GodOverYou.Com - Internet Marketing & SEO Blog

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about how people learn SEO. It never really begins with SEO…

I’ve never been talking to some guy online and shooting the breeze about where our pasts were from and how we came to be talking about SEO to begin with and I’ve never heard (or saw) someone say…

“Yeah, I was hanging out at my friend’s house for the Superbowl and during half time someone started talking about SEO and I was just hooked…”

Nope… That just isn’t how it goes. Normally, it’s a much less classy affair….

“I heard you can make a lot of money online and I knew I needed to get me some of that….”

Come on, you know it’s true.

I don’t care if you are completely new to the industry or if you have been in it for years – you’ve met plenty of guys that started by wanting to make money online.

Sure, there’s some guys that were web developers, or wanted to package SEO as a service they could offer – but most of the time it’s internet and affiliate marketers pounding away at it trying to earn that quick buck.

And hey, I don’t blame them. I learned that there was good money in it and I went after it as well…

The Right Now Mindset

Because of where most people who are now working in SEO begin – that is the immediate need to make fast cash as they are often told they will – you begin to understand some of the culture on various forums and perspective that a lot of “SEO’s” or SEO advocates are working from.

They want results and they want them right now. Everything has to be right now, because a sale today is better than a sale tomorrow.

It’s about the immediate payoff. The need to get what they want at a moments notice. The fast payoff….

I think this has created a disservice to the greater SEO community. Let me explain that by first taking a step back to talk about what it is that we really do here…

Iterations in Digital Marketing (outside of SEO)

No matter what people do in marketing, they will almost always begin with the first draft, the first effort, the first site or the first landing page.

They are all firsts because and almost exclusively because there is always a second… a third… a fourth.

Digital marketing by it’s very nature is evolutionary…

In the PPC word, creating and tracking iterations of ADS is CRUCIAL to their success and profitability. Sure, every now and then they will knock one out of the park – by 99.9% of that industry revolves around adjusting copy (or if display) colors, fonts, images, borders, etc.

The exact same thing goes for email marketing. You test landers all the time and against all sorts of traffic. SOLO Ads, PPC, POPS, Display, etc… you track it all. And you test iterations of each ad against them all to get the highest opt-in rate possible. (In most cases anyways.)

The Smart Marketer (outside of SEO)

You see, digital marketing – all of digital marketing – is really simple.

Once you’ve learned https://iq-trading.com.br some of the basis, digital marketing comes down to split testing, experience and evolution of thoughts, ideas, concepts and combinations.

The smart marketer is the one that collects this information and though as if by an act of pure mental magic they will coalesce that information into a final product with the judicious application of their unique intuition and creativity.

Mind you, I said judicious. Neither intuition nor creativity are given too much freedom; these two must work together and they are bonded by the information learned from split testing.

So, what happened to “SEO’s?” Did we all ride the short bus?

SEO Iterations for Performance Driven Search Visibility

Back to those internet marketers who want to make a fast buck.

These guys are typically hungry. They might not be the brightest, and they might not have the most knowledge – but what they lack in those areas they will make up for in work tenacity.

That’s pretty much why I’m sitting here. I wanted to market a small business. My money was offline…

I learned SEO that way. THEN I heard about how you could potentially make money online based on skills that I was already applying to the real world business… Then I became a bit of an idiot for while because I simply worked hard, grinding out posts and articles (which was the thing at the time in 2007, 2008?). I blame affiliate marketing for that – it’s easier than saying I made a mistake after all.

I made a few bucks pretty quickly, but then realized that I wasn’t actually learning anything. I was just throwing shit at a wall and not even watching it to see what stuck….

I’d build links and then forget about it what I created, what I wrote. It simply became a old, vague post on my site that was used primarily to host an advertisement of some sort.

I wasn’t sitting down to test things and watch what was really working and then repeat that and reverify it.

But I was An Idiot…

If you are into performance driven results – that is to say results that you can repeat with an expected level of performance… then you need to be testing, recording, iteration and verifying.

When I read forums these days, I often find myself separated – separated from all camps.

White hats – they can be good guys, I like a lot of their thoughts and strategies. But when they start talking about anything outside of white hat, I want to pull my eyes out because it quickly becomes clear that they don’t have the experience that years of doing it will teach you.

Grey hats – this is where I see most conversations, and this is where most affiliate and internet marketers live. This is the area of conversation where I’ve been so fixated lately as I’ve been on my own little assessment on what happened to me and why so few participants can discuss these topics on any real mature or knowledgable level.

Black hats – Hey, love you guys (fist bump), but I mean, really …. some times it’s pretentious. And sometimes it’s equally ignorant as the pure white hat forums. Typically though, it’s not even worth entering into a discussion at this point. The AGRO factor is just too high…

So if someone wanted to avoid these camps – and I mean all of them – and just get to the basic works of SEO, I’d say to start iterating.

Basically, figure out some basic link building strategies and then test things on the page and see what happens….

Iteration Development Cycle Suggestions

Since we are really only going to be talking about on page things, I thought I should at least mention the areas that I would look at.

Title

As far as I’m concerned, everything starts and end with the title element. (Ahh, ahh, not title tag – it’s not a tag, it’s an element… [this is an inside joke.])

Anyways, Google weighs titles pretty heavily, even if people say they don’t – they do.

Hummingbird created all sort of confusion in SEO land. Because it has a separate ‘engine’ to find synonyms of words and phrases in titles, sometimes Google doesn’t display the exact keyword in the title of various search results.

So… what’s the answer. If you write a post with your main keyword in it and you’ve got good links to that page, with a domain of somewhat equal internal linking structure (strength) to the competition and you aren’t ranking – but you see others with what might appear to be ‘Synonymized’ title results, then start iterating your title.

Go ahead, play with it, see what happens. Hey, if you aren’t ranking as well as you might link and you’ve got the link juice going to the page – mix things up with the title and see what happens.

Reword your initial title into something very similar, but yet different.

Images

First of all, I highly suggest using image the image title element, alt tag, and description to your maximum benefit.

That having been said, all of these things can be manipulated and keep your primary keyword in mind… just mix this up.

If for instance the title of your post or article was to be an answer to a question, as is so popular these days (hummm, wonder why?)…. MOBILE, not me. Gezzzz, I’m not that arrogant….  Anyways, change the text in these areas of the images up to almost give an answer to the question if the answer was to be purely based on the images elements themselves.

I know, it might sound crazy, but give iq-trading.com.br it a shot. If nothing else – these are things that are a factor in the SERPS, there’s no question. Why would you not iterate this?

Subheadings

Look, I’m a big fan of them. I get it, people might not think it means much…. but I do.

In fact, I consider not using subheadings just stupid. It improves the readability of your content if nothing else… But yes, I also think subheadings (or enlarged text) has a role in SEO.

So again, keep Hummingbird in mind and create more of a logical thought using these.

Change, wait, record, change, wait, record….

What I Don’t Suggest Your Iterate

For the love of god, unless you are going to make one big change and stick with it – don’t iterate your internal linking structure.

In my opinion, once that is set, it is set. You could risk ‘crashing’ the site if you do something ridiculous or change things too frequently. I’ve seen it happen all the time. In fact, when people move sites, crashing the internal link structure is often the number one reason that sites flop post-move.

It’s the big fear with WordPress themes as well. Well, that’s assuming the theme isn’t doing anything odd… like not include a title element or something.

That’s all….

I don’t know what to tell you. That’s what I got for you tonight. That’s my thought….

So, what’s up with you? “You come here often?”

The SEO and digital marketing world is a funny thing. We are all often tied up in our own self importance, trends, preconceived notions of what is right/wrong or ethical/unethical… It gets to be a bit much quite honestly.

There’s no secret that I have some experience in the spam game… It’s a space that is basically dominated by windows on the low end (GSA, Scrapebox, Xrumer) and linux on the high end (in-house developed scripts). There’s really no room for OSX in this landscape.

Sure, using something like parallels you can run windows (or any other OS) on virtual machine. Of course while this is a great asset in some ways, it’s not a perfect solution. I’ll speak more on that later…

But with these things in mind – the fact that most link building software is developed specifically with Windows in mind and all of the link-heads speak only in Microsoft terms there would seem to be no motivation at all to move to Mac and it’s somewhat vacant OSX landscape.

The Tired SEO

After having done this for so many years… quite honestly you can only keep doing it for so long before you eventually being to fatigue. Whether it’s mental fatigue, physical fatigue or what I’ve come to call ‘Soul Fatigue.’

I found that my ability to produce work had been deteriorating over the past 18 months or so and I just couldn’t stay focused. I had every excuse to mind you… I’ve found Google’s new directions to be somewhat stimulating and in combination with the challenges that they have presented link spammers, the field of study is fresh and interesting.

But none the less, my eyes hurt. My anxiety over Windows 8.1 mindless “Fuck you I’m auto dimming now” display utility and split personality OS made me not even want to turn on my computer.

Sure I still had Windows 7 machines, but… it’s old. I don’t mean in the sense of being outdated or not performing well – I consider Windows 7 to be one of the best operating systems released, ever. But it’s… old. I’m use to it and not in a comfortable way…

More in a sense of it choking the creativity right out of me. Point, click, open, type, publish, close, kill-my-soul.

The truth is that I began hating what I did on a daily basis.

Wanna Buy My iMac?

In my social circle I’m pretty well established for being someone with a thirst for anything that technology oriented.

I enjoy the click of a keyboard and the animation of a app opening. I’ll spend hours playing with the newest iPad and not because of any great software change but because of how it’s new over-powered processor snaps through applications ‘so much faster’ than my 11 month old iPad.

So it might not come as a great surprise that when someone bought an iMac and couldn’t make the adjustment that they would turn to me to find a buyer.

Now, I had no interest in Mac’s. I was in the SEO uber-society where I disregarded Mac’s as something hipsters in Panera’s or Coffee Shops would use to annoy PC users who would later claim that ‘Those darn Mac users are using all of the bandwidth.’

As it would turn out however, this iMac was 6 weeks old and had the best hardware that was still currently available. Being someone who is always open the negotiation I decided to flirt with the idea of buying it just to resell it… so I hammered him on the price and ended up walking away with a $1900 iMac for $400.

Like A Virgin, The Very First Time

So I brought the big white box home and let it sit in my living room for a few days. I really didn’t even pay it much thought to be honest and then one day my Vaio decided to go into a screen auto-dimming hissy fit.

Now, if you’ve never heard me complain about Windows 8 and auto dimming, just take my word – it’s the kind of hate that might be considered legendary by some standards…

Enraged, I snapped my laptop closed and poured a short glass of my favorite Whiskey. Took a sip, rubbed my eyes, leaned back in my chair and looked at that big white box.

“What the hell? Why not?” I took the shot of Whiskey down and cleared a space on my work desk. I suspiciously unpacked the iMac wondering what the hell I was even doing and why I would want to subject myself to even more frustration this even considering what just happened with the Vaio.

Once the monitor – well entire computer as it turns out – was up on the desk and the batteries were in the fragile feminine looking keyboard (which I initially used as a frisbee against my chair) I spent the next 10 minutes looking for a power button.

[enter glass os whiskey #2]

I refused to even look at the Vaio at this point and sure as hell wasn’t going to read the manual so I pulled out my S5 and Googled the solution. Boy did I feel like as ass for having not noticed the power switch but if you have even been in this scenario, I’m sure you understand where I was coming from. And if you haven’t ever looked for the power button on an iMac, I won’t ruin the surprise. Just go to a local Best Buy and see if you can find it easily.

Oh, This Is Interesting

Shooting down the next glass of whiskey I saw that familiar White apple on the screen in the familiar crisp detail that I had come to recognize from my iPad’s retina display.

I looked down at the keyboard with suspicion for no more than 4 or 5 seconds and when my eyes returned to the screen the OS was already loaded and almost iq option apk taunting me… as if to ask why I had the nerve to make it wait…

I was suspicious of this appearance of readiness so I sat there and waited another 15-20 seconds and nothing had changed… Was this thing really ready to go? Was I missing something?

Suspicious I grabbed the ‘Magic Mouse’ and it’s feel instantly appealed to me but I felt insecure about there by no scroll wheel or buttons… I didn’t know what I was doing so I approached things like an engineer might and began in the upper left corner.

Clicking on the Apple symbol I noticed the open to restart the computer… Still being suspicious of the whole startup process to begin with I opted to do that right away.

Again… in no more than 7 or 8 seconds I was in the OS and ready to rock. I wanted to see if there was something I was missing so I instantly began opening as many of the programs in the Dock as I could to see if there was the obvious performance impairment that Windows machines will typically have during the initial boot and loading stage… even with SSD’s.

There was none… Time to pour that third glass of whiskey.

I Can See, Oh My Dear Sweet Jesus I Can See!

The first thing I did was head to some familiar forums. Why? Not sure. Habit probably. But when I got there… I feel in love.

Everything was easy to read and despite knowing the the CSS/HTML/PHP/JS was all the same stuff the PC was rendering – everything seemed to fit on the page more neatly. Everything was easily to navigate and follow. There wasn’t the terrible eye fatigue and strain that I had so frequently become use to when visiting the same sites on my PC’s – which had wonderful 1080+ displays as well.

None the less, I spent hours reading forums, blogs, things I didn’t even care about just a few hours before.

I jumped into some of my site’s WordPress backends and continued to be equally impressed by the sharpness, user friendliness, the ease with which I could see and interact with on screen elements.

I know to a diehard PC guy, this probably reads like I’m Mac-fangirling, but there really is a difference. A huge difference. Gone was the fatigue and frustration that I was experiencing and it was instead replaced with something strange…

I didn’t just like using the iMac… I actually WANTED TO USE IT. There was something rewarding about using it, fulfilling almost.

As the fifth glass of Whiskey drew to an end and I heard my neighbors car door open and shut I knew that I had been up too late. In one final act of desperation to continue experiencing this new thing I decided to reinstall the OS and put everything under my Apple account.

To process was quick, easy, effortless… I decided that I should come back to this in the morning to see if I really still felt the same way.

Okay, Let’s See What The Real Problems Are…

The next morning I strolled into my office and looked at the iMac, almost in defiance. With all of my mental faculties about me I found myself returning to my strong PC mindset – quickly dismissing my previous night’s experiences as being entertained by a new toy. Surely these things would fade.

Cup of coffee in hand, I flicked the mouse and the iMac was on quickly again…

I decided that the time had come to look into this App store… to see what was in there. Was it all garbage? Was there anything useful?

What I found was a plethora of free or low cost apps that added functionality to OSX that I never would have dreamed of having with Windows. Curious, I began looking for the other big apps I might use frequently and quickly discovered than 99% of what I needed was already prebuilt for OSX.

Within 45 minutes of waking up I had reassembled a work station on my iMac that almost completely replaced my PC and with virtually no effort or cost.

There were a few things I was missing still – notably Notepad++ which I love and Paint.net which I also love. Then there were a few other odds and ends that I wanted, like Scrapebox and the like – but two purchases later I had Windows 7 on my Mac at moments notice, whenever I might need something I just couldn’t live without otherwise.

What MAC Did For My SEO Efforts

Within 12 hours I was now thrust from an existence of not being sure if I ever wanted to look at a computer again to loving using one.

It was bad, so bad in fact that I began to miss my Mac when I was doing normal things – pumping gas, making dinner or being out with friends….

Switching from a PC to a MAC completely changed how I looked at work. I unlocked my stuck mindset, removed the straps of frustration and gave me a new energy towards doing what I knew how to do.

I allowed me to get excited again about exploring these new things that Google was doing and thinking of new ways to tackle problems. All of this only got better of course as the Macbook Pro was purchased shortly there after. Then the Airport Time Capsule that I could use as a free 3TB cloud storage from anywhere I was… (Think about what you can do with 3TB of cloud storage… for free… that is totally yours and nobody else can see.)

Sick Of SEO? Get A Mac

While this post turned into more of a detailing of what I experienced … really what I want to leave with is that if you are feeling stuck by work and maybe even crushed by it… consider making a switch.

I’m not saying to go out and spend $2,000+ on a new iMac or Macbook Pro but check them out on eBay.

Get something with at least 8GB of Ram, a newer i5 and a retina display (<<IMPORTANT!)

See if it doesn’t maybe free you up a little bit and get you moving in some new directions. You might just be surprised…

I’ve been hanging around a bit lately and I’ve noticed a trend on a lot of BH forums. That is that their members are now beginning to create far more ‘authority sites’ than they had in the past.

I personally think this is a great move and there are several reasons for that.

First of all – as I noted back in my hummingbird analysis post, question/answer posts have really seem to fall in favor with Google’s synonym engine and the conversational search dynamic that mobile devices have since created (since queries are often spoken and not typed at a user terminal.)

Authority sites and question/answer posts go together like peanut butter and jelly. The fact is that posts which answer queries are exactly what an authority site should have – if it really is trying to be an authority in a niche.

While this is great for the user (and therefore Google would claim it is what they are looking for), it can also be great for the marketer.

The Marketer’s Edge

When someone comes to your site through a question-based query, you already know exactly what they are looking for. You might not know their exact motivation but you will probably be reasonably able to guess at it.

That puts you in a unique position of control…

This is a huge opportunity to key into someone’s problem or query and deliver a message – YOUR MESSAGE.

I’m not saying that it’s right to be a sleazy salesman. Just the opposite actually. I think it’s an opportunity to present yourself and an expert or authority on a topic and provide them with just what they were looking for.

By doing something good for them, you will be creating a transactional-relationship. That is to say that you are giving something to them and they will want to give you something back. It’s almost an obligation that the may feel… and then you can strike right then, when the iron is hot.

You’ve Got Your Hooks In

Think about it…

Someone comes to your with a question. They may have ‘asked’ the same question to a few other websites that failed to provide a fulfilling answer. If you can be ‘that one authority’ who provided not just the right answer, but the right answer in an engaging and intriguing way then you are giving them something valuable. Not just information but an experience as well.

Your goal should be to make them feel fulfillment, maybe even relief that they have what the wanted and the way they wanted it. You want those reward centers of the brain firing for them… think of your content like a piece of chocolate that provides them joy in the middle of uncertainty.

At the peak of this pleasure you need to ask them for something. I’m not saying that you should ask them to buy something… In fact that may be a horrible idea since it may erode the trust you just earned. Instead, get an email address…

I know, I know – it’s not like I’m breaking new ground here. Hell – you don’t even see an email subscription box on my blog. (I do that for a reason at this point.)

I’m just trying to walk you through the emotional process with them so that you know exactly what kind of content you should be delivering on your authority site if you are going to build one, that’s all.

So What About The Money

Well, this is where things fall apart unfortunately. While this new generation of so called “Black hats” has got a great thing going for them, they aren’t actually thinking like a marketer for the most part. They are thinking like publisher more or less, and that’s fine if you just love to write… I happen to like making money though.

Take this thread on BHW and you will see that the original posters intention is to make $75,000 a year from Adsense ads. He mentions that he has one other monetization method in mind but goes to no great length to define what exactly that may be.

Not everyone will click on adsense ads…

Well, that’s all well and good – but as others have pointed out – what happens when Google decides they don’t like his website anymore, or his backlinks or his ad position. He’s screwed, that’s what happens.

Now, I’m not knocking the guy and in fact I hope he has awesome success. What I am doing is drawing a line in the sand for you.

If you want to make an authority site, figure out why you want to do it first. Do you want to do it because you love writing articles and being a publisher or do you want to do it to make money?

If you’re goal, and I mean your REAL goal, is to make money then you need to tackle the monetization methodology upfront. None of this hope and pray that Adsense doesn’t ban you stuff… That doesn’t work in my book. In fact, it’s a complete newbie move.

If you are reading this page, then you are on GODOVERYOU.COM and that means that you don’t have the right to be a newbie anymore, got it?

So figure out the money side of it first.

Are These People Really Blackhat’s Anymore?

Not really.

Unless they are going to be using link spam and blog networks to rank their authority sites – they have basically become white hats. I’m fine with that, but let’s just keep our eyes on what things really are here…

So… Is there room for Blackhat’s in the authority site model?

YES!

I’ll probably be developing more on this later but in short, building large domains centered around a niche is nothing new. We just have to automate some of it and there are tools that do just that.

You see, internal links are still links. So, if you can create solid content upfront there’s nothing stopping you from autogenerating a category of not-so-hot video/comment posts that act as link donors towards your other priority pages for example.

I do this with Content Foundry on several domains and it has worked out really well. I scrape a bunch of videos with it, auto generate a few hundred words and guess what – there’s a new post.

Now, I don’t ‘Feature’ these posts of course. They just sit in some rarely visited category that would otherwise be tough to find on the site. But they do contribute links to other internal pages that improves the chances of those other pages to rank for their intended terms.

In Conclusion

Just kidding, there’s actually a ton of money in this for the smart blackhat. The only question is if they have the tools for the job.

I think this new move towards authority sites is a good one. It’s a shame that you only see it being discussed on BH boards for the most part, but it is what it is.

There’s still room for BH on these otherwise well intentioned authority sites – it’s just a matter of getting in there and doing it. Of course, at that point – why not just autogenerate the whole thing and cloak it? Oh, wait… yeah, we do that… and it works.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.