
It sounds pretty logical, but there still are loads of companies out there that don’t want you linking to them. Mentioning a positive linking policy on your copyright page can help, but encouraging linking goes much further.

• Include a link encouraging message in your confirmation email or in the follow up email. Something like “Did you like this product? Tell us and tell others! Found something wrong with this product? Tell us and others as well!”, together with the URL(s) of the product(s) your customer just bought might get you dozens of positive posts with natural links. It might also get you a few less positive posts, but this is a great way to let these customers get familiar with your excellent service.
• You might take this even a step further by offering discounts or coupons. I don’t know what Matt thinks of something like “Let others know what you think about this product and get a 15% discount on your next purchase!” in terms of paid links, but I think it’s a great way to encourage people to give you feedback about your products. Whether this is positive or negative feedback.
• If your products have a manual, use it. Let your customers know the URL of the product they’ve bought, so they can check out this page for more info, updates and more. This way, you might bond with a few customers and make them linktrigger-happy.
• Images. In stead of preventing people from hotlinking your images, encourage them! In return for a link to the source, of course. You could also use a script like this.
• Even a simple “bought this product?” button in stead of a “send to friend” button (with some explanation included) might encourage people to actually write about the product they’ve bought in the past.

While these steps look pretty easy to follow, I’ve only seen a few companies actually use this in their linking strategy. This is very remarkable, considering the fact that only a few changes might results in dozens or hundreds of free, natural deeplinks over time. And while I’ve mentioned only a few link encouraging tips, I’m sure you can come up with plenty more.

This post, Loads of natural links to your shopping website in 4 easy steps, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

“I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them.”

While I believe that this drop was caused by a mix of both algorithmic and editorial influence, most of BizRate’s top rankings seem to be coming back already. At least, the stuff that I have been tracking and from where I can see it…

BizRate, BizRate…
BizRate happens to be one of those sites that I have been tracking for a while now, mainly because of their aggressive link buying tactics. They used to have tens of thousands of anchor text optimized links pointing to almost every page on their website. The majority of these links was paid for; footer links, sidebar links and numerous ad box links. You name it, they had it. As you can see, BizRate was (and still is) a great example to keep an eye on.
Aaron’s post inspired me to dive into BizRate’s backlinks once again. I have been doing this in more than one occasion, but this time it was different than before. Lots of the news websites, that were selling direct links to make up for the ongoing drop in news paper subscriptions, have been removing, altering or nofollowing their sponsored links. What used to be a block with irrelevant text links, turned into a Google AdSense Ad. Complete footers went pink because of all the nofollows and direct links suddenly turned into redirects. Even several of the famous BizRate link blocks got slapped with rel=”nofollow”.

Mission accomplished
Google’s October FUD Campaign seems to be working out exactly as planned. More and more ad publishers are complying with Google’s rules and advertisers are backing out of renting links because of their fear for a penalty. Only a few will go underground and some will remain to use the same strategy. However, this will be resulting in fewer direct, paid, anchor text rich links, what will lead to multiple shifts in highly competitive SERPs.

And this is, in my opinion, one of the things that happened with BizRate. Publishers got scared and nofollowed or removed the sponsored links, what resulted in a huge drop in anchor text rich links. This, combined with a little touch of human influence, lead to these changes and a near zero visibility in Google for at least a few days.
BizRate will probably alter their link tactics and choose for something safer, which means that Google got what it wanted.

This post, FUD: amazingly effective…, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

If you spot a positive consumer opinion, a review that praises one of your products or a great critic on a trusted website, don’t hesitate to link to it! This is not only a way to serve positive feedback about Your Company to your existing website visitors and to encourage consumers to give you (positive) feedback, but also may change the future SERPs for a “Your Company” search query into something more like this:

This is like using Google, Yahoo! and MSN as giant mouths in your Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy.

This post, Word of Link Marketing: Link forward!, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

It’s almost funny to see how some companies still avoid the Internet as an advertising opportunity. I took the top 25 companies (totaling a stunning $53 Billion) and listed both their advertising spending and their internet advertising spending.

Please note that it’s advertising spending in the US only, in billions of $. Hiring a web design company isn’t part of the online ad spending, for example. Banner advertising costs and Google AdWords click budgets, however, are included.

It’s almost stunning to see that four of the top 25 companies, GSK, McDonald’s, L’Oreal and Macy’s, spend less than 1% of their advertising budget online. Come on already, it’s 2007! Ok, the numbers above are last year’s, but still…
Only AT&T, Verizon and Disney spend 4% or more of their advertising budgets online.

It would have been great to dive into the online success of these companies measured by (for instance) #of Digg front page listings, StumbleUpon reviews or Del.icio.us favorites. Unfortunately, companies like P&G and Unilever each have hundreds of different brands, which would make these results inaccurate. Maybe if I had some spare hours left…

This post, Online ad spending of the top 25 US advertising companies, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.