It is not going to be an easy post to write. It will eat thousands of dollars of my time. And I most likely will not make any sales from it, but it is a nice introduction to how media works for anyone who has not yet seen or read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.

Self-survival is the First Goal of Any Organization

Parking meters are needed to add cost to a finite good (parking places) to decrease demand. Recently in Oakland they went from $1.25/hr to $1.50/hr. The meter man explained inflation to me, right before I read a bunch of news about the potential horrors of pending deflation. Why was I talking to the parking meter guy? I talked to the parking meter guy long enough that the person he was going to write a ticket for got away. I had done my good deed for the day. :)

The payment gateway for that particular area was broken. I pointed that out to him and he said "oh yeah I will call it in" with a matter-of-fact tone. So he knew the meters were broke, but didn't get them fixed because he knew he would be able to write more parking tickets that way.

About a week later, parking in a nearby area, I put a quarter in a regular pay meter and went in to pick up food that I had ordered. When I came back to the car the meter showed a minute left, but there was already a parking ticket on my window. Probably the same corner cutting public servant hooked me up on that deal.

Fraud can happen at the individual level, but as an organization grows bigger it...

• requires more capital to be sustained
• has more stakeholders
• finds additional incremental growth opportunities are harder and harder to come by

Bob Massa mentioned being at a business meeting where the CEO was told all our KPIs point south...to which the CEO replied "sounds like we need some new KPIs."

Which leads us to the inverse law of business ethics: the larger a business grows the more hypocritical it must be to sustain its growth and please its stakeholders.

The Media Sells What is Hot

Best. Bubble. Ever.

The US society is largely based on instant gratification, consumption, and debt. To keep growing we need to build bubbles (and promote them via the media), hoping to make each bubble larger than the last. Mortgage fraud replaced the tech bubble. And the next bubble will likely be related to green energy.

Media Pandering

"If it leads it bleeds." The press is always pandering the story of the day to make it seem more important than it is in an attempt to capture attention

The media lemmings, the same ones that encouraged you to get a second mortgage, buy a McMansion and spend, spend, spend are now falling all over themselves to out-mourn the others. They are telling everyone to batten down, to cut back, to freeze and panic. They're looking for stories about this, advice about this, hooks about this.

Or as a commenter named Mike, on one of my favorite investing blogs, wrote:

Some idiot on Bloomberg is talking about how irrational consumers had been and how they are now getting rational. Judging someone's rationality depends on what they knew at the time. And, Joe the Plumber was bombarded for years with propaganda about how your house was your best investment, stocks always go up, we are the kings of the world, etc. They did what you would expect.

Now, if those of us who look behind the curtain had bought into the hype, that would be irrational.

Media is always selling you up the river to some advertiser interest.

Advertiser Interests Come First

In The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Google's founders explained:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Years later, after Google became the world's largest ad network, how did that view that same web of content that they scraped and wrapped ads around? Eric Schmidt explained:

The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

So in less than a decade branding moved from "the enemy" to "how you sort out the cesspool." Makes sense if your business model is to educate consumers by cashing in on other's branding efforts one click at a time.

But Google has obscene profit margins and market leverage and does try hard to strike some level of balance. No other large media company has similar profit margins or market leverage, and thus they tend to be more controlled by advertiser interest.

Consider Fox News, which fired some of its reporters for wanting to report the potential link between rBGH and cancer. Why were the reporters fired? They refused to be silent about the research they had done, and as an advertiser pushing rBGH onto ignorant consumers, Monsanto was going to cut their ad spend if the truth about their product came out. Killing people with cancer for a dollar...that is how low some media standards are.

Shill media is so commonplace that not being a shill is actually remarkable.

Conduits for Misinformation

Public Relations vs Reality

Many companies live by telling multiple stories simultaneously. When Google was promoting PageRank they talked about how it leveraged the "unique democratic structure" of the web. But when the Department of Justice sued Google for search data, Google's response stated that "Google only attempts to crawl the "best of the Web" to create a useful repository of Web pages." And when they feared GoogleBombing potentially causing negative blowback during the 2008 election cycle, Google tried to defuse the practice.

Sensationalism

Sensationalism works. Write something that is factual and nobody cares. Twist is just a bit and it is press worthy. That is why guys like Jason Calacanas are so fond of writing lines like "What you do in the next 30 days will probably make or break your company."

Lies

If your budget is large enough and your sample data pool large enough it is not hard to lie with statistics. Some business models are based on pushing through biased research and hoping that their solution is so ingrained in society that by the time the truth comes out nothing changes.

In almost any area where Google talks about their being "spam" there are brands built off of sleight of hand marketing.

Finance

The bogus consumer bankruptcy bill was pushed using biased self-selection stats about people filing for bankruptcy because they did not pay their credit card debts, when the leading cause for bankruptcy is medical issues. The same bankers that pushed that through are now at the trough begging for handouts.

Education

We are taught that the rising cost of college is just because a degree is worth so much, while ignoring kickbacks to finacial aid officers and a decade of student loan fraud.

Healthcare

After decades of bogus research, much of it was de-bunked.

The truth was there all along, but it just took a few decades to come out in the media.

Politics

The examples are so abundant it is hard to pick one. But as an example, here are pre-election stories blaming high oil prices AND low stock prices on the market pricing in the likelihood of an Obama presidential victory. Such analysis is usually thin on research.

Fraud is a Fundamental Part of Capitalism

I could list dozens more categories here if I took the time to do the research. Kickbacks and misinformation are everywhere because capitalism promotes short term gain at the expense of future generations. Some media companies even carry fake video clips created by public relations companies.

Even the US Government Actively Manipulates the Media

The US government so heavily alters economic data that there is a third party website to decode their numbers.

The US government actively manipulates the media to mislead and misinform consumers. If you watch Robert S. McNamara's Fog of War you will see him talk about how they timed Vietnam War related releases to play them down and minimize blowback.

30 years later the media is still being used to propagandize war. What ever happened to those weapons of mass destruction that were central to the lie that started the Iraq war? George Bush thinks their absence is funny. So does the press corps


As one Youtube commenter puts it:

As repulsive as Bush is, we shouldn't forget some of the people laughing at his "humor," notably the press corps who helped him sell his phony war and who derided, as naive or unpatriotic, those who raised doubts about the WMD issue before it started. But hey, war makes for great great TV and big profits for the military-industrial-media complex. They're a big part of the reason why America is so frequently at war.

Back when we were pushing to go to war there was nothing but cheer leading from the media, and now the same media reports how the pentagon uses TV analysts that had equity stakes in defense contractors to sell the Iraq war to the US public:

Collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.
...
Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence.
...
Members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

There are laws against inside trading, and yet somehow it is legal for the government to give defense contractors classified information so long as they are willing to lie to the US public in exchange for it. Mind blowing!

And while crony capitalism thrives with the government lying to their own citizens, it gets harder for a citizen's voice to be heard. It is as though Carl Sandburg never wrote or read The People Yes.

Reporters Spin the Truth

Some have complained about live blogging not being accurate, but the same thing happens with regular reporting.

I think humans tend to be somewhat dismissive of or scared of technologies they do not understand. That is why Lori Drew was tried on 3 counts of accessing computers without authorization, rather than being tried for psychologically abusing a child.

Reporters should be skeptical because in some cases people are willfully feeding reporters inside details that are false to try to push a stock (or some other business interest). The sheer level of detail in The London Times's report on the false Microsoft Yahoo deal last weekend is mind-boggling. Those sorts of lies are embarassing and make reporters cautious.

Some reporters know their stuff and do in depth research, but some go into writing their pieces with an end goal in mind, looking to misquote you to drive home their point...asking leading questions and making you the focus of them. For example, I was asked about how I could use Google Knol for spamming. I responded with something like "I don't consider myself nefarious, but for sake of arguement lets say you or I were the nefarious type..." and that got quoted as "lets say I am the nefarious type."

Why do People Buy SEO?

SEO is Worth a Lot of Money

I gave a presentation at an investor conference and ended up charging somewhere around $1,000 a minute for the presentation.

I recently charged a CEO $300 for a 30 minute speech and hung up feeling guilty that I under-charged him. I taught them all sorts of advanced topics like conditional site structure alterations based on crawl information and traffic levels all other sorts of goodies. I estimate that call will add at least $1,000,000 of search traffic to his business if he executes on 50% of what I taught him.

Nobody Wants Average Rankings

While I have had well over 10,000 paying customers, not a single one of them has ever paid me with the goal of "rank them where they deserve to."

Everyone who has paid me a large sum of money (say 5 figures or more) wanted to rank better than they were, and in most cases (all but 1 so far) better than they would deserve to from an objective view of the web. And those who were already clear category leaders wanted to know how to create a second or third white labeled high ranking site.

Search Can be a Cheap Distribution Channel

If you are already paying for the cost structure of running a brick and mortar business, there is little incremental cost to gaining more organic search traffic...the medium is still exceptionally underpriced.

Search Exposure Builds Real Value

If you are one of 400 insurance brokers or real estate agents selling the same recycled stuff, then you don't want to rank where you deserve...even if you are number 12 out of 400 you are probably getting less than 1% of the potential traffic. That is pretty crappy relative to how well you would do with just a bit more effort.

A thin affiliate site with little to no editorial content was recently bought for $34 million. That site was not bought out because it was above average, but because it had above average rankings. The CEO even stated that they bought the site based largely on its search engine rankings.

Isn't SEO Manipulative?

As referenced above, most of the entire media ecosystem is heavily manipulated. Why? The intersection of 2 key points. ;)

• People want media for free.
• People need to make a living.

Many people who claim to be against manipulative SEO practices have no problem with being manipulative and lying with their public relations. Both have the same end goal of profit, but renting a link to try to rank one spot higher is nowhere near as toxic as lying is.

Even Search Engines Hire SEOs

Large media organizations like the NYT employ SEO tactics. Even search engines have internal SEO teams. Laura Lippay is the SEO program manager for Yahoo!. I know Microsoft has an SEO team because a couple years ago a headhunter contacted me wanting to hire me to work on that team.

If search engines employ SEO then you should too. Why not make your company rank as best it can?

Why Outing is Bad

For many webmasters profitability comes from leveraging new platforms along with creativity and innovation...often within the gray area where marketing strategies are net yet abused. But when a well known SEO outs something they are intentionally trying to make the search engine look stupid, forcing the search engineer's hands into banning something or making something 'not count'.

Want to Help Google Clean Up the Web?

Google Sells Ads to Spammers

Google sells ads that promote virtually anything. All a person needs to do to get exposure through their ad network is open up their wallet.

Eric Schmidt said that the internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives. Here is how you can make the web a better place! Anytime you see a Google AdWords/AdSense advertisement that does any of the following...

• makes a false claim
• promotes something that is illegal or immoral
• is published on a copy of stolen copyright work

make sure you file a Google spam report AND out it on your blog. Google needs more help cleaning up their ads than the organic search results (as the paid search algorithm is much less complex and is directly influenced by payment). That is, of course, unless Google likes promoting infidelity while cleaning up the web.

In a previous article, Baking SEO Into The Workflow, we took a look at the problems faced by in-house SEOs. Most of those problems occur because SEO forces a change in work process. Change - any change - is often met with resistance.

We received a lot of great feedback on that post, so we thought we'd delve a little deeper into this topic.

The Change Process

Change managers highlight three crucial factors in any change process:

• Start at the top
• Address the human side
• Approach change systematically

"Any significant transformation creates “people issues.” New leaders will be asked to step up, jobs will be changed, new skills and capabilities must be developed, and employees will be uncertain and resistant. Dealing with these issues on a reactive, case-by-case basis puts speed, morale, and results at risk. A formal approach for managing change — beginning with the leadership team and then engaging key stakeholders and leaders — should be developed early, and adapted often as change moves through the organization. This demands as much data collection and analysis, planning, and implementation discipline as does a redesign of strategy, systems, or processes.".

Let's take these ideas and apply them to the world of professional SEO.

Management Strategy

Start at the top.

Management buy in is also the most crucial element. Without their support, it's unlikely you'll get anything else done at the lower levels. That's why change processes start at the top. So, how specifically does one approach getting management on-side?

Analysis

First, do a complete audit of the existing website and web strategy, and make a list of the problem areas that need changing. Order this list in terms of importance. i.e. crucial changes, nice to have, phase one, phase two, etc. Also make a note of how easy, or how difficult, each item is to implement. Think of it as a proposal, which is really what it is. This type of analysis will show that you're serious, organized and thorough.

Management are going to be looking for you to deliver more benefit than it costs to provide that benefit. If you can show you'll achieve this, you're half way there.

Sell It

Use factors such as competitive advantage and disadvantage. Show them where their competitors - specifically their SEO savvy competitors - rank. Estimate the level of search engine traffic their competitors receive.

Create value propositions. Try to get management to place a value on each visitor. What is the opportunity to get in-front of a customer worth to them? How much does it cost to get that same attention via existing channels, such as direct marketing, print, radio or television advertising? Compare this with the cost of implementing your strategy. Show them how they can both save money, and get more return.

Managers also want to get some idea of the following factors:

• What is the cost?
• What is the time to delivery?
• What should your performance metrics/kpi be?

Be prepared to answer such questions.

Use case studies. Show before and after situations where seo has made a remarkable difference. Something that has been tried and proven carries less risk than the new and different. Remember, SEO is probably going to sound new and different to all but the most web savvy organizations.

Get management to commit to your strategy on a point by point basis. Insist that you'll only be able to deliver outcomes if this strategy is followed. Outline the risks of removing any element.

This achieves two things: it gets them to commit to your course of action. They'll back you if you receive push back from designers, developers and writers. Secondly, it provides a get out of jail free card. If you miss KPIs because you couldn't achieve all of the strategy i.e. the other areas pushed back, you can show them why you couldn't deliver.

The Human Side

You go into a meeting.

There is one of you, there is a small team of designers, and there's a manager who thinks he needs SEO, but doesn't have an understanding of what is actually involved. So how do you tell them that their strategy is all wrong, to stop building everything in Flash, and start designing to your exact specifications?

You could use the direct approach: "Listen up! Your strategy is all wrong, stop building everything in Flash, and start designing to my exact specifications!" A tough road, but if your daddy owns the company - certainly worth a shot :)

More likely, however, the design team has more authority than the SEO, especially if you're new to the job.

Softly Softly, Catchee Monkey

There's an apt British phrase: "Softly Softly, Catchee Monkey".

It means play it gently and carefully in order to achieve the outcome you seek.

If you lack sufficient authority to get your way on all decisions, as is the case with most SEOs who work within large organizations, then the softly, softly approach might be more likely to produce results than the my-way-or-the-highway approach.

Consider how people react to change. How did you feel when you were forced to adapt to change? Empathy goes a long way.

For example, try putting yourself in the designers shoes.

She may have graduated from a graphic design course. During her years of study, SEO wasn't mentioned once. She has been working as a web designer for a few years, and she's acutely aware that web design is a very poor second cousin to print design. In print, the designer has free reign, and can specify everything to their exact requirements. The colors, the size, the fonts, the look and feel.

On the web, however, she has to think about how her design is going to display on different screen sizes, how the colors are going to look on various monitors, and how different browsers are going to render the layout. She has to incorporate widgets and forms from the developers. She's got to present to management in a few weeks time. The top manager, who controls her bonus, likes to be wowed by cool, cutting edge designs. She jumping through all these crazy hoops that get in the way of her graphic vision.

Then in walks this new SEO guy and demands she retool the site so a search engine spider can see it.

If there's a fan in the office, it will soon be covered in something unpleasant.

How To Make SEO Fit In

One way is to not do anything.

Not every battle is worth winning. For example, lets say you're working in house at an agency, and the work is for an external client. The client wants a spectacular site, because he wants to impress his colleges and boss. The designer is happy to design it, because she might win an award. The client hasn't specified seo as a delivery requirement, as the clients customers usually find them by word of mouth, not via search engines. Is SEO really important here?

No, it's not.

The best approach, when SEO comes late in the piece, might be to inform the manager in charge of delivery that this site is unlikely to receive much in the way of traffic from search engines in it's existing form. You could specify changes, but is that really in the best interests of everyone? Does the cost/benefit stack up at this late stage?

Insist the person with the authority makes that call. If the client comes back latter and wants to know why their site isn't showing up in search engines, you can refer back to the meeting. Most intelligent people will come to their own conclusions that their process needs to change.

But lets say SEO is something the client wants, but is not knowledgeable enough to know that their web strategy won't deliver it.

If you're experiencing a lot of resistance, try splitting the work into phases. Make phase one low impact. If it's a Flash site, or some other major SEO headache, how about suggesting they add a print -friendly version of the site, with a link from the home page?

The designer will probably go for it, because in her head, the only people likely to see a print version are those who have already seen her flash version. They are simply choosing to print it out. You know better, of course. This is the version search visitors will see. Once these pages start drawing traffic, you then have some leverage for Phase Two. You've demonstrated the power of SEO, and if only they did more of what you request, then they'll get more search visitors.

Their call.

Once you can demonstrate proof of concept, you're on track to winning the war.

Natural Synergies

In my earlier article, I recommended that you keep a look out for natural synergies. Thankfully, not all designers are flash loving design heads. Web design trends have, thankfully, moved away from graphic-heavy approaches, and have moved towards providing ease of use and utility.

Suggest incorporating SEO-friendly elements that are also design elements. Examples include breadcrumb navigation, site organization and hierarchy, most important pages closest to the front, duplicate navigation schemes if the main navigation scheme is uncrawlable, and using Google site maps. None of these elements interfere with look and feel too much.

Attend the meetings where they map out site structure. If the structure is designed with SEO in mind, a lot of other elements fall naturally into place. Emphasize the fact you need to be brought in early, not late, on site design decisions.

Content Writers

In the web industry, content writers are most likely to slot into one of two schools of thought.

One is journalism. Journalism often consists of a top down approach, or inverted pyramid.

"The "pyramid" can also be drawn as a triangle. The triangle's broad base at the top of the figure represents the most substantial, interesting, and important information the writer means to convey. The triangle's orientation is meant to illustrate that this kind of material should head the article, while the tapered lower portion illustrates that other material should follow in order of diminishing importance"

The second is copy writing. Copy writing differs from journalistic styles in that the writing is crafted to elicit a specific response from the reader, rather than to simply inform. There is often a specific objective the copywriter needs to fulfill, and every word is likely to be carefully deliberated over.

Legal

A side complication is legal. Lawyers, as a profession, tend to be risk adverse. Their job, in this context, is to prevent libelous, defamatory, or untruthful copy from being published, which could expose the the company to financial risk.

There's no simple advice I can give on how to get around legal. They carry a lot of weight. Just be aware of the legal requirement, and keep in mind that the "aggressive link baiting technique" you had planned might not be an appropriate strategy for this particular company ;)

Will It Blend?

The easiest road is with the journalists. They are trying to answer the questions Who,' 'when', 'where', 'what' and 'how' . Try to frame your SEO requests in this language.

For example., say if your keyword term is "buy house in San Francisco". A reporter could work this into his copy by asking the "what" question, s in "what is happening?" e.g. "Recently, people looking to buy a house in San Francisco have had to contend with...." etc etc.

This is very much an on-going education process, but it helps if you're already talking their language. Provide them a list of keywords, and specific examples of how they can be incorporated into the article formats they already use. Writers might actually like you feeding them article and story topics. It makes their task a little easier. Try to think of ways you can frame your keyword research as article topic suggestions, or article research.

In terms of structure, try and devise templates that encourage SEO friendly formats i.e. short paragraphs with big headings to break up the copy. You could also argue this increases readability and usability.

Have designers and developers code the templates so related articles are suggested automatically. Include a related articles section. Build the SEO right into the article structure, so that a lot of the SEO happens without the writer having to think about it.

Guidelines For Developers

Developers are used to working to guidelines and specifications, so try and work SEO requirements into these documents.

Here's a sample guideline. There is some overlap here with design, so split them up accordingly:

1. Use descriptive file names. i.e. dog.jpg, as opposed to image568765.jpg.
2. Include title and meta description tag in all templates. Auto - populate fields from teh templates i.e. document title - where no over-ride exists.
3. Use CSS to control font sizes, particularly header tags.
4. Links should, wherever possible, include keywords
5. Titles should use text, as opposed to graphics.
6. Specify an alt tag for images
7. Create a Google Site Map
8. Use the following URL format: domain/page-title-name
9. Avoid frames. If using frames, use the the noframes tag
10. Create a custom 404 page that links to the site's main pages, or sitemap.

I'm sure there are plenty of other rules you can think of, and depending on how co-operative the developer is, there is a lot more detail you could go into. I find that the shorter the checklist, the more likely developers are to incorporate the changes required. Long lists just create headaches, so often go ignored.

Make sure they do the important things, and don't sweat the small stuff. At least, not in your first week!

Real Life

In real life, things are never this simple.

Humans are messy and complicated creatures, so there are few hard and fast rules, nor is there a prescription you can follow. Be flexible. Be aware. Communicate. A lot. Hopefully, the ideas above will help you formulate your own approach.

You're not alone. Most professional SEOs know exactly what you're going through :)

Related Reading

• John Fisher's Transition Curve - a look at the stages of personal transition when faced with change.
• John Fisher's Transition Curve - Baking SEO Into The Company Workflow & Culture
• The Seven Dynamics Of Change - how to address employee reactions to change

The holiday season is almost upon us.

In fact, it started in July.

More on that shortly.

Part of planning a SEO campaign, especially for anyone involved in B2C retail, is to optimize with holiday events in mind. Obviously, gift giving is a tradition that no retailer can miss out on, so SEO campaigns for the holiday season are often planned and executed well in advance.

Let's take a look at some of the keywords and trends associated with the upcoming holiday season, and look at a few strategies you can adopt in order to cash in.

1. Historical Research

It is fascinating to look at keyword trends, especially around this time of year. Go to Google Trends, and flip the date back to December last year.

Notice any patterns?

For starters, a lot of people are looking for recipes. If you have a food oriented site, include a section focused on preparing common Christmas meals.

People are also looking for stores and restaurants open on Christmas Day. Think about other holiday specific information you can include to capture this type of search traffic.

The other interesting thing to note is that people are still in the mood for shopping on Christmas day. Either they're looking forward to the after Christmas sales, they're looking for something to do, or they're looking for tunes to put on their shiny new Ipod. Think about how the nature of shopping changes on Christmas day, and the few days following, which should help you earn a bit more revenue than your competitors.

Here's an interesting one:

Calendar queries rise from Christmas day onwards, and peak in early January. A last minute purchase, obviously.

2. Gift Lists

Here are few examples of gift lists.

Amazon's Holiday Customer Review Team
Twelve Good, Cheap Christmas Gift Ideas
Geeks Bearing Gifts

Notice how these types of pages pretty much optimize themselves. You can create all sorts of gift lists. Gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for mothers, budget gift ideas, etc, etc. It is a good idea to personalize the list. Add a human touch, such as a photo, or commentary, or both.

Search on those terms in Google's keyword suggestion tool, and you'll find a wealth of profitable terms and ideas for lists.

For example:

gift ideas for guys
gift ideas for geeks
christmas gift basket ideas
gift ideas for christmas
gift ideas for dad
cheap christmas gifts
unique gifts
corporate christmas gifts
romantic christmas gift
unusual christmas gift
unique christmas presents

Often, people don't know exactly what to buy. They're hunting around for ideas. Organized gift lists solve a genuine problem, and they're a great addition to your SEO campaign. They can convert very well, because the buyer intent is closely aligned with the sales process. Think about the sales funnel and incorporate the hunting stage - not just the buying stage - into your site.

Use sales data to help you decide on your list. What are the most popular and/or high margin products? Can you group these together into the type of list people search for? Link to these lists from prominent pages, like your home page, and try to get links from other sites. This will help drive sales, increase Page Rank, and rankings. And not just for this year - hopefully for many years to come. Can you come up with the definitive Christmas list for "gift ideas for *insert term here*"? You can swap out the products each year.

3. Start Early

If you're only just thinking about SEO for this holiday season, you're probably left your run a little too late. In fact, anyone who didn't have their campaign good to go by July probably left it a little late.

Check out this chart:

Year after year, people start as early as July on their Christmas shopping! They really start to go for it in October and November.

Start planning early for next year :)

4. It Isn't About Brand, It's About The Offer

Because Christmas has a set deadline, and a lot of people leave things until the last minute, brand is the last thing on people's mind. They're focused on solving a problem.

At times such as these, the offer is the most important thing. Your copy should reflect this. This may mean rewriting some pages, or adding new pages that specifically target this time of year.

Be sure to include delivery times, and assure people that their gifts will arrive in time, else they'll be going to your competitors who do emphasize this point.

5. Coupon Codes & Discounts

There was a time when retailers didn't offer sales and discounts during their most profitable time of year, but there's too much competition these days. People will respond to discounts and coupons, same as they do at other times, so try to work them in. Given we're in a recession, and people are likely to be feeling the pinch, discounts and incentives will be especially important this year.

Check out keywords relating to:

bargain christmas gifts
cheap christmas gifts
cheap christmas gift ideas
christmas coupons
sale christmas

etc....

Speaking of which, and since Aarons clearly already in the holiday mood, we are offering all SEOBook readers $25 off their first month's subscription fees by subscribing to SEO Book through this link.

First in, best dressed. :)

6. Seasonal Imagery & Details

Stores are awash with Christmas imagery, and with good reason. It compels people to spend. If you're selling gifts direct to the public, you should do likewise.

Test pages, using PPC, as early as July. Does the Christmas imagery increase conversion rates? What wording and topics produce better conversion rates at this time of year, compared to other times? Feed this data through into your SEO campaign.

The advantage you have over PPC is that PPC bid prices are going to go higher and higher as Christmas day approaches, whilst your bid price remains the same. Zero.

You just need to prepare well in advance.

Got Any Cool Holiday SEO Tactics?

Share 'em below :)

When I was about 1 year into the field of SEO my friend brought me over to his parent's house for a winter break for a few days. His dad is a genius (in about every way possible) and worked at the time as an archivist that digitized old content collections for media companies. I told him of what I did (SEO) and he told that I should learn XSLT, and that Google would soon kill the field of SEO.

The Anarchist

I believed just the opposite...that SEO was an extension of marketing (which will only increase in demand as the web grows older), and that as Google's profits grew, they would use them to forge partnerships with content creators and build their own mini-web to supplement the greater web and give themselves a second bite at monetizing searchers. In the past few years Google added news results to their organic search results, bought YouTube, digitized a ton of books, settled a publisher and author lawsuit with books, created a books API, created Google Maps (and local), created Google Earth, created Google Maps, created Google Local, and Google just purchased 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages from PaperofRedord.com.

So far I am winning that bet, but only because I view SEO as an extension of marketing and have aggressively re-invested profits toward growth...which got me to thinking of publishing trends that will grow in the years to come.

Publishing truths for the digital age

• Many forms of scams and spam will look so much like real information that most people will not be able to distinguish between them.
• The web has a deep and rich memory. But most people's use of it will remain shallow.
• As the world gets more complex, we will increasingly question authority and seek out experts to turn to for alternative view points and advice.
• We will subscribe to niche channels that largely match our biases and worldview. Information retrieval tools (search engines), information consumption tools (feed readers), and the social structure of the web (links, comments, how we use language) will further create a self-fulfilling prophecy on this front.
• Curiosity and the ease of publishing will turn a half billion people into experts connected to a passionate audience.
• Amongst that competition, there will always be an unquenchable demand for marketing, branding, and public relations.
• If you sell information, accessibility and marketing will matter much more than being deep and/or factually correct.
• Piracy is a cheap distribution channel.
• The tightness of a social network will be far more important than its raw size.
• It is easier to build a large profitable revenue stream selling what is new rather than selling what is old.
• Information without personalization and context will increasingly become commoditized. The average web page will be worth less than a cent unless there is a strong editorial voice associated with it and/or there are explicit votes for it.

Your Turn

What do you see changing as the web ages and grows?

While it focuses on non-profits, much of the advice could apply to just about any website. We would love to get your feedback on it. If you find it useful or know some charities that might like it, please share. Thanks to Dominic Mapstone for early feedback and advice. :)

When you are a default category leader you no longer compete against others in your category. You compete against other categories. Google and Amazon.com understand that. Microsoft maybe. eBay no.

eBay could have used the last decade to create communities around buying, selling, and collecting...taking a slice of any transaction as they turn buyers to sellers or sellers to buyers.

• They could have offered awards for collector of the month, seller of the month, buyer of the month, and done interviews with the winners.
• They could have a section called deal hunting where they offer tips on how to find the best deals.
• They could have a section called "good as new" where people talk where people talk about old items that are a bargain, and in some cases even better than new.
• They could have allowed sellers and buyers to build editorial communities and collections on the eBay site. Control the conversation and control commerce.
• What if eBay could have got you to tag just about everything you owned, and then told you roughly what it was worth (based on recent transaction data) and had you put a buy it now price on it? CueCat was a failure, but eBay has a much better platform to market such a device on.

Instead they did nothing. They lost a decade to improvements in search, Amazon.com, open source software, blogs, and the rest of the web.

Rather than improving their network feedback mechanism and making a deeper network, the new eBay strategy is to try to be more like Amazon, but that won't work. While eBay spent a decade alienating buyers and sellers (with no innovation, shifting fees, encouraging a market lemons, etc.), Amazon was off building user loyalty. And now Amazon is out working public relations with a holiday customer review team and extending their platform in new dimensions - offering digital downloads, the Kindle, selling utility computing, and selling their shopping platform.

Staying competitive is more of a mindset than an event. The decay happens long before it impacts revenue. And by the time it impacts revenue there isn't a lot of time to fix things.

A business model that contains subtle white lies that are familiar and easy to like is often far more profitable than a business model built around attempting to change people's identities. This is precisely why so many business models are built around for Christians, for bloggers, or for charities.

As an entrepreneur it is worth considering the above quote when thinking about new business models, new platforms, new formats, and new algorithms. You could spend all your time trying to prove your vision of the truth, or modify it slightly so that others are willing to do the work for you. Your choice. :)

Start with a socially active core that identifies with what you have to offer and give them the tools to help spread your message.

Blendtec - Will It Blend?

One of my personal favourites; what was the best way for Blendtec to demonstrate the might of their blenders?;nbsp; Gun for product placement in films?;nbsp; Leverage food channels?;nbsp; No, all they needed to do was blend an iPod, a broom, golf balls and a multitude of other things.;nbsp; This campaign attracted visitors like no other - people loved watching sturdy/expensive items turned to dust by this blender.;nbsp; On Youtube alone the iPhone blending attracted nearly 6million visitors, the iPod attracted nearly 6 million too, 3million for a bag of marbles - you get the idea.;nbsp; Sales of Blendtec blenders increased by something like 800% because of this cheap yet moreish campaign.;nbsp; Pure genius.;nbsp; Visit Will It Blend?

Honda - The Accord ;quot;Cogs;quot;

I consider Honda's marketing team to be amongst the best in the world because they frequently deliver rememberable, instantly recognisable advertising.;nbsp; This advert that they created for the new Honda Accord became iconic; it didn't need to be subtle in it's intentions, the sheer scope of what they accomplished ensured that people were forwarding this advert to each other across the entire Internet.;nbsp; It was shown on TV's worldwide and implied that if Honda could go into this much detail with their advertising, the car must be exceptionally well made.;nbsp; Which they were. ;nbsp;

Guitar Hero - Bike Hero

Only yesterday [http://www.seopher.com/articles/marketing_stunt_of_the_week_bike_hero] I awarded this 'marketing stunt of the week' because the scope of what was achieved here is just excellent.;nbsp; It was completely unbranded and uploaded as if someone had gone out and done it - it showed a guy using his pushbike as a guitar-hero controller and cycling his way around a track they'd drawn around his neighbourhood.;nbsp; He had to hit the right notes at the right time...;nbsp; It's really quite inspiring to watch.;nbsp; All this video does is raise awareness of Guitar Hero in a positive light, but done in such a clever way that it's indistinguishable from normal user-generated content.;nbsp; It wasn't until someone blew the whistle that it was flagged as viral marketing.

Burger King - Subservient Chicken

Nike - Ronaldinho Golden Boots

This campaign was unquestionably created by Nike, so heavy the branding and obvious it's intentions; yet it had so many admirers just to see the unhuman skills shown by Ronaldinho.;nbsp; Clearly it was fake yet it was done so well that no one could conclusively prove it was.;nbsp; Why was it good?;nbsp; It hinted that by buying Nike boots you too could develop inhuman skill, yet at the same time it was done in a way that made you want to show your friends.;nbsp; That's good viral marketing.

Transport for London - Do The Test

Transport for London created this absolutely astonishing piece of viral video; you're challenged to keep an eye on the video and count how many times the team in white pass the basketball.;nbsp; At the end of the video a new dimension is introduced that forces you to re-watch it - the message this video promotes is massively important and they conveyed it brilliantly.;nbsp; This is a video that I personally sent to 10+ of my friends because it had the perfect combination of surprise and competitiveness to make it viral.;nbsp; Visit Do The Test. ;nbsp;

Cadburys - In the Air Tonight Gorilla

This is a campaign that didn't quite resonate with me, but it did with everyone else.;nbsp; A very simple advert created for TV showed a gorilla sitting behind a drum kit listening to Phil Collins' ;quot;In the Air Tonight;quot;, upon reaching that famous drumming moment the gorilla starts playing the instrument.;nbsp; I didn't understand quite why this advert had such appeal but it really did - certainly amongst children and those 30+.;nbsp; The advert had a very strong presence online and raised brand awareness, clearly delivering a good ROI because this video can't have cost much to make.

Jack Links Beef Jerky - Messin with Sasquatch

A fairly simple premise but executed in a tidy way - short videos showing guys messing with Sasquatch.;nbsp; Nothing overly amazing about these videos but they were mildly amusing and perfectly forwardable and with a few million views on Youtube alone shows that the campaign took off pretty well.;nbsp; While the videos don't have the creativity or vision of heavyweights such as Honda, the fact that I knew the product solely because of the viral campaign shows it works (they're not sold here in the UK - jerky isn't popular at all).;nbsp; Visit Messin' With Sasquatch.

Honda - Difficult is Worth Doing

Honda have the best marketing team in the world (in my eyes) and this campaign showed quite how much effort they put into their advertising.;nbsp; With a slow lead-up for a week or two on TV (small snippets explaining Honda were going to be doing something) they then went all out and broadcast a live advert with choreographed sky-diving.;nbsp; This wasn't quite as viral as their ;quot;cogs;quot; campaign but it showed how much time and effort they're willing to put into their advertising and by proxy, how much time and effort goes into their products.;nbsp; It didn't matter that they didn't advertise the fact that they sell cars, because Honda no longer need to tell people what they do.;nbsp; They just need to continue to prove how good they are at doing it. Watch the video here.

• this tool is free
• Google has more search data than Compete.com does
• this shows bid prices and search volume estimates next to keywords (like the Google Traffic Estimator)
• this shows your current page titles and keywords
• this shows the % of organic and paid traffic going to a URL

For any keyword, the Google Search-based Keyword Tool will show up to 800 related keywords with cost and search volume estimates. This tool also works to show you 100 keywords related to a site, and if you own a website they will show you thousands of keywords that they think you could bid on which are not already in your account. In addition they show your search share of voice (via ads and organic search results) for keywords. This data is easy to export using a handy export button.

There are a variety of cool extra filters that can be applied on this tool, including...

• minimum or maximum search volumes

• bid price range
• low, medium, or high competition
• keyword in URL
• combining URL and keywords as filters
• keyword + general category
• negative keywords

Using a variety of different combinations for these filters you can see many different sets of 800 keywords even within the same subset. Export these different lists a variety of times and you can quickly build a list of thousands of high value keywords.

If you are a paying subscriber, this thread has a few more tips for how to get the most out of this tool.

Danny Sullivan whinges about all the flavors of spam killing the utility of the web.

John Andrews on the absurdity of calling affiliate links spam.

Slightly Shady SEO looks at Google's user data empire.

Andrew Goodman on why you have to target a tight niche to build a community. He also highlighted that display ads might be getting the credit they deserve, using a fun analogy:

Alexander Hamilton's face is on every $10 bill, but his brand isn't doing so hot. Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, has a strong brand, and he's only on the 2, and there are hardly any of those in circulation. What is a fair CPM rate for either gentleman to pay for this type of exposure?

Seth highlights that connecting people is the easiest way to make money online.

Business.com offers SEO Book members a $50 off coupon when they submit a site to the Business.com directory.

SEO Black Hat is hosting another high level SEO conference, in Rio De Janerio.

At WembasterWorld Pubcon Brent D Payne mentioned that if you were covered in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, or any Tribune Interactive publication, but were not linked to, then you can send him a tweet on Twitter and he will try to get your link added.

Stuntdubl announced he is doing social media consulting again. He is probably amongst the top 3 social media marketers, along with Brent Csutoras and Christopher Angus.

Joost de Valk created a cool Mint Pepper to show Technorati backlinks.

Microsoft search may re-brand as Kumo. They would be better off buying Ask.com.

Here are some funny SEO comics.

Interviews & Meta-Me

I wrote a guest column for Search Engine Land about how using a consistent site structure helps build your SEO momentum.

I did a couple interviews recently. If interested, here is on on GottaQuirk, and another on PalatnikFactor.

I was also interviewed in the recently published book Blog Blazers. I have a couple copies of the book to give away...if you want one just comment below...first come first served :)

The video shows a teenager using his bike as a Guitar Hero controller, with LED's on the handlebars indicating what notes he should be hitting. He then rides around a mammoth Guitar Hero circuit with the entire track drawn on the ground. It's hard to imagine quite how long this must have taken to A) set up and B) film.

The production is excellent; it's perfectly plausible that someone would do this in their free time and that's where most viral campaigns fail. This is an epic stunt pulled off exceptionally well and for that, Guitar Hero is my marketing stunt of the week.

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Why use OpenX?

My reason is one shared by many I'm sure.;nbsp; Because I don't use Wordpress, Drupal or any other blogging platform (I use a custom built one), I'm not using sexy little plugins developed by others to manage my advertising.;nbsp; Therefore my 125x125 banners were just entered into an included file, wrapped by a comment telling me when to remove it.;nbsp; Obviously this meant I was forever forgetting to remove banners when the 30 days had expired.;nbsp; More-over, I had no idea how many clicks these banners were getting or anything.;nbsp; OpenX gives you the level of control to fix these problems. ;nbsp;

Incidentily, OpenX is tracking around 900,000,000 banner impressions every day, with somewhere between 5,000,000 and 7,500,000 banner clicks each day also tracked.;nbsp; Make no mistake, it's big business.

Banner Control

You can upload banners and assign them to regions; you can then specify a set of rules to govern when and how this banner is to be shown.;nbsp; You can limit the hours of the day, the days of the week, the number of impressions and which dates you wish the banner to show.;nbsp; For the average fixed-rate advertiser this is handy because I can upload a banner and set it to display for 30 days - when those 30 days are up, it will automatically stop showing it.;nbsp;

However, for those users who work on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions), you can limit banners to a certain number of impressions (if the advertiser pays for 10,000 impressions, you can ensure it's no longer displayed when that limit is reached).;nbsp; As an extension to this, you can limit the impressions per day, so if a user has paid for 30 days but you've caveated that with a maximum of 1,000 impressions a day; OpenX can accommodate this too.

Statistics and Reporting

Another key reason for using OpenX is for the analytical side.;nbsp; It'll tell you how many impressions each banner has received, how many clicks it's had and obviously your CTR (click through rate).;nbsp; This will help you optimise your advertising and ensure you're getting the best performance out of your adverts.;nbsp; You can compare statistics for any given day against any other - think Google Analytics for banners - meaning you can see how the banner has performed day-on-day over a custom defined period.;nbsp; This is also crucial for working out whether you're increasing the CTR or not.

Hierarchical Banners

Installation

Aesthetics

Usability

Conclusion

Moving forwards with OpenX Market