Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Forget Advertising, Hire Bloggers
The general consensus among the people I know is that advertising rarely works. The same amount of money would be much better spent on creating a blog on your site and hiring bloggers to write for it. I’ll explain here all the advantages of blogs over advertising.
Long-term vs. Short-term Investment
The biggest problem with advertising is that it is a very short-term solution. As soon as you stop advertising, the traffic to your site drops back to where it used to be. You could spend $5,000 in a month, and once it’s over, there is no lingering benefit. It’s like $5,000 evaporating into thin air.
Blog posts keep paying off. Each blog post may attract only one visitor a day, but it can keep doing so for years (provided that it has some timeless quality to it.). If you have 100 posts that can bring in 1 visitor a day, you will get 100 visitors a day. That is a lot of qualified visitors. If we are to pay a professional blogger $25 for each post, $5,000 would buy 200 posts, which means you could potentially get 200 visitors a day from the same investment. Remember: This goes on indefinitely without any additional money. With advertising, your $5,000 is gone in a month, over, period.
Luck
An effective advertising campaign is like hitting the jackpot; you have to be very lucky to generate enough profit to cover the cost of your advertising campaigns. Advertising works only in very specific situations, like the perfect storm. One of my clients told me that a lawyer he knows tried Google AdWords to target a very specific area of legal practice and worked well for him. Because the profit margin for lawyers is big, they do not have to attract many clients to pay for the ads. Even one client could potentially pay for a $5,000 advertising campaign. If you get two clients from the ads, you are in good shape. But even this involves finding the right keywords that many people happen to be searching for. What if the right keyword that you found is not your area of expertise, or the area that you would rather not get into? What if it attracts people who have no money? You also have to be able to find the right keywords relatively quickly. If you take too long to find them, you can lose a lot of money in just experimenting with different keywords, which makes recouping of your money more difficult. You see what I mean by “the perfect storm”?
With a blog, you are less dependent on luck because your investment is spread over a long period of time so you have time to tweak and perfect your strategies. Change your focus/angle/tone. Hire different bloggers. Also, some of your old posts may suddenly become relevant because of recent events. As long as your blog posts have some value for the readers, search engines will send visitors to them. In fact, not getting any visitors would be quite rare.
Respect and Authority
You cannot buy respect or authority with advertising, but you can with blogs. If your blog is insightful, entertaining, useful, and/or helpful, you can earn the respect of your readers. In this sense, blog is a tool of public relations, not marketing or advertising. It’s a “pull” medium, as opposed to “push” like advertising; the former always command more respect. When Web surfers are looking for credibility on the Internet, they try to “pull”; they do not trust information that was pushed on them.
Blog Content Is Self-generating
As your blog becomes more popular, your existing content will generate more content for you automatically. Search engines index and scan blog comments too. If your blog posts are thought-provoking, they will invite comments from the readers. These comments are free contents that draw more visitors to your site. In this sense, investing in blog posts is like buying stocks that pay dividends.
Furthermore, the more popular your blog becomes, the cheaper it will be to hire bloggers, because your need for bloggers becomes symbiotic with the needs of the bloggers to promote themselves. You will be able to find writers who are willing to contribute blog posts cheaply or even for free, because you are giving them free advertising for their writing business.
Free Contributions
If your blog becomes really popular, some people will start feeding you interesting information, or even a piece of writing that can be posted to your blog as is. At this point, you are in a privileged position; your competitors would have a hard time keeping up with you, because you have access to information that they don’t have.
Links
Nobody would link to your banner ad. Why would they? (Unless they are criticizing or making fun of it.) Links to your site are quite valuable on today’s Internet where Google’s PageRank determines the value of your website. PageRank is an algorithm that determines the significance of your web page based on how many people link to it. A good blog post can generate a number of links to it. No banner ad could do this. And, if your blog posts are relatively timeless, they can keep generating links for years.
Some people buy links to their sites from blogs. This seems silly to me. If you have your own blog, you can spend the same amount of money on hiring bloggers. A quality blog post can generate many links. With the cost of buying one link, you could buy a post for your own blog to which many others could link, and continue linking for a long time.
Conclusion
I could probably come up with more, but it’s probably not necessary because the advantages of blogs over advertising is overwhelmingly clear. The timing for starting a commercial blog is perfect too. There are many writers and journalists who are unemployed, and who would be happy to make some money on the side while they look for real jobs. Professional blogging is a flexible job. Writers can do it from anywhere any time. Many news organizations are now going out of business partly due to the fact that they are competing with blogs. It would make sense for blogs to hire these unemployed writers and journalists. This way, the loss of quality in these newspapers could be compensated by the rise in quality for blogs.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Is Google Really Scared of Bing? At Least There Is One Reason They Should Be.
There seem to be a lot of articles about Google feeling scared of Microsoft’s new search service, Bing. I wonder if this is part of the massive ad campaign. If so, it’s pretty effective.
There is actually a good reason for Google to be afraid. Unlike operating systems or office applications, switching the search engine of your choice is rather easy. No installation, learning curve, compatibility issues, or licensing. Nothing sticky. I can set the default search on my browser to Bing in a few clicks, and it wouldn’t disrupt my daily work at all. Google search isn’t even tied to other Google services like Gmail. The search engine market is actually a relatively easy market to compete in. The only problem is that the infrastructure required to support the basic search capabilities is so costly that small businesses can’t enter the market successfully. It needs to be someone like Microsoft.
Also, search has a lot to do with perception. I have a feeling that if Apple entered the market of search, even if their product is inferior, many people might believe it’s superior, and they might be able to beat Google. The average people have no way of gauging the quality of the search results. They just want to be assured that the results they are getting are the best possible results; so that they don’t have to search on a variety of search engines every time they need to search. Second guessing is what the users want to avoid because it’s time-consuming. In this sense, advertising and PR are key factors in the success of search engines.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Disadvantage of Slash-separated URLs
It’s common these days to convert URL arguments into what looks like a directory structure. Here is an example:
http://example.org/words/2009/05/a-quick-take
WordPress and CakePHP do this for you. I never liked this idea, and it can become a real hassle when implementing a web-based application that offers a variety of features. For instance, say, you want to add the ability to change the background on your blog page by passing an argument
http://example.org/words/2009/05/a-quick-take/blue
Say, you also want to have a background music
http://example.org/words/2009/05/a-quick-take/blue/on
And, you also want, to have the option of displaying banners or not
http://example.org/words/2009/05/a-quick-take/blue/on/hide
Now, suppose you just want to hide the banner, and you don’t care about the background color or music, ideally, you would want to do this:
http://example.org/words/2009/05/a-quick-take/hide
But you can’t because 5th argument is defined as a background color. So, even if you don’t care about the background color or the music, you still have to specify all the arguments.
And furthermore, what if you wanted the ability to break up a long post into multiple pages? (That is, AFTER you have already implemented all the options above.) You want to add an ability to append a page number like this:
http://example.org/words/2009/05/a-quick-take/2
But you can’t, because you have the 5th argument already reserved for the background color. In order to change this, you will have to go back to all the links and shift all the positions by one. This is a huge pain. And remember, it’s not just you who have to shift the arguments, everyone linking to you (including search engines) now must shift them, or else the link will break.
So, this scheme may work for a closed system like WordPress (where it serves only one purpose), but it’s a real pain for a system that needs to remain flexible and extendable. It’s one of those things that you need to be aware of and be able to weigh the cost and benefit when you are designing the whole system.
CakePHP implemented what they call “named parameters” to get around this problem. Here is an example:
http://example.com/controller/action/param1:value1/param2:value2/
I believe named parameters are order-insensitive. So, you could eliminate the ones you don’t care about. This feature was added after-the-fact, because, I believe, many developers realized the same thing I realized. It was a real hassle in many situations. So, it’s like a work-around, which is unfortunate. The combination of two schemes makes the whole thing more convoluted than it needs to be. Also, we need to keep in mind that search engines would not understand what those colons mean. Even if CakePHP sees them as order-insensitive, search engines would not know that; so they have to treat them order-sensitive, which means that when you flip the order, they would consider them as separate URLs.
Furthermore, the slash schemes are often hard to read and understand. For instance:
http://example.com/portfolios/2/3/1061
You have no idea what those 3 numbers mean. If it was using a straight URL, it would look like this:
http://example.com/portfolios.php?user=2&folder=3&work=1061
Now, you understand what they mean, and so would Google.
Here is Google’s official answers to this issue:
Here are some key points:
Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic).
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3
Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL. Failure to do this would again result in a static looking URL which is hiding parameters. So the best solution is often to keep your dynamic URLs as they are.
The second one is particularly interesting because it’s not just humans who have hard time understanding what the parameters mean, and what to do when adding more parameters to the existing order. Google would have no idea either. So, contrary to the popular belief, those readable URLs are actually SEO UN-friendly.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
More on Readable URL
Following up on the previous post:
Actually, there are two separate issues here. I do believe that directory names should be readable. For instance, if Bitskis.com had a photo section it should be:
http://bitskis.com/photo
However, from here on, to view individual photos, you have two choices
http://bitskis.com/photo/annika-at-blue-school
http://bitskis.com/photo/?id=123
The problem with the first scheme is that the URLs are automatically built using the title of the photo, so if the title happens to be really long, you might end up with an awkward URL like
http://bitskis.com/foto/annika-at-blue-school-pretending-to-be-princess-Ariel-from-the-little-mermaid
You cannot use this for Twitter. You cannot paste it into a plain text email either because it would line break and the link would not work.
WordPress supports the latter scheme, but I’m not sure if it’s really advantageous. The idea behind this scheme is that Google see the words in URL as significant words, but I’m a bit skeptical of this. I know this is true with the domain name, but I’m not so sure about the rest of the URL. For instance, if you have a domain name SellBooksInNewYork.com, you will most likely come up at the top if you searched for “sell books in New York”, but if you had a URL like:
http://dyske.com/sell-books-in-new-york
I’m not sure if Google really sees this as significant. I think by now there are enough people abusing this scheme that Google might be ignoring them, just as they did for meta tags.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Disadvantage of Readable URL
Readable URLs are supposedly more search engine friendly. Here is an example:
http://www.babble.com/Excerpt-Free-Range-Kids-When-judgemental-moms-attack/index.aspx
I actually wonder if it really makes a difference. One big disadvantage of readable URLs is that they are really long. So, you need services like tinyURL.com to create a shorter version of it. If people start linking to your site via URL shortening services, you are not going to get any PageRank from those links. So, I’m not convinced that readable URLs are a good thing.
I try to keep my URLs really short. On Bitskis.com, for instance, all the links are this format:
http://bitskis.com/?p=275
Even if you put this in tinyURL.com, it won’t get any shorter. So, I have no need to use tinyURL to post my links in Twitter and other similar services.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
