I began doing SEO in late 1999.  It took me about 18 months to really get the hang of it, as back then there was very little information on SEO.

I was solely responsible for the marketing of my small company (eight people).

The economic collapse hit in 2001, just as the great revenue gains I was generating were kicking in.  And as the economy got worse, my SEO achievements accelerated.  I built many different websites so that each of the four salesmen could operate their own brand.  By doing so, the company would have not just a number one rank for our keywords, but often four.

Our revenue grew and grew, seemingly immune from the economic downturn.  As the overall market decreased for our industry, our market share increased faster.

An article in today’s NY Times describes a merchant who is doing the same, but with paid search.

The merchant has increased  his revenue by doubling his conversion rate, his bid, and his marketing budget.

Think of all the companies out there spending significant amounts on brand campaigns, yet are budget constrained in paid search.

The right move for these marketers is to drastically cut, or eliminate, their under performing non-search campaigns and maximizing their investments in search.

I just managed a project to use WordPress as a CMS for an SEO campaign.

WP is getting a lot of attention for its ability to be a flexible CMS.  With nearly a half million plug-ins, it has the largest open source development community of any CMS.  Ironically, it was not meant to be a CMS.

But the development work done by the WP community has given WP the ability to function as a CMS.  When I spoke at OMMA in NYC last year, a fellow panelist was asked for a recommendation on an affordable SEO-friendly CMS.  He answered “WordPress” and I was thinking, “amen!”.

Out of the box, WP is very SEO friendly.  When we piloted our first enterprise launch of WP as a CMS, we encountered many obstacles, such as writing custom title tags and URL handling.  But every problem had a plug-in that was not only free, but very easy to install.

Our front end developer spent about 4 days converting PSD files into WordPress friendly CSS templates.  Once the templates were made, publishing pages was very easy because ANYONE CAN DO IT.

The success of WP has a lot to do with ease of use.  So you can give each business unit or manager their own section and just let them build out their pages when the templates are up.  (Afterwards, have a designer sweep through to make it look professional).

I’ve worked with a number of enterprises, from Adobe, Hearst, Sony, Warner Brothers, and American Express, and a number of small and mid-size companies.

WordPress can, but is very unlikely, to serve the needs to larger companies that need complex publishing rights and version control.  One can, however, recreate this functionality from plug-ins and your own custom scripts. (Note: creating plug-ins for WP is very easy, the code is clean with descriptive inline comments).

But let’s face it, WP is not meant to be an enterprise CMS.  Ford has used WordPress for a microsite, but we have yet to see WP used for websites that have a lot of stakeholders.

As marketers within large companies recognize the inertia they face creating an online presence for business-unit campaigns utilizing centralized resources, they look for inexpensive and easy publishing solutions.  Wordpress is filling that need, and I am excited to contribute as an SEO to continue evolving Wordpress.

Here’s a great piece of advice.

Treat people online the same way you would in person.

Think about it.

One of the mistakes I see marketers make frequently is they have delusions about how much “passion” visitors should have on their site.

The experience of surfing the Internet is distant, cold, and removed.  The digital, satellite enabled transmission of data does not cater to emotional seduction.

People insult one another on message boards and through email because the reality of personal presence does not exist.   It’s far too easy to flame someone remotely than in person.  And it happens all the time.

Let me ask you a question.

How many websites can you name for which you feel a warm, personal, spiritual relationship with?  How many interactions have you had with websites that have left you breathless?

I know that right now, you are thinking hard.

Websites cannot give us what people can. Marketers too often forget this.  They want code base to connect with people the only way people can.

I can’t think of one website that has inspired me by way of aesthetics.  The most value I have experienced has been through the cold and clean interface of Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Google.

Websites deliver information.  I want that information quickly so I can go back into the world where my sense are more than virtually stimulated.

Just give information.

I was watching that wonderful show Mad Men this wkend about an ad agency in the 50’s.

Lucky Strike was a client.  A report came out in Readers Digest that introduced people to the idea that maybe smoking was harmful.

The Creative Director (CD) was taking a lot of heat from the client over how he would respond to the news.

The CD didn’t want to respond to the article, and so the meeting got very heated and the owners of Lucky Strike stood up, angrily, and began to leave the room.

In a last act of salvation, the Creative Director said, “tell me, what is the first step in making your cigarettes?”

The owner said, “we take the tobacco and we toast it.”

The CD wrote on the wall, “Lucky Strike, It’s Toasted”.

The owner said, “so what, all the other companies toast their tobacco as well.”

The CD said, “yea, but they don’t tell you that, so they don’t.  When the conversation with your consumers is going somewhere bad, change the topic and say something irrelevant that sounds good.”

It’s Toasted.  Account retained.

The topic of paid links to support an SEO campaign is as much a philosophical one for SEO’s as it is tactical.

This post is not intended to explore the philosophical side.  Instead, I’m going to address the question of: how good is Google at detecting paid links?

I just completed another experiment on the topic.

Here is what I did:

I built a page optimized for a localized service.  I got the page ranking #32 for my benchmark keywords.  I waited one month to be sure that the SERP had stabilized.

Then I spent $100 to pay an Indian contractor to acquire triangular links.  The links appear on pages that have at least 50+ completely irrelevant themes (the sites were also largely irrelevant to the service I optimized). The $100 spend acquired 20 links that have nearly identical link text.

Within 3 weeks, the page shot up to a #2 spot on Google.

I think this improvement was clearly a result of the rather spammy looking backlinks.

A counter point to the apparent success might be: “but Google’s filters haven’t yet profiled those links - and in time, the links will be identified as purchased and the SERPs will decrease again.

Maybe so.

But for $100, this service can easily afford to keep buying links and staying ahead of the filters.  The ROI on that buy is far greater than the cost per click for paid placement.

The recent Google PageRank update, from the observations of myself and my SEO team, seems to have significantly lowered overall PageRank.

Google has to do this from time to time. Based on Larry Page’s original algorithm, PR has to be lowered from time to time (as it increases over time).

I’ve followed a number of sites, including Adobe (PR 10 - which nows has a number of internal pages at PR 9 for the first time in a long time) and I am seeing a calculated deflation.

One could argue Google is doing this either to correct the PR inflation or to inflict some pain on the link broker business.

I think Google is doing this to correct the inflation, but I could be wrong. Regardless, I do believe we saw a large drop in average PR.

I’ve played around recently with link-bait ideas on my personal blog, and what I’ve discovered is that if you piss people off, they will link to you more than some of the other tactics I’ve tried.

I also tried flattery (Study Determines Bloggers Are Better in Bed), which resulted in a handful of comments by other bloggers but no links.

I’ve also published experiment results, which do get a bit of buzz as well.

But if you anger a passionate group of people about their core values, voila - links!

Of course, this is not the best way to go about building a brand.

Even if you are a retailer, I strongly believe in adding more content to your site.

All the time.

From an SEO perspective, there is the concept of “fresh content” (the belief that search engines prefer new content). There is also the PageRank consideration - as more web pages are added to a site, a properly linked site increases its overall PageRank.

And then there is the real reason (for me): going after the long tail.

If you have 2000 articles on a topic and you strategically target long tail terms, you are likely to see a lot of traffic from that content. (I’m not going go discuss, in this post, converting that content).

But how do you get so much content? After all, you are doing the copy writing, or your writer is swamped.

I’ve been using Forum Booster for some projects (not big brand projects). You can have articles written for $10, and they’re fairly good (tier 2). If you have a topic with a long tail, it’s worth spending $1000 to get 100 articles. More than likely, you’ll see a positive ROI before long.