But he's more than that. He's open and honest, inquisitive, practical and smart.

In March you had about 16K followers and follow about as many yourself. Now, almost 4 months later, you have 27K followers (following 25K) and if you keep going at this rate, you'll pass 43K by the end of the year.

What's your reason to follow so many people?

To me, Twitter is about

1. Conversations
2. Networking opportunities
3. Media reach
4. Fun

To do all of those, you need someone to see your tweets. The more people who see your tweets, the more response you get, and the more opportunities there are. It's all about interaction. But only a certain percentage of your followers are watching at any one time. And if you have diverse interests and expertises like me, not everyone will be interested in every tweet. The more followers you have, the more chance there is that you'll get a response to every tweet.

Since I'm not a celebrity, I can't just gain tens of thousands of followers based on other media exposure. I have to do it by following people. This year, as I predicted, has been the Invasion of Twitter by Celebrities. At one time I was a top 100 twitterer on hubspot and twinfluence. Not anymore!

Regardless, with about 20k followers, I can get 100-500 clicks on a tweeted link, depending on retweets. You can't tell me that would be the same number with 1k followers or 100k followers. Ok, you can tell me but I won't believe you.

You don't seem to follow back 1:1 … What's the difference there? Bots?

I don't autofollow back because I don't want to end up following bots of questionable repute. I follow people who talk with me or retweet me, but I'm not perfect- I miss some people. But they can call me out at anytime and I'll follow them.

What do you use for contact management; the things we typically track in CRM? And if you don't use any, how do you "wing it"?

You mean how do I organize responding to people on Twitter? I don't. LOL. I tweet and monitor mentions of me and I reply. Sometimes I check in on somebody I haven't heard from in a while and respond to one of their tweets.

Your TweetStats show you prefer the web interface. I was surprised. I more or less expected the hardest choice for a media maven like you to be between TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. Why the web?

I don't like desktop apps that monopolize system resources. At least one of the two you mentioned used to have problems with that and I haven't checked back. One of them I believe had an API-related limit. But mainly, I don't see anything crucial missing from Twitter.com… retweeting is easy. I'm quick with the copy and paste. I'm not seeing what the big advantage is of using those apps- that could be neglect on my part. But obviously, if you can do what I do without them, do you really need them?

I used to always have search.twitter.com open to monitor my name and other accounts (@soulpossum @danishpunkrock @tweetROI @momidlike2tweet etc.) but search.twitter starting having problems showing new tweets, at least in Chrome, and Twitter.com added the @briancarter mentions tab, so I'm cool with that.

Sometimes I tweet from HootSuite. If I participate in a chat like #GNO I might use TweetGrid, but that's about it.

According to those same stats you tweeted a lot at the end of 2008 (1500-2000 tweets/month) to go back to moderate to medium amounts (500-800) again afterwards. What's up with that?

Actually that might be skewed by not tweeting much at all in early 2009. I was investing my energies in other things like TweetROI. I'm sure sometime this year I'll tweet that much again.

In the latter half of 2008 I was speaking at conferences and traveling a lot, and that gave me a lot of in-between times to tweet. When you're traveling alone, tweeting provides a sense of connection. Taking photos and sending them to twitpic with funny captions is one of my favorite pastimes- that happens more when I travel.

Your master piece The 6 Spheres of Social Media Marketing is a pretty streamlined conversion process going all the way from "anyone" to "customer". When we're following @briancarter are we seeing that process in action?

LOL I haven't always been that intentional on twitter for myself. But you might be onto something…

In the outer three spheres (beyond, engagement, SM lists), I'm monitoring conversations on keywords that concern me and following those people and possibly replying to them. I have gotten more intentional lately about staying current with certain friends, industry peers, and journalists.

LOL now that I'm evangelizing TweetROI, I have to care about who blogs about social media and so on, and just hope I didn't piss them off at some point with one of my bad jokes or snarky comments. Those people are more on my radar to read and reply to.

I talk to some of my closer SM contacts more privately; via DM, IM, or email. That's definitely true of the people I've met in person. Once I've met someone IRL, it's less likely that you're seeing my relationship with them in public @replies.

In the other three spheres, I don't do a heck of a lot- It's not like I'm a freelancer who needs to win agency business- that stuff goes through Fuel salespeople and account managers. However, people I've created relationships with have fed us business… Hmm, Ruud, you're helping me realize I've left a few things out of my 6 spheres! I had a feeling there would be more corollary stuff to write on that. LOL now you're definitely getting some new posts.

In that piece you write that you need to keep the end in mind and that that end should be making you money; "no money" equals "get another job". What's the goal, the end in mind, for @briancarter?>

Right now, I have a number of goals. For Fuel Interactive, we're building business, growing my department, getting more clients, improving our business and optimization processes, and so on. My goals are to build and improve Fuel, train and grow experts and leaders, and push the search and social media industries forward. I believe we are the vanguard of the new advertising and marketing industry, and we should lead in the trends toward greater accountability and ROI. I'd like to see a change in focus in traditional media like AdAge and OMMA. That would be nice.

For TweetROI, we want to be one of the top players in the paid tweeting industry. I'm going to help grow that industry, evangelize our service, and drive enhancements to the service. I also am going to watchguard quality- I'm as concerned as anyone about paid tweeting reducing conversation quality or spammers corrupting the great social "party" we've all been having. I'll do my best to make sure relationships stay front and center. One goal is to help Twitterers make money while keeping their authenticity and dignity. The other is to make Twitter a practical marketing channel for businesses of all sizes.

And the other thing is my sense of humor. I'm constantly looking for innovative ways to make people laugh. I'm not a touring stand up comedian, so I have to be more creative. I did the first Twitter stand up comedy act, tweeting my jokes for a couple hours back in Octover 2008. I've taken my comic characters like Larry Possum to YouTube, to mom-focused tweetups, and to charity efforts. We're actually pitching Larry Possum as a celebrity hotel reviewer to one of our clients right now. And I take my funny photos and twitpic them. Increasing people's joy through comedy is one of my serious goals.

When I see growing opportunities like (in sequence) blogging, video, social … mobile of course (left on the table by tons, still) … I see that the first wave of people who benefit most from it are those who have a first-line involvement. The line between them and the business is very short; often they are the business. The further away you get from the money, the more it becomes a service which will attempt to maximize revenue by going for the lowest possible cost per action. Zappos wouldn't be Zappos on Twitter had Tony Hsieh gone for "lowest possible cost".

How do you propose a business quantifies and judges its investment in social media? Should they go beyond "employee cost per hour vs. directly contributable conversion"?

Has anyone really measured what Zappos has gotten from Twitter? Certainly loads of backlinks and free press. I wonder how much revenue that was for them. But you're right, a lot of people get attention for being the first, or the most, and it's not repeatable. So you either have to follow proven strategies and tactics and you DO care about your cost and KPI, or you decide to be a crazy innovator. Not everyone can be Zappos because not every CEO is or needs to be Tony.

As far as attribution goes, I work a lot with PPC which is one of the easiest channels to track ROI in, but from what I've seen, at least 10% of the value isn't tracked, and possibly much more- there's the effects of PPC on other channels, and the complexity of the sales cycle and multiple touchpoints. I believe that accountability in advertising is great, but until we have better analytics, we have to take it with a grain of salt and keep using common sense.

PR and branding have always had an effect, but we can't measure it easily. Social media efforts are somewhere in between- it's more measurable than PR and it provides more value than just direct sales revenue. When you figure out how to measure improvements in brand affinity and the effect of one advertising channel (among multiple touchpoints) on customer lifetime value, let me know.

The answer is, there's not a clear answer yet. In fact, I think analytics-based advertising runs into the same larger issues that all science does: no matter what we do, we can't predict everything, we can't know everything, we can't understand all causes and effects. The environment is constantly changing. The circumstances of something that worked this year might not be present next year. Successful marketing is a mix of inspiration, analytics, proven strategies, intuition, and common sense. You need marketing experts with experience who collaborate with clients because they often have insights about their business and customers that we just don't have data on or experience with.

If a company decides to outsource its blogging, its social media, its social networking … do they lose Voice?

Depends on how they do it. I always suggest that an agency can interview key employees and do all that prep, writing, and execution. That's one way to retain voice while outsourcing much of the initiative and work.

Seeing that many of these venues almost by definition become churn & burn services when in the hands of 3rd parties, what criteria should a company use to select one?

I believe the agency should be collaborating with you on strategy, goals, and KPI's. If you don't know what the end goal is of a tactic or platform, why are you doing it?

For example, I'm extremely skeptical of Facebook marketing- that's a long story. To me, getting followers or engagement on a social platform is great, but if it doesn't affect your end goals, what's the point? Maybe it's only providing branding or increasing brand affinity. But if you haven't even thought about how to get those FB fans to do something else for you, I'd call that neglecting strategy and losing potential value.

If your agency isn't asking questions, isn't creating something custom for you to leverage your particular advantages, you could probably have an intern do it for you.

Finally a few for the road Favorite email app?

Gmail.

Storing knowledge or information in …. ?

Excel.

Favorite time or attention management system?

My brain. I'm a bit ADD and I don't resist that. I use to-do lists, but many things are fluid. Priorities and possibilities change quickly when you work in teams. I also go with my gut a lot. I'm naturally analytical, so I used to overcomplicate my self-organization. Not anymore. I'll send you a picture of my desk, for this part… LOL.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Ruud Questions: Brian Carter

I'm talking with Paul Wylie to get another angle on business-driven blogging.

Initially blogging was very personal. Now blogging can also take the form of reporting. For a business, for a company, which considers blogging, what angle should they pursue?

Business blogging is a slippery slope each company must fully understand the complexities involved before decided if their company wants to commit to blogging.

Not all companies are transparent enough to open their doors to the world. In todays business environment a company needs to communicate with their prospects, clients and business peers in near real time; blogging can be one way to do so.

Not everybody is a good writer or blogger. Egos can easily get in the way, especially when it belongs to somebody higher up. What is a good business strategy to decide who blogs when, what?

Your company must have a strategy and a clear way of implementing those strategies.

One main concern for any company is reputation management. The company ideally should have a media marketing team or at the least hire a consultant to set some guidelines. Then appoint a spokesperson to be the companies eyes and ears.

As far as when to blog I suggest starting with a post or two per week to get the feel of it and to prevent blog abandonment.

Make time in your scheduale to blog in a timely manner. If you have an editorial process in place then follow your guidelines. Before long you will look forward to writing that next blog post and not look upon blogging as thing you have to do.

How would you explain the benefits of blogging to a client?

Here is your chance to step up onto the soap-box and proclaim to the world just who you are and what you represent!

In todays marketplace you can ill afford not to take advantage of blogging. You don't have to look far; just see what your competitor is doing and it becomes pretty clear what the benefits are.

One, increase in traffic to your site which can equate to new customers.

Two, positioning your business as an authority in your business genre.

Three, an increase of links to your site which in turn may posiition you higher in the SERPS.

If you do not have a company blog you should seriously consider having one.

So do you think that business blogging is primarily for SEO?

My backgound is SEO so I am prone to the benefits of blogging for SEO benefits. However, in business the last thing you should be worried about is SEO.

Blogging is wonderful platform for you to engage, capture and convert your visitors. Imagine, the power of converting your visitors to become brand evangilists; passing your blog post to their friends, placing your RSS feed on their sites for their visitors so that they too can enjoy your postings…

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Ruud Questions: Paul Wylie on Blogging

@steveplunkett contacted me on Twitter to explain just how he disagreed with me [yes, see, you should be on Twitter too and follow @ruudhein as well -- you not only get to be hip & happening but also get to join the conversation and tell me just how wrong I am].

We soon took it off Twitter: there's no way you can limit Steve's replies to 140 characters. 140 character is his version of "hmmmm"….

You have some reservations about the stance I took in Doing Things The Right Way — or The Google Way (was: How To Lose Trust). What's your concern?

I think we are missing the big picture.

Google's main purpose is to provide it's searchers with the most relevant results in their search engine so they will come back and do more searches. Or click on PPC ads when the right stuff has not been organically optimized to pull up in the top 5 results.

I think the whole "nofollow" thing was started by some whiny SEO blogger anyways… it's not like Matt Cutts said.. "hey i know let's provide a kludge that goes against every other coding of "nofollow" and all accepted standards for the "rel=" programming directive…" nope.. unless I'm completely wrong.. the issue came up and a bunch of people suggested it or more like bitched and bitched and bitched until matt cutts tried to do something to appease them.. .. of course those are all the people who now, have lots of work to do to undo the suggestion.

I don't base my SEO strategy on links or following what every other SEO is doing so it never affected me.. I did think it was a bad idea and said so publicly at ScarySeo in October of last year.

Which is why I don't feel "betrayed" as you seem to, but i do understand your viewpoint. Google said "X" from Google's mouth and therefore it must be law so why did they change the law? I completely understand where you are coming from.

But…

Google is fluid and must remain fluid to fight off spammers, hackers and people who pollute the SERPs with poop.. Matt Cutts is a new thing.. I've been doing SEO since 1995 and I never had anyone to answer my questions on what works.. I just worked with some of the early people to test spam methods and spam blocking methods.. (webcrawler, GO, yahoo, ODP, etc)

How long has MattCutts been taking crap from whiny SEOs?

But i NEVER asked how to rank.. nor have I ever asked Matt Cutts for anything other than better service on the spam report, which he told me, i needed to associate my Gmail username with the report.. that's the closest thing of a hint I've ever asked for and I understand his answer.

It's my job as an SEO professional to figure out how to make my clients get qualified traffic and contribute to better results in google, it's also my job as a Google webmaster to report spam sites, i'm also not supposed to use automated queries on Google.. I don't..

How many SEOs report spam? How many SEOs use tools that bog down Google's server (or at least caused them to beef them up)? So Google is the enemy? the untrusted friend? How many SEOs are NOT Google's friend? This is where the trust issue starts to rub me the wrong way… I follow all the rules, i don't use automated queries to check rank, i go search manually or we have interns that search manually. Yes it takes way more time.. but i can say "my company adheres to Google webmaster guidelines" to a client and be very serious about it. But doesn't this FRIEND thing go both ways..???

If we're friends, doesn't that underscore the Trust issue?

Absolutely.. but If I was Matt Cutts, I'd be the minister of disinformation, I answer everything vague and when it fits the spam increases I'd put out something that would help me identify the spam and not tell anyone what it was used for.. (i.e. nofollow)

I think you have to look at the nature of the man's job.. his job is.. "Google Spam Team"???? Hello? I think he is too nice.. Also, if I'm DJ'ing in a club and you want me to play a song that will clear the dance floor, you may be my best friend.. but I won't be playing it. Some people might get upset I was their "friend" but wouldn't play their song, the smarter ones would figure out, "it would kill the dance floor, so he couldn't"

I agree that Google isn't the enemy. It's not that black-or-white. Somebody somewhere mishandled proper communication.

To quote, I want you to apologize.

I think that's just it… let me hypothesize a few things for a moment..

a. let's pretend google had a spam problem on blogger blogs, let's assume they created nofollow to deal with it.

b. let's pretend a bunch of whiny SEOs bitched and didn't see why this wouldn't work for the links they all have to use as a crutch to rank. they were concerned about linkjuice or whatever.. let's pretend to Matt Cutts, this made sense.

c. LET"S PRETEND - He talked with Google engineers, they said ok.. (one of them thinking in the back of his mind.. "What a great way to identify SEOs and linkbuilders"); seriously I'd do that if I were them.

d. Let's Pretend Matt Cutts is NOT a mind reader so he goes back to the whiny SEOs like Moses and gives them nofollow…

e. let's pretend it's causing problems.. with PageRank, TrustRank whatever the google linking programming is.. etc..

f. let's pretend that the page scuplting properties of nofollow are vapored but the amount of spammers and SEOs that do NOT follow the Google webmaster guidelines have been caught using this method.. so the engineers don't really tell Matt, yet…

Now.. if we PRETEND that's the way it went down.. is Google still the "enemy" ?

also.. if I want you to say "sorry" and I have to tell you to do so.. it kind of devalues its intent..no?

One of your arguments was that Google is one of the reasons we have a career, work, a business. So? What?

I honestly think that Google should be like the soup bully.. you argue with them? NO SOUP FOR YOU.

It's their search engine, their money, their bandwidth, you do NOT have a constitutional right to be listed in Google. you can always pay for it though. =)

(DISCLAIMER: yes I own a bit of google stock, so I see things differently)

The Florida update, this update, that update… none of these have ever really effected me or my clients, except the one update where they started using bounce rate more.. and that just allowed me a better metric to provide better results for searchers of my clients.

Again, part of my job is to figure out how google works.. it is why I get paid. all those "public" tricks, i.e. links, nofollow etc.. are things everyone uses.. what will keep me in business for years to come is my ability to figure out Google and NOT use the same techniques everyone else does.. or at least not in the same way.. I still use the same stuff i have always used, now I just make sure my bounce rate is 0% to stay there. the ranking theory is still the same, it's just staying there is no longer keyword mods, but user experience to maintain top SERPs position.

Sure, it's easy to blame Google and their right to handle search as best as they can. But this is not about that. It's about choosing to communicate something to the webmaster community, changing an essential part of what was communicated — and then not talking about that until a year later.

I think you have to look at the nature of the conversation.. I don't think Matt Cutts came up with this on his own.. and set it forth to the SEO commuinity, other than a response.. am I right or wrong? (i can be wrong a lot, that's how i learn, from my mistakes)

I saw how it worked.. i did an experiment with 14 people to prove it didn't work in December.. again.. I really don't think Google pulled it out, I think it was a response.. now… again I understand it was on the Google Webmaster blog so how could they change it.. ok.. how long did it take for XML sitemaps to actually become useful? Has Google ever written something and changed their minds?

Ruud,
Thank you for taking the time to communicate with me, I understand this is what your post was about. All you really wanted was Google to say.. "umm.. guys.. this umm.. nofollow thing, it's kinda not going to stick around, so advance notice.. you need to remove it." Isn't this what you really wanted? but.. Google hasn't always been very helpful on how to exploit their product, have they.. and I hope they never are.. but please keep up the great articles you write.

And you? Do you have an opinion on Google and Fair Play?

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Ruud Questions: Steve Plunkett on Google Is Our Friend

With what feels like sleight of hand, Google has done away with a huge chunk of Trust in the relation it is trying to build between itself and webmasters.

The relation that they are trying to build is one where they are perceived as at least meaning no harm. How they go out of their way to give regular folks, webmasters, small business owners, yes everybody, the information and tools and knowledge to achieve their very best in Google without crossing The Line.

And much of that is achieved by making everybody's life so much easier, so much simpler.

Don't know how to set your canonical domain? No problem! Just log into Google Webmaster tools and "set your preferred domain".

Can't figure out how to be relevant to a specific country? Log into Google Webmaster tools, tell Google which country you target and let them do all the work! Ain't life grand?!

Never heard of Information Architecture or smart internal linking? Who needs to! With the Google invention of machine-readable site maps no site needs to be well structured ever again! Get every page on your site indexed! New — now with improved priority setting!

Avoid duplicate content using a smart site structure, some intelligent blocking or lightweight server-side scripting? Nay, why would you?! Didn't you know Google has the canonical tag, you silly!

And while you're at it make your 404 pages more useful — not with a WordPress or Drupal plug-in but with a Google widget.

And host your conversations on Google Wave.

All this can be achieved through simple "set it and forget it options" or copy and paste code. New features and changes are clearly communicated and explained through official and unofficial Google blogs, Google groups as well as Google video's.

Life is beautiful, there's nothing to worry about and you can now go home and enjoy your shoes.

Foul!

Except we can't go home and enjoy our shoes as Google has turned out to be an unreliable partner. In fact, many of us will have to start to do a lot of work to undo the reliance on Google promises versus best practices Web development supported by solid SEO.

The SEO community thought it had seen everything when just two days after implicitly supporting no follow for page rank sculpting a prominent Google employee invalidated what the video suggested about how the no follow tag works by pointing out that the tag in question no longer works that way at all.

But not long after, Google added insult to injury by stating they made this change as far back as one year ago.

More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
– Matt Cutts, Google

That's one year of total silence. 52 weeks of pretending nothing happened. 365 days of not saying anything — on purpose.

This from the people who have "user experience" plastered all over their guidelines.

And why didn't they say anything? Because "we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice" — oops, sorry…

Nobody in his right mind leaves communicating potentially business-critical information up to "we figured". That's just not smart. And I have a very hard time believing that the people at Google are not smart. That leaves; not trustworthy.

Oh Irony!

In the same post where I get explained how they pulled one over me the author starts an answer with "I wouldn’t recommend closing comments" — oh sure, because your other recommendations have turned out to be such solid ones, right? I mean, you wouldn't say one thing one day and then two days later at an SEO conference something completely different, now would you?

You wouldn't provide information that something works one way while in fact it works in a completely different way — at the very least for 365 freaking days in a row… Right?

Right…

On With The Basics

So it was a nice experiment.

You gave us the tools, we used them.

You were consistent, we started to rely on you.

Bad idea.

We Figured You Would Notice…

Tin Foil Hat angles dismissed for this post but included for your perusal and, possibly, entertainment.

• Nofollow use has been marginal at best – with Google admitting to profiling SEO's, has nofollow been a helpful identifier?
• As we still see so much duplicate cr*p turning up, does the canonical tag even work or is this another dummy placeholder?
• With there being no way at all to spider the whole web, sitemaps or not, what is the real reason behind sitemaps?
• Two words: Google Analytics?

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Doing Things The Right Way — or The Google Way (was: How To Lose Trust)

Needless to say Cindy and I follow each other on Twitter now.

To do mobile SEO, do you need a mobile site or can we just rely on whatever we already have out there on the web?

It really depends on your goals. If you plan on having a very interactive mobile experience on a variety of different phones, then it might be a good idea to put some money into a separate mobile website. If you just want to show up when people do searches for your brand or your product line, then it might not be as important to have a separate mobile website.
You
don't
need a
separate domain for mobile
In terms of SEO, the most important thing is that generally you don't need a separate domain. Creating a mobile site on a different domain, for instance a '.mobi' or an abbreviated domain name really duplicates your efforts, and splits your value. If you would like to have a separate mobile experience, I think the best thing you can do is to set it up on your existing domain. That way, you don't make your customers have to remember two different domains, and it is much more of a seamless experience.

You have two basic options if you would like to add a mobile element to your existing website. If your website is built in clean XHTML, it might be enough to create a separate mobile style sheet. This allows you to give all of your existing pages separate rendering instruction when they are displayed on a mobile phone, but they still display the way that they always have when they are displayed on a traditional computer.

The other option is to create separate mobile pages and put them in a mobile sub-domain or sub-directory. When you do that you can eliminate things that you think will not be useful or not render well on a mobile phone. When you do this, it is a good idea to maintain the look and feel of the traditional website, and keep the navigation options the same, so that people don't get lost.

If you take this option, it is important to use your robots.txt files to block the mobile bots from indexing the traditional web content, and block the traditional bot from indexing the mobile content. If you are putting the content in a sub-directory you can do this all with one robots.txt file, but if it is a sub-domain, it is easier to create two robots.txt files.

With any of these options, it is possible to use browser detection to determine when a visitor is viewing your website on a mobile phone, then redirect them to the mobile version of the page. You should also include buttons at the top of the page to allow people to switch between the mobile version of the site and the traditional version of the site. It is important to keep these buttons at the top of the page because if people are looking for those buttons, it usually means that the page isn't rendering correctly for them, so the last thing you want to make them do is scroll around and search the entire page for those buttons.

I get lots of questions about how to handle iPhones and other 'true web browsing' phones – should they be redirected to the mobile version, or treated as a traditional web browser. To make that decision, you should test to compare how the traditional and the mobile versions of your site look and work on the more capable, 'true web browsing' phones. In general, the mobile version of the site will still look better and work better on 'true web browsing' phones because they will eliminate the need to scroll left-to-right, which really is a pain!

Mobile browsers are all over the place at the moment; we have browser that make a mess of things, browsers that try to follow standards and show well coded sites as nice looking mobile ones, and we have great mobile browsers that basically take and display any site — simple small screen display, so to say.

What are your 3 to 5 rules of thumbs for doing a mobile site?

• Code in XHTML: XHTML has ridged accessibility standards that make it ideal for mobile rendering.

  As you mentioned, there are a lot of different browsers that all render HTML slightly differently. When you add onto that the fact that the various phones could have different screen sizes, the ability to display pages in 'landscape' or 'portrait' mode, that makes it near impossible to anticipate what type of rendering conditions your site will have to work with.

  Adhering to the highest XHTML standards is the best way to ensure that your website will be able to adapt to the broadest spectrum of rendering conditions.

• Use Separate External Style Sheets: As mentioned, you can use multiple style sheets to make your existing pages render well on mobile devices, or you can create separate mobile-only pages. In either case, it is important to use style sheets, because they streamline the code, ensuring that your page will load quickly, which is very important on a mobile phone.

  When you are writing your style sheets, it is important to use percents and relative positioning as much as possible. This will allow your site to stretch and shrink to fit whatever size screen it is being displayed on, and adjust between 'landscape' and ;portrait' mode on its own.

  Using external style sheets instead of embedded style sheets is important, because the external style sheet will only have to be downloaded once, the first time it is requested. After that, subsequent pages that use that same style sheet will simply refer to the one that has already been downloaded, rather than having to request it again. If you embed the style sheet it will have to be downloaded each time a new page is requested.

• Test, Test, Test then Test Again: When you are developing you mobile strategy, take time to think about what types of phones you will be targeting. People on 'true web browsing' phones behave than people who are on less sophisticated phones. In some cases it will make sense to target all phones, but in other cases, it might be a good idea to just focus on the 'true web browsing' phones.

  Hopefully this is already well ingrained in everyone's psyches, but if you are really interested creating a good mobile experience, you will need to know what that experience is like on a variety of different phones. You can start by testing the site on device simulators and mobile browsers like Opera, that you can download directly to your computer. When you get to the fine-tuning stage, it is important to actually test the site on real mobile phones, with all of the default settings in place. It is no fair to tinker with your own device settings to improve how your site looks on your own phones, because your visitors won't be doing that.

Let's play devil's advocate… I'm funning around with my mobile browser, basically killing time. I'm not going to get serious work done here, no serious research to perform. Except for when I would do a location aware search for pizzeria or movie times, what's the benefit for any company to target mobile? As Cuba Gooding Jr. says; Show me the money!

The funny thing is that traditional internet marketing totally missed lots of local pizzerias and other types of restaurants, because the potential website ROI was low (or at least it was perceived to be low). The local restaurants and pizzerias didn't have much content to warrant the website other than menus and possibly coupons. Most people don’t search for those types of establishments on their traditional computer.

Location aware mobile marketing changes that. It is ideal because it reaches people when they have a specific and immediate need. If you are searching for pizza on a location aware mobile phone, it is probably because you are hungry. If you are searching for movie times, it is because you would like to see a movie soon, and would like to find one close by you. Location based mobile results are more appropriate for filling immediate needs, and can turn a much higher ROI than traditional web results - People search exactly when they are ready to buy.

A third of US mobile subscribers recall having seen ads while browsing with their phones. Screen estate this small is *precious*. How does effective, non-backlash inducing mobile advertising look like, how does it work?

There is a delectate balance to creating mobile marketing ads that will be effective, and not intrusive. The most important way to avoid backlash is to a good job targeting your campaign. When you are only showing ads to people who are very likely to be interested in what you are selling there will be less backlash.

The other thing that is very important is to make sure that the website that the ad links to is very easy to use on a mobile phone. The backlash will be much more stringent from people who tried to make a purchase from your mobile site, and couldn’t because they were inconvenienced and disappointed. Test your conversion process on a variety of different phones, and make sure that everything works, and is simple to use on the mobile phone. Otherwise, you are just wasting money sending traffic to a site that doesn’t work.

Budget best spent: mobile app or mobile web site? Why?

It really depends on what you do and what your goals are. Most applications are being developed for the iPhone, and while that is the most active mobile demographic out there, it is certainly not the largest. Mobile applications are great if you would like to leverage the interactivity of the phone, and a variety of different functions, but mobile websites are nice if you only need simple interaction with your customers.

The Nationwide Auto Insurance application is great, because it uses so much of the iPhone functionality, saves their customers time, and makes their whole claims process more efficient: When someone gets in an accident, they pull up the application, and it immediately takes their location (via the GPS), and shows them numbers for local emergency and police stations, and the user can click directly through. Then it gives them forms to fill out, to ensure they get all the pertinent information from the other people in the accident; It even lets you use the camera in the phone to take pictures of the damage, and save them within the accident report documentation. After you submit the accident documentation, the application then uses the GPS to show you a list of approved local repair shops and tow trucks. In this instance, the application is probably much more valuable than a mobile website would have been.

We're loaded, overloaded even, with SEO tools, free and paid. What's out there that we should be aware of, should be using, for mobile SEO?

The simplest tool I have found in mobile is the device itself. So many companies really haven’t even tested their mobile website on a mobile phone yet. In terms of SEO, it is important to remember that a mobile search engine spider will be evaluating your website as if it was being displayed on a mobile phone; The first step is always to take a look, and see how your site looks on a variety of different mobile phones. Other than that, there are mobile browsers and user agent switchers that I use on my traditional computer when I am working on mobile projects.

We see tremendous growth in mobile web usage. From countries where it's the main way to access the net to countries where it's another way to access the net. Will non-computer access of the web overtake computer-based access? Why?

It is estimated that world-wide, by the end of 2011 there will be more full mobile HTML browsers (like the iPhone) than there are full traditional HTML browsers. I think that there will always be a place for traditional computers, but that they will continue to get smaller and smaller. I also believe strongly, that we will rely much less on traditional computers for small tasks and simple communication, and only rely on them for more complex and time-consuming activities.

Finally, what are your 3 favorite mobile applications?

I am a pretty simple girl! I use the Facebook application, TwitterFon and Pandora the most.

3 favorite mobile destinations?

Again, pretty simple here. I go to Google, YouTube and Hotels.com (I have been booking a lot of travel recently, and they have a great iPhone ready site that works much like an app.)

…and what are the 3 things you use your mobile web access the most for?

I think I am a pretty normal person for my demographic in terms of mobile web access. Other than doing research for my book, presentation and clients I use my phone(s) most for email, social networking and web search.

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Ruud Questions: Cindy Krum

Jeff Quipp at SES Toronto

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Jeff Quipp: the past, present and future of SEO

Since a couple of weeks her popular TGIF post appears on SEO Scoop

Information retrieval, algorithms, patterns. The mind's eye sees a schoolboard filled to the very edges with formula's, the mad scientist continuing to scribble on the wall…..

Is any of this material accessible if you're not a mathlete?

I started off as a Linguist. My first degree was in translating-interpreting French and German. My true passion was and still is finding patterns in language as well as philosophy. I decided to take a Masters in Computer Science to research Machine Translation. After that I was offered a PhD by my University in IR and NLP related things. So you see, I am not at the base a mathematician. I am a word person. In fact me turning into a computer scientist surprised everyone including myself. I thought I was going to be some cool literary type.

How did I make the transition? Well I put my fears aside and started at the beginning. I learnt about a lot of things that appeared supremely complex, that I had never come across, that I barely understood, and many things that I actually had no idea about at all. Some things took me a couple of years to digest and fully comprehend. Writing equations was a steep learning curve, and coding proper languages (not web programming) was quite a challenge too. I discovered however that I was blessed with a knack for finding creative solutions and that my linguistics background gave me an edge as did philosophy.

Edison said “Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” - unfortunately there's no way around that. If you want to be a computer scientist, you have to have passion and not be afraid of hard graft. You can grasp the basics though, and they help for things like SEO and that's usually enough, but if you're talking a full in depth understanding, it takes time.

Dividing search into information retrieval and ranking algorithms it seems one is very basic (collect information, spit it back out) and the other is hidden (who knows *what* they're using to rank!).

What can I learn from which part?

IR is all about finding the right information in the context of a query, simply put. It is very far from basic, there are so many complexities to deal with. Before you can decide whether a document is relevant, you have to read it, or at least scan read it and understand it. Then your brain links it up to the topic around that query and then you make a decision. The same is true for a machine. The thing is that they don't cope with that sort of thing very well, so we have to devise all sorts of weird and wonderful things to make that happen. Even humans aren't 100% correct in retrieving information because it becomes very subjective. We are trying to get a machine to do what we do, but even better. This is a tall order.

IR understanding tells you all about how to work with copy, and how computers process it and make sense of it. It helps you work out how they go about picking particular documents above others. This information is not secret. In fact the science community is very open so you can easily find all of the papers and methods that you need.

Ranking algorithms are very complex and the topic around those is called "Learning to rank" because we use machine learning algorithms for that. In order to rank anything at all you have to create some kind of scale and then place everything in the right position. Humans can't really do this. The data has so many dimensions that it needs to be processed and analysed and taken apart with complex maths to establish any kind of ranking order. Do you always agree with the Google ranking? I don't and their system is very efficient in comparison to a lot of other ones. It still doesn't work to the level required though.

Here you learn about how machines go about deciding how to sort content. This is also the area of classification and clustering. Again all of the information on the shiny new methods are available.

Remember IR is a hammer and every problem is a nail. Things like machine translation are scalpels and microscopes.

New ranking algos nobody has talked about yet

Also issues with IR evaluation

When we hear "natural language processing" our mind conjures up the image of a captain aboard the deck of a space ship, talking to a machine and receiving intelligent responses. Or we imagine typing a question into a search engine and getting an answer back that is not "keywords on page" based.

What do you see when you think about NLP?

Natural language processing is often misunderstood as a discipline. It feeds into all systems that work with language. NLP is used to manipulate text, physically. This means that it does things like stemming, parsing, stopword removal, pattern matching…that sort of thing. It's a bit like the admin side of computational linguistics if you like. The space ship thing is natural language understanding and generation which is quite different. It uses NLP but also heavily relies on artificial intelligence. Typing a natural language query into a search engine is the same thing. In fact I work in that area at the moment. It requires a lot of different methods of which NLP, but in my own work for example, it isn't the most exciting thing under the hood.

This might be useful

What should we be thinking about when Google states its working on AI projects?

Google has always been working on AI projects. It was first described by John McCarthy in 1956 as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.". In fact you were mentioning dialogue earlier and Alan Turing is the man who started this conversation off in 1950 with "Computing machinery and intelligence". AI goes back a bit and so I would be very surprised to see any IR project not make any use of AI techniques. They can be as simple as the genetic algorithm for example but they can also be horribly complex! Google probably mean that they're working on systems that use intelligent agents, which is what AI is about. It means that systems that are capable of organising themselves and taking actions based on their own decisions are likely being worked upon. Again I wouldn't see this as anything strange, coming from Google it is a given in my mind.

What is AI?

This might be useful

AI for marketing

Why the emphasis on personalization? What are they trying to personalize — and what does "personalization" mean anyway?

We have reached a point where there is only so much more that can come out of processing a query in isolation. IR in search engines is hard because a query is always in isolation and there are few works to work on. In natural language you have a grammatical structure, more information, and you can derive something a lot more accurate (as long as you can disambiguate effectively). Personalization means that additional information that isn't usually accessible to search engines can be acquired. It is all about making the system more efficient for users and putting their queries into context. Personalisation is the art of making something tailor made to a user. I can guarantee that my search history is different to a lot of other people's ones. If the search engine is "aware" (for want of a better word - this is a choice of word that leads to big arguments!) of the fact that I read the coastal news for my area, that I often look for surfing related things, sport events, computing stuff, particular books…when I enter "Yoga class" it's pretty safe that I'm not looking for one in Memphis. I'm in Sydney.

A lot of people worry about giving information out to the engines, and privacy and such things. Online you are lucky to have any privacy for a start. Google yourself and there's your proof. Data from a single source is not interesting because it doesn't tell you anything about your performance as a whole, where the issues with your system are, what queries are common to which demographics…that is the sort of thing you want to look at. Who cares if Trevor Smith has looked at seashells from Papua New Guinea? We might care however if 2,000 people interested in the same things as Trevor looked at the same thing. I welcome the time when I can have more personalised results because they will save me time for one thing.

How does it work?

For SEO

There is a common sense element to expecting search engines to somehow make sense and use of the tremendous amount of information available in social networking data.

Is overlaying social network signals simply another layer of ranking calculations?

Social networking data is something I've been looking at along with a bunch of other computer scientists. Having it incorporated into a search engine can lead to quite noisy data. The quality of the stuff that comes through twitter is usually not great anyway in my experience, and so I don't think it belongs in the "normal" rankings. Certainly there should be a way of getting through it all and finding things threads that you find interesting. The information on Twitter for example is great because it's short, but it's not easy to work out who is an authority source, find a full conversation instead of bits, and processing full natural language isn't the easiest, especially not in real time. An interesting area of research is sentiment extraction, something which Chris Rines is working on - watch this space. I'm not sure social media stuff belongs in a regular search engine. If it is to be included there are some issues that need to be addressed first.

Twitter in an IR system

Google proudly boasts taking into account over 200 factors when ranking results. Meanwhile pragmatical SEO's think "yup, and a good http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEnginePeopleRuud/~3/kfNp0hO5Zes/ruud-questions-ralph-tegtmeier-aka-fantomaster.html http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/ruud-questions-ralph-tegtmeier-aka-fantomaster.html#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 12:12:35 +0000 Ruud Hein http://www.searchenginepeople.com/?p=3484 Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Ruud Questions: Ralph Tegtmeier aka Fantomaster

]]> The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed

When thinking how to introduce Fantomaster, those words came to mind. His is a nickname that evokes the legendary imagery of Clint Eastwood, of one who took the red pill.

I was pleasantly surprised to come across him on Twitter; more so when I realized how smart he is (he even retweets me on occasion, so like, there!).

Seeing some of his ideas and opinions bubble around I just had to ask him for an interview.

""Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"

You've said "links simply aren't everything if you want to achieve rankings" yet the majority of SEO these days is built on links, links, links. If links aren't everything, what are those link-focussed people missing?

For one, the good old classic SEO rules still apply and have actually never stopped doing so - build web sites with good, useful information or content; make your pages light and fast to load; use keywords in your title tags and text headers; use meta tags: sparingly perhaps, but intelligently as well; attend to usability as much for your human visitors as for the search engine spiders hitting your site, i.e. don't make things difficult to discern for either of them; make sure you optimize your on site navigation and linking structure.

There's lots more but this little overview should suffice to illustrate my point that on site factors are still all important: for your human visitors as much as for the crawlers.

For example, whenever we conduct an on site link analysis of just about any fairly large corporate sites, there'll always be hundreds if not thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of pages that are either entirely orphaned or bleeding link juice the wrong way.

In some cases we've detected that up to 25% of a site's pages weren't linked to from anywhere at all - and mind you, these are big corporations deploying only best-of-breed expensive content management systems, not some cheapo amateur outfits with only a couple of hundred pages!

As for off site ranking factors, RSS feeds, for example are still extremely useful though sadly underrated. People seem to be so obsessed with an utterly simplistic view of link building, it's quite pathetic. All they've heard about is that "nofollow" links are useless (which is plain untrue) or that "you must have high PR links or else" - which is just another stupid myth, even though it has spawned a multi million dollar industry of link selling and brokering etc.

I'll gladly concede that the Web is getting ever more complex which makes it harder to fathom its interdependencies and to properly gauge the potential synergies they offer. But on the upside there's such a huge, unprecedented amount of opportunities to leverage these very relationships that I feel this is actually a very good thing.
If you
think
organic SEO
is links you
miss 90%
of traffic conduits
So if all you can think of in terms of organic SEO is "links, links, links", you're actually missing out on about 90% of all those other possibilities and traffic conduits out there. That's like restricting your offline advertising efforts to classifieds only: yes, such a one-sided approach may actually work out nicely in some areas, but chances are you're still leaving a lot of money on the table by ignoring other advertising platforms, by not investing in proper public relations activities etc.

This is not to say that links are unimportant in any way, on the contrary. Yes, you do need links to achieve good search engine rankings, and yes, you're right in putting a lot of effort into getting those links. But don't make the mistake of getting all smug about it, conning yourself that this is all there is to it. You really couldn't be more mistaken.

You advise that link development should be a consistent process showing no sudden or strange cyclic, account-based dips and spikes.

It's what I consider a common sense approach to link development but what I find interesting is that you explain that in the search engine's mind such spikes are only reasonable and plausible if they coincide with a corresponding spike in search queries for that particular topic.

Apart from Query Deserves Freshness, in which other ways do you think query data is folded back into both ranking and filtering?

One familiar major way in which both search query and link spikes will occur is the news. If a topic starts hitting it big with the news outlets, it's only natural to expect lots of people chiming in both in terms of their search query activity as well as their publishing and linking efforts.

Let's say you're running a blog featuring op-eds on economic subjects. And let's assume that half a year back you or one of your guest commentators published a cutting edge analysis of the U.S. prime rate sector along with a pretty shrewd and detailed prediction that it was bound to impact the entire banking system and the world's economy in a very negative way. Come the credit crunch, lots of authority sites will report on this very topic at great length. Now suppose a major site like WSJ happens to link to your piece - this will funnel a lot of attention your way, and on the Web "attention" will typically translate into incoming links, probably creating a huge spike.

If the search engines regard this as a "natural" rather than an artificial or manipulated spike, how would they actually determine that? There's a number of possible ways they may be doing it: analyzing the news sites' topical focus, their human users' search queries, RSS feeds activity, social networks buzz, etc. Unfortunately, this is nothing you can reliably plan in advance as a rule - which in turn makes it all the more "organic".

On a slightly less dramatic scale you'll find seasonal topicality. E.g. you wouldn't expect a lot of new links suddenly pointing to your Easter egg coloring site during the Christmas season, would you? So there are some fairly obvious exceptions to that rule. However, generally speaking links won't come your way in sudden spikes only to peter out again soon after. Rather, it will probably be an ongoing, fairly consistent process which you should mimic to the best of your ability.

We do know about a lot of search engine patents addressing this issue, though whether they're actually making use of them in any meaningful manner is nothing the engines will tell us about openly. We can, however, venture some educated guesses. One of these being that they're leveraging user behavior data - quite a rat's nest once you dig into the mathematics involved here, and definitely anything but perfect. But it does stand to reason that the search engines will make use of it any way they can if it actually helps them achieve better results.
Google's boatload of spyware is to discern public trends on the fly
The way I see it this is one out of many reasons why Google, for example, is rolling out such a boatload of blatant spyware: whether it's their notorious toolbar, their AdSense tracking technology, their Web Accelerator, Gmail, personalized search, their Webmaster Tools, the Chrome browser or their data storage facilities allowing you to host all your documents on their servers ranging from your personal or corporate correspondence through spreadsheets and health records - all of these are prime data funnels allowing them to discern public trends on the fly.

Now while I'm not exactly on record for being the world's most ardent Google lover, I have never claimed that they are stupid or clueless in terms of technology and data mining. They certainly would have to be stupid, however, not to make ample use of all this data deluge they're so obviously keen on grabbing. To what extent they're actually doing so, and in which precise manner, is probably anybody's guess outside the 'Plex. For us as SEOs this amounts to a great challenge in terms of reverse engineering their ranking process, of course.

You've mentioned that maintaining the IP list of bots is not purely automated: critical steps are done manually.
How involved are you with the process and how much time do you spend on it every day?

We would love to automate the entire process but we've found out the hard way that there's no reliable way of doing so. And so have many others, by the way. Sure, we've created a lot of scripts that will analyze traffic logs and alert us to suspected spider activities, but at the end of the day it requires a great deal of manual checking out by highly experienced staff.

For our fantomas spiderSpy(TM) database we're monitoring over 35k third party sites' traffic on a daily basis. It's hard to accurately gauge the amount of human labor time spent on this because it tends to come in shoves. Ok, so we update our database every six hours and have been doing so since 1999. However, sometimes no new search engine spiders will crop up for days or even weeks on end. Then, all of a sudden, Yahoo! or Google may roll out 800 new spiders within a couple of hours (yeah, you read right: I'm not exaggerating!) which is when things tend to get rather frantic.

You see, it's not as easy as simply defining entire IP ranges in one fell swoop: more often than not, some IPs within any given range are obviously reserved for human editors, i.e. non-spiders, and it requires a lot of expertise to suss them out reliably.

Two general, rule of thumb, best practices type questions regarding cloaking.

First; the majority of web sites do or do not need cloaking — which is it, in your opinion?

It's a question of a) how competitive your niche or industry is in the first place, and b) how hard hitting your competitors are. Even Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has admitted publicly that there are industries where you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell if you don't adopt hard core black hat SEO techniques. Take pharma, adult content or online gambling (the "other PPC" aka "pills, porn and casinos"): these are classic and pretty well known areas where you'd better acquaint yourself with cloaking or IP delivery technology if you don't want to go belly up in no time.

There are lots of other, albeit less notorious niches where the same applies: online finance in general and credit repair or payday loans in particular are one prominent example. So are travel, ringtones, webhosting, domain registrations, and many many others.

On the whole, what with an ever more competitive online market, the number of niches requiring cloaking as a boost for organic search rankings and qualified traffic is actually dramatically on the increase.

Still, if you are working in a low competition environment, cloaking may actually not be for you. It does require some pretty good reliable and sophisticated tools and these don't come cheap.

Another obvious factor to consider is your overall ROI or profit margin, of course.

Second and two-fold; if my SEO company recommends my business to employ cloaking, how worried should I be that A) this company is a scam, and B) that I'll be found out and destroyed by Google?

First off, it's a question of full disclosure or due diligence. If your SEO agency "forgets" to mention the risks you'd incur by going for cloaking or even pretends that there's absolutely no risk involved, I'd say you would be justified in rating them a scam outfit.
the risks of cloaking are overrated
This said, the risks involved, while quite real, are generally overrated. Yes, cloaked sites may be found out and they may get banned by search engines: it can and does happen, so you'd better be prepared for it. But for one it's actually a pretty rare occurrence. More importantly, however, there's a lot of fairly uncomplicated security measures you can adopt to buffer the impact or render it negligible.

One practical example: Don't mix cloaked and non-cloaked content on your money site. Should you get penalized for cloaking by the search engines, you'd lose your money site's indexing and ranking. Rather, build self-contained cloaked-only sites, what we term Shadow Domains(TM), and redirect your human visitors from there to your money site. If possible, clone your money site, hosted on a different server, and use it as a redirection target. That way, even if a search engine editor should track it down, following your SDs' redirection trail, you would simply set up a new clone somewhere else and start from scratch.

Again, there's lots more but this example shows that there's plenty of very effective things you can do to reduce the risks and improve your risk/gain ratio dramatically.

Most importantly, though: don't try to pull the cheap stunt on yourself. "Poor man's cloaking" such as delivery by UserAgent, JavaScript based operations etc. are simply too risky to be worth the effort at all. Only use software that offers genuine IP delivery because there's no other reliable approach.

And always work from a reliable, regularly updated list of verified search engine spiders - the free lists available out there are hopelessly dated and inaccurate. This is quite critical, of course, because unless your cloaking application can positivelys determine a search engine spider for what it is, you're running the risk of detection.

Information retrieval has come a long way. Given a clean index filled with good documents only, most IR systems should be able to give a user a set of relevant results. But a web-index is filled not only with great on-topic content but also garbage and plain spam. Search engines meanwhile don't give the best ever results; they approximate a top 10, or 100, or 1000 of possible candidates and rank those. What do you see in the future then; pay for inclusion indexes? Premium search and free search?

While I don't see general, all-purpose search going away anytime soon, chances are there'll be a growing demand for more focused, laser targeted and specialized search options in future. Ther's actually quite a lot of this happening already, even though we as SEOs seem to ignore it. For example, as a professional lawyer or a doctor or a physicist you'll probably sign up for specialist portals or databases that cater to your profession's specific needs only. Most of these verticals are human edited and monitored which is an entirely viable business model because registration is generally not free and actually quite expensive.

But these fairly smallish clienteles aside, there's plenty of scope for medium size markets to be catered to as well. Whether you're involved in researching music rights, late Elisabethan poetry, alternative non-insulin based diabetes therapies or airplane spare parts - merely googling these topics will generally be a pretty frustrating experience even today. Even if you're not a professional researcher subscribing to highly demanding standards you're likely to be sorely disappointed with what crawler based engines have to offer you. So as demand for compact quality information grows, so will platforms addressing this need - specificity will rule.

Eventually, we'll see a lot more of this cropping up, segmenting the search market as a whole and obviously stealing significant chunks of traffic from the all-purpose, one-for-all engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live. Let's not forget that Web search, for all its 15 years of history is really still in its infancy as, for that matter, is IR as a whole.
We'll find today's search incredibly primitive and make corny jokes about it
There's still a great deal of work to be done to actually make all the world's information available in a meaningful, cost and time efficient and reliable manner. Currently, search engines like Google, Yahoo! etc. are merely servicing pretty unsophisticated mass markets who are content with gobbling up their shoddy results for the simple reason of convenience and because they are free. But with further specialization on the rise in economy and commerce and society as a whole, people in the not too distant future will probably consider today's search technology to have been an incredibly primitive and error prone affair they will probably make a lot of corny jokes about…

On to the economy and its victims. Is the web a place for people, for regular folks, to look at and say "hey, I can make a living here" or is setting up something that pays a monthly income on the web akin to starting your own shop "in the real world"?

I guess this depends on how prone you are to being hyped. Essentially, the Internet as a marketplace has been overloaded with ridiculous expectations and promises pushed from many different quarters. Sure, it offers a lot of opportunities the world hasn't seen before, and if you know how to make the best of it, it can make you incredibly rich in an equally incredibly short time.

And yes, this has actually happened over and again - but as always in life, if you mistake the singular exception for the general rule, grief is only one small step away. Generally speaking, building a viable online business is just as much of a challenge as is setting up shop in a brick and mortar environment.

It's also governed by the very same economic laws: don't spend more than you have; buy low, sell high; listen to your customers; watch out for your competition; don't give in to smug routines etc. None of this has fundamentally changed because it's ingrained in the way the world of commerce (or, if you like, capitalism) simply works.

So while some ventures may prove to be a roaring success in no time (which, incidentally, tends to happen in the "real world" as well, so it's nothing entirely tied to the Web), most all operations will have to practise relentless perseverance until they will actually turn a profit. There's no easy way out and no guarantees of success, no matter what some marketing bozos may claim when trying to pitch their overpriced stuff.

And the sooner you come to terms with it, the better your chances of success. It's still very much about toil and market savvy and shrewd risk assessment, mingled with a decent quantity of sheer luck. Merely because you're using a computer and some digital download platform instead of high street shopping premises and a warehouse doesn't change any of that.

Once a person like the one above has gone ahead and setup a blog or an Adsense site, a freemium idea or subscription content — what is the single most effective next step they should take to start to have a chance of getting people in via search … with the constraint of that question being limited budget?

Once you've optimized your site for SEO and conducted some decent link building, go and create a buzz, make people talk about you, preferably in a positive way. Underpromise and overdeliver Underpromise overdeliver get involved help create relationshipsas much as you reasonably can. Get involved in conversations - there's plenty of free platforms available for that. Don't be an obnoxious pitcher of your own stuff, help people out with advice and create lots of relationships. Let them spread the word for you: after all, word of mouth is still the most cost effective kind of promotion. Linkbait can work miracles if you do it right, too. At the end of the day, all of this should translate into plenty of inbound, one-way links and in the search engines taking note.

On our fantomNews blog at we're getting a pretty consistent volume of traffic even when I refrain from active blogging due to time constraints. I actually didn't blog for two consecutive years once without any dramatic slump in traffic. Why? Because we've obviously created plenty of useful content people are interested in.

Plus, publishing our SEO cartoons consistently week by week has proven a prime traffic magnet as well. Those cartoons are arguably one of the best investments we've ever made in terms of keeping the buzz level up. This is no "secret sauce": it's pure common sense - give people what they need or enjoy or even get worked up about, and they'll honor it.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Ruud Questions: Ralph Tegtmeier aka Fantomaster

]]> http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/ruud-questions-ralph-tegtmeier-aka-fantomaster.html/feed http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/ruud-questions-ralph-tegtmeier-aka-fantomaster.html