Forum Moderators: phranque
Industry reality, or perception:
98
SEOs were blood sucking leaches on the dot-com.
02
SEOs (promoters) are what the SEs are banking on for survival.
This should be on your mind with every piece of currency you spend. If you do not like the way a portal is conducting business, spend your money elsewhere. The pay-for-whatever engines need you to survive, you do not need them.
Think about what will happen to your business in the long run if [Altavista¦Overture¦Yahoo¦Inktomi¦LookedSmart¦Fast¦Google] goes under... Your business will adjust and you will concentrate elsewhere for traffic, and sales.
What happened to your small business when Infoseek or Excite died? You adjusted and went on.
So, my point is this. You are in charge, you will determine who will die, and who will make it. If they treat you bad, if they are dishonest, if they promise one thing and do something else after they get your money, if they do not reply to your emails, if they do not give you the respect of a business partner walk away with the confidence that you will outlast them.
If you are an SEO, build this into the actions you encourage your customers to consider. If they fail to consider this, take their money and separate yourself from them.
We are in like the fourth level of the dot-com fallout and the wheat is being separated from the chaff by the minute. Optimize for Word-of-Mouth. Optimize for Word-of-Mouth.
I'm marketing my site to a specific audience that wouldn't find it in a casual browse through a Search Engine.
My customers spread the word by email and w-o-m.
My wife recently bought some specialty clothes over the web and she used search engines though, but that was general retail. My sites aren't general retail.
Heed this post, and SEO may also survive, through helping our clients thriive.
Buying indescriminately is a bad idea. Making good judgement calls, and watching ROI closely is the best we can do.
>>We are in like the fourth level of the dot-com fallout and the wheat is being separated from the chaff by the minute. Optimize for Word-of-Mouth.
I get what you mean. But, my take on this is to "treat the net as just another media." A media which most of us at WMW University understand quite well. Keep the users happy, optimization will take care of itself.
The way you do business in general will decide if you thrive or fall. Those rules did not go away just because its the web. SE, to SEO, to web merchant, its all the same - serve your customer well, and pass it on.
treat the net as just another media
exactly what I tell my web design clients. It's not the greatest thing to ever be invented and it will not bring extra riches to you immediately.
It's another form of advertising (for ecommerce sites).
It's a storefront that is open 24 hours a day instead of the 8 hours your regular store is open.
In saying this though, it's not just like any other media!
In saying this though, it's not just like any other media!
For the purposes of this discussion it's just like any other medium. The fact that it's open 24 hours a day is more of a management problem than an SEO concern (arguable?).
I am an SEO, but I'm not sure how much I believe in the practice. More than anything, I'm just a web development professional. I know how to get your users happy - which in the long-run is far more important than getting search engines happy. My most successful site became big just because it was so popular with users - and so should it be.
Maybe we should stray from the term SEO entirely?
Maybe we should stray from the term SEO entirely?
I wish straying from the term could be done easily. Unfortunately, for an SEO, having a homepage is a necessity, and so are those three words. I saw the discussion where people were discussing alternate terms but someone searching for milk types in milk, not "white liquid from bovines."
I prefer many other terms but, "the guy that drives surfers to your site and makes them happy" is a bit obscure for a search phrase. :)
DG
1. If I had a typo in a brochure or catalog - how much add value would my client and the recipient get?
2. If I notice that a typo kept appearing in my recorded search results and went and looked at the page and found there was indeed a grave error and corrected it in a mere second without needing to reprint or incur additional costs for my client.
3. If 20 visitors a day were appearing at this site and quite by accident because of a typo which was my fault and yet my client was so pleased with this unfortunate result.
4. Now in correcting the page I would lose these accidental visitors and my client is quite happy with these ere. So I optimize for a typo commonly typed in and hid the typo in tags that the visitor would not see and the client is so excited that he wants me to ere more often.
3. If because of a typo that a search engine user accidently typed in, that I ere and they found the site that I corrected but optimized so more would accidently come and even make some accidental purchases which really makes my client believe that it's the best mistake he's ever made (hiring me that is).
SEO is a tool of the media, not the media itself and the advantages ... dynamic, interactivity, immediate feedback, changing on the fly, and taking a consumer from unaware to aware to interest to desire to customer and returning patron in a multitude of ways, even in ere.
4. Please convince your clients to place a typo in any other media ...
and get the same results.
I've always felt, that the web is so big, and full of free contributions and services, that it should be the rare exception when you pull out the credit card. I find that especially true for SE services.
