Blog: Fresh Tilled Ideas

Will SEO services slowly come to an end?

Posted On: July 11th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

It's definitely not the end, and could possibly be the beginning for a whole new line of SEO services and products. Consider how Google works; it needs information to make determinations about what's relevant and what's not. Humans also need information about what's happening with their SEM campaigns so analytics is here to stay. Even with a futuristic flawless search engine you still need an SEO expert to do all the on-site work (e.g. title tags, blog set-up, etc.) and you need them to analyze the results (e.g. analytics, reporting, optimizing, etc.).

Many people are asking this question in the context of social networks and will social networking become more important than paid for SEO? This is where the internet has been going. The idea behind the Internet is to give power to the people as citizen journalists. This democratic ubiquity forces companies to improve their offerings because the customer reviews and referrels influence conversions and loyalty. Getting brands to interact with consumers is positive trend and companies should embrace it but not at the expense of getting the basics right.

In reality not much changes. The difference is that the predominant links come from blog posts and profiles instead of long lists of sites we used to dump into site. Google has always used the voting power of the web to drive its algorithm. As long as people are searching for and recommending sites this formula will work. And as long as the formula works we'll need SEO experts to direct marketing efforts down this path. The ability to personalize content and direct popularity perceptions just increases the importance that marketers place on SEO to reach the audiences building and reading these pages. SEO experts have a huge role in making these pages relevant to the appropriate audiences.

What's clear in the shifting of SEO practices is that a contextual search environment is emerging. In some ways this means companies like ours are going to have to work harder and longer to achieve results for our clients. Link blasting has given way to highly specific contextual linking and the reality is that it takes a little longer.

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What Obama is teaching us about internet marketing

Posted On: July 8th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

Regardless of what political party you support there is something undeniably brilliant about the Obama campaign. At face value the idea that millions of strangers will give you $10, $25, or $200 seems odd. Yet that is exactly what successful web businesses are trying to do every day. Extracting the monthly subscription from the customer has been the holy grail of businesses. So what can we learn from the Obama campaign? Firstly, the campaign marketers understood that the world is a very different place. The internet has changed everything and many of the other candidates relied too heavily on the same techniques that have always worked. Let\'s break it down a little more.

1. The internet is transparent: Everything you say will be checked and distributed instantly and without filtering. This means you need to be honest about who shot at you in a foreign country or what your taxes look like.
2. The internet is democratic: Your vote really does count online. The little guy gets a chance to make a difference by combining their vote with other little guys. Special interest doesn\'t rule online. In fact, special interest is a fringe interest that can easily get squashed.
3. The internet is wealthy: Who would have imagined that you could raise more than$200 million in a few months just by asking the web generation? The web-class may not have individual wealth, like the big-wigs at the fund raises, but collectively their $25 donations are a Tsunami of wealth.

Take a look at this great graphic by Xplane founder David Gray. From David\'s Flickr account: "Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money – by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks. Get the pdf version here."

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How to create a linkbait campaign

Posted On: February 12th 2008
By: Richard Banfield

Late last year we started serious linkbait campaigns for our clients. Here is a little insight into how a campaign is constructed and what results can be generated. Our client, Beau-Coup Wedding Favors, wanted to attract attention to their site and build dozens of relevant links in the process. Creating hundreds of new links is the whole point of a linkbait campaign. These campaigns are similar to PR campaigns where the quality of the content and the distribution list are the critical success elements.

Step 1: Research your market and develop content that is relevant to this audience. In our case we wanted to launch on Digg.com, which is visited primarily by young tech-savvy males. We chose a title that would immediately appeal to that target market: Nintendo Influenced Weddings.

Step 2: Create a page on the main site that looks like an ordinary article page. Use images where appropriate. Here is the page we created for this campaign.

Step 3: Invite all your friends, individually - not in a spammy email, to Digg the article. In many cases we start with our own personal and business networks and then expand to other acquaintances and friends-of-friends as much as possible. This is the hardest and most laborious part of the linkbait campaign. It can take hours to send out all the individual emails and chat notifications with the link embedded.

Step 4: Be patient and watch the Diggs grow and the traffic swell.

Here are the actual stats of that campaign. Linkbait release date: December 19, 2007

Page views: 192,721

Unique views: 133,948

Backlinks Yahoo!: 1,166

Backlinks Google: 64

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