Anyway, long since forgotten, after a tweet by @searchmartin about archive.org (a site I’m very familiar with) – I went looking and the whole wmv file was on there for download which really surprised me. This was made (if my memory is correct) on a Pentium 200 running Adobe Premiere with a Pinnacle breakout box and winamp

I truly wish I can take credit for the music, one of the best version’s of Pachabel’s Canon I’ve ever heard (and was done before Canon Rock before anybody points it out)

Anyway….enjoy

A video project I made in 1999 – Check it out! is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

I was reminded of this as the ladies in my office are going crazy wanting tickets for the upcoming Madonna concert, where you can buy a preorder pass allowing you to buy tickets before they go on sale for the generous price of £15 (which they’re thinking of doing).

Standard large tour ticket selling tactics:-

1. Announce 2-3 nights only
2. Announce presale to fans / mobile phone / credit card customers … sometimes you can even get them to pay for the privilege … sell them all the less than ideal tickets that will be hard to sell in the real sale a few days later, maybe scatter the odd front row seat in there so that they don’t smell a rat
3. Open public sale, only put a few hundred tickets on sale for each night, grab newspaper headlines by claiming to be the fastest sellout ever.
4. Meanwhile sell all the best front block seats to legalised touts that regularly book blocks and pay in one go so minimal credit card costs
5. If really daring and uncaring, cut out some of the legalised tout companies and set aside all the decent tickets into “hospitality packages” and sell them yourself for fan-rapingly insane sums of money
6. Announce more “extra” nights by popular demand even though it’s literally impossible to book extra venue nights, lights, sound, staff, insurance, licence, transport etc without days or weeks of negotiations. Again only release a few hundred tickets for each one to maintain “sellout”
7. Repeat (6) every couple of hours or days until gullible public’s appetite finally slows
8. Enjoy having public’s money in the bank for best part of a year or more
9. Release all the remaining seats in a quiet steady trickle or in blocks whenever the talent is in the newspaper or appearing in some chat show
10. If the last tickets are proving hard to sell once the tour start nears, then use “new seats available due to stage plan having now being finalised” as being the excuse for loud public announcement of loads of seats being available for supposedly sell out gigs.

The general public seem to fall for this time after time…What happened to first come first serve ticket buying that still happens for the theatre.

How to sell out a large concert tour is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

90% of quality incoming links are paid links.

Let me explain. Back in the olden days when Google was starting out and it first started looking at the linkscape, I would say that 95% of the links coming to any site were completely natural which was why Google’s algo worked so well. People did things for the love of doing them, created content for the love of it. Someone came across it, thought “hey, that’s cool” and linked to it. What a great idea and what a lovely innocent time.

Fast forward to 2011 and what I’ve realised is that the linkscape that affects people’s rankings now is 90% bought. I’m not talking in the somewhat callous “Here is £300 for a link on your mozrank 8 website homepage” although obviously that can be a very effective way of link building for some but if you consider the amount of time and money that goes into proper outreach and link building.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Blogging competitions

I send out an email, tweet, letter, whatever my form of outreach suggesting that someone’s blog has been shortlisted for a Blogging prize, here is a lovely badge you can use…You’ve been shortlisted, accept by putting the badge on your site linking back….You could win an iPad 2. At that point, are they linking to my content out of the goodness of their hearts, because they think it’s good? No of course, not, they’re linking because they get to say they’ve been shortlisted for a prize and they could win an iPad 2.

The link is paid, cost:

• an hour or two to make the badges (assuming you have the skill, or that’s outsourced to a designer)
• an hour to research who is to be “shortlisted” (not based upon the content of their blogs of course but based upon the authority of their site)
• a couple of hours writing the emails and “managing” the competition
• and an iPad 2 at about 300 quid.

Infographics

THE way to build links in 2010/2011….the infographic. A nice graphic that gives complicated research and information in a nice easy to follow format. The concept isn’t new of course, infographics or “diagrams” as they used to be known predate the internet but creating them for link building is fairly new. Assuming nobody creates an infographic for fun, lets again look at cost involved.

• Identifying the research you wish to portray in your infographic – Maybe a brainstorming session…Time, a couple of hours.
• The cost of getting it made, assuming you don’t have an in house salaried designer, this is an outsourcing job and could cost you a couple of hundred quid.
• The outreach, spending the time (and one would assume the salary cost of the person doing the outreach)
• The follow up – mopping up who’s using the infographic and making sure they link.

Were those incoming links free then? Doesn’t seem so to me!

Again though, it works, here’s a stonking example of an infographic as linkbait:

Evolution of Google

Notice how it’s easily shared and embedded with their anchor text “Online PhD”, This is obviously done to get links, the site has nothing to do with Google history, but by Zeus it’s a good example! Was it free to make, of course it wasn’t!

A widget

Creating a handy embeddable widget with back link. First, ask yourself. Are you creating this because it’s a useful resource and giving it to other webmasters to use free of charge out the goodness of your own heart? It’s unlikely…You’re doing it to get backlinks on hundreds of sites using the anchor text that you want.

How much is it going to cost you to create and market this widget. Again that all depends on whether you have the resource in house, but it’s not going to be a cheap venture. Then you have to market the widget and do the outreach so there’s some added time, and assuming that your time isn’t free, there’s extra cost there. Again, these don’t seem like free links. It may be very effective, but there’s definitely payment there, you’ve definitely paid for these links in both time and money.

Guest blog posting

It’s amazing just how quickly you can become an expert in something if there’s a potential guest blog with embedded links in the content on offer. Whether you research it yourself or outsource it, you’re not doing it to give value to that blog, you’re doing it to get back linksm, using the anchor text you want, on a high quality site, seemingly for free.

Assuming the blog owner hasn’t contacted you and offered it, you’ve engaged in outreach which costs money. The content doesn’t doesn’t write itself, so you’re either paying in your own time in research, or to outsource it to a writer. You’re not offering the blog owner 300 quid for a link, but the link you end up with may have cost you that much, if not more.

Conclusion

Basically, the way I’m starting to see it now is if you’re doing something with the express purpose of gaining back links, then you’re paying for the links. Whether that’s a payment in your time or actual money for outsourcing, We spend time and money on content creation whether that’s written content, graphical content, widgets, badges and other such staples of the SEO industry. You’re paying for the outreach as well, in either time or money. Maybe we’re incentivising them with the possibility of a prize whether material or “feel good ego stroking”

We put a nice veneer on it, we as white-hat SEOs would never think of buying links. After all, that’s outside of Google’s webmaster guidelines, it’s evil and black hat to buy links.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with anything we do as white hat SEOs, proper outreach is great and of course, it is a white hat way to link build but I think we should be honest with ourselves and say it.

Good link building is paid link building, it costs time and money to do properly and there is no such thing these days as a free quality link*

* Free links do exist

90% of quality links are paid links…full stop is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

For the last 12-18 months, high street store Boots has been targeting women in it’s advertising campaigned using the slogan “Here come the girls”, fine, whatever. What I object to is just how much their advertising relies on portraying men as dumb, stupid, “rubbish”, lazy and hypochondriacs. Their advertising is blatant sexism towards men.

There’s no doubt that a similar advertising campaign with the gender roles reversed would have been banned by now for being sexist and perpetuating gender stereotypes, so I have to wonder why such advertising is seen as acceptable when men are the target of the sexism?

Their latest sexist abomination where a man’s daughters save Christmas from “rubbish Dad” has at this point been the straw that broke the camels back, and to be perfectly honest, any daughter that buys her mother “Fantasy” by Britney, really does not have the right to call anybody “rubbish”

What Boots have to remember is that although their customer base is predominantly women, a large proportion will be the men that they are insulting on a daily basis. When I buy fragrance for my other half this Christmas, I will not be doing it at Boots but at a store that doesn’t insult me and my gender. They should perhaps consider that a large proportion of “gifts” that are bought at Boots this Christmas, will be being bought by men.

I have set up a Boycott Boots campaign over on Facebook – here’s the link: Boycott Boots until they change their sexist advertising campaigns and look forward to watching the group grow as more and more men (and hopefully women) say no to blatant sexism from a major high street retailer.

“Here comes the girls” – Here comes blatant sexism – Boycott Boots campaign is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

Of course it’s another big stinking myth.

Repeat after me:

No incoming link can harm your website’s rankings!

Whether that link comes from a paid source, a dodgy source, a legitimate source, a porn site, a viagra site, a gaming site, thousands of comment spam links. No matter what dodgy link getting method that is used, the worst thing that will happen is that Google will simply discount that link in your backlink profile.

• The concept of Googlebowling although often talked about has not been proven, no high quality sites have been successfully bowled out of the rankings.
• To successfully bowl a site out of Google would require more than incoming spammy links
• It would require:
• Millions of incoming spammy links created very quickly
• Millions of hidden doorway pages created very quickly
• Website cloaking and other black hat tricks

It would cost upwards of $100k to successfully Googlebowl a site and if the site has any authority whatsoever, it would be impossible.

Incoming links from spammy websites can harm your rankings. #seo is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

and you know what, I think he has a point, we’ve taken to using the word awesome to mean:

• That’s quite clever
• Good use of programming skills to achieve a desired outcome
• I managed to create links by undertaking this simple process
• That’s kinda neat

So what is worthy of awe in the SEO world?

In my opinion, if I’m truly honest with myself, not a lot.

There are a lot of people that are worthy of respect in the SEO world, the pioneers of our industry. Those that help us be understood as an industry. What some of these people can do is impressive and very clever, they live and breathe our industry and a lot of them are very groovy people to spend some time and have a beer with but i would say they’re more “kinda cool”, the SEO Hipsters if you will than truly awesome.

There are tried and tested techniques and processes and the experiments that people run to see if what we think works “actually works” – Again that’s kinda cool, is it truly awesome though, worthy of awe?

There’s impressive tools that can give you unbelievable data on a url in a heartbeat, who links, how powerful, what’s it about, who do they link to, who owns the domain etc etc etc….Very impressive stuff and you can admire the tool’s designers and what they’ve achieved, but the tools themselves aren’t really awesome.

I would say donating time and resource and SEO skill to a small budget-constrained charity which then increases their donations by 500% and saves lives…Now that would be awesome! (and I’m happy to say that there are a number of SEO companies doing just that)

So I hereby swear on a printed copy of Google’s webmaster guidelines that I will not use the term awesome  from now on, unless it truly is worthy of awe!

What exactly is worthy of being called #awesome is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

We’re starting with a story

Kevin Richardson invented the speed camera lottery

Persuassion is a more powerful motivator than compulsion

If you’re in the speed limit, you get put into a lottery to gain the money generation by the speed camera by all the people who went over it.

It decreased the average speed from 32kmph to 25kmph

In italy, you start with points and lose them when you get caught speeding

Getin.com

It’s had 1 million users, sent out a pile of stickers

the platform allows yo to check in, make recommendations, how can they make a profit sending out stickers. It’s an advertising platform for the film and TV industry giving data and they’re selling marketing data. People are getting stickers for completing things

Gamification – Using game mechanics to motivate peopel to perform actions on your website

Game mechanics 101

• You need a points system
  Points are powerful There are experience points and reputation points. Points can earn you more money based on their reputation.
• You need leaderboards
  You need a leaderboard to show them where they rank compared to others in the gaming system
  Check out Bunchball’s nitro platform

Microsoft use game mechanics to help users learn their products, giving them rewards

• You need levels, Linkedin do this to reward people to complete your profile allowing them to get more data to then sell on
• Badges
  Badges are simple rewards in the system, People may talk about unpredictable rewards giving
• Virtual currency/virtual goods
  People spend money on virtual stuff

You have to start with a great product

• I’mOK
  Check in based platform for children, there are points for checking in, and rewards
• Rewards with status is a powerful motivator
• Create signups/sales with loss aversion
  Prople put more effort into avoiding loss, than in gaining
•  Codeacademy – Has a badge system, points system, levels and htey help people learn – loss aversion. They allow people to go part way through the system without forcing register, then ask to register to keep a badge
• Help people drive their business
• Generate reviews
  Netcars has a badge and points system to reward actions important to their business. They needed more reviews and ratings and implemented a system to encourage and measure this. Leading to expert status
• Incrase signups to your site
  Incentivise signups
• Rewards for gifting.
  Give a gift of virtual currency and if the person you gave it to uses it, we’ll give you a t shirt
• Reward users for creating content. Check out Lockerz.com
• Use gamification to generate links
  Encourage people to drop a link for
• We could increase social shares
•  Use it to get your questions answers

Reward Users for the behaviours that are critical to the growth of the business.

Learn how to motivate them

Gamification by @richardbaxter from #searchlove is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

No matter what, it can work.

On the other hand “That will work” doesn’t work

The fun part is trying tofigure where the line is for you without crossing it.

A link analysis can help with lots of things and it looks a bit chaotic. With structure it looks much better. Allows you to do stuff rather than make the reports and do nothing.

Make your own tools, because you know what you like. Which is great if you have the time to.

No link building process is the same.

1. Competitor Identification

• Find out who your competitors are
• Searching is wrong. A lot of large sites are help back by technical issues. They’re out there but you don’t see them yet.
• To find out the stuff below the surface, make your own tool
• Allows you to spend more time
• PPC
• client input
• similarsites.com
• alexa related sites
• social sites
• industry publications
• related searches
• realted operator in Google
• Google suggest

2 Gathering & Processing

• Do your own thing, use pretty tools or the more industrial approach which can be overwhelming
• Let machines do the dirty work
• Basic information sheet
• Import filtered OSE .csv exports
• Switch to dashboard worksheet

Charts alone don’t do anything, you need to interpret it

Spot the extremes, Is it helping them, is it worth it, is it worth the effort/risk to try it out yourself.

4. Start analysing

It is your job to find out why these charts are not the same

Look at what’s different about the links and investigate what’s different and if something they’re doing is working, replicate it. Look at other signals too, social, anchors and relevancy.

You can rank without getting the right anchor text. How relevant is the link, are the keywords I’m targetting in the title tags of the page that’s linking.

Look at link pattern growth and whats causing so many websites to link to them

Look at quality spread (page authority)

Take a look at the top 10 anchor texts, shows where people are focusing, even if they’re ranking well in your niche, they could be targetting other places

Only analyse the required elements, don’t just finish a checklist

pretty charts are  nice, action points are much better

Awesome, we’re being given the dashboard….sorry to people not here who won’t get it

The charts are not the important bit, it’s the action

Competative Link Analysis by @wiep #searchlove is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

Starting off with the history of Google but more about the results than the homepage.

We’re looking at personalisation of the results and just how much it changes and search has evolved from a 2d search (keyword and time) to a 4d search (keyword, user profile, time and location)

Brief view of Siri on the iphone 4s and how cool it is

We’re looking now at location search

It’s not just solomo (social, local mobile)

and bringing click stream data into the mix.

Onto facebook, showing me stuff it thinks I like (everyone have a look at edgerank) in the main section and all the crap goes in the left.

How do you discover things when it only shows you things it thinks you’ll like.

This is all great right, it’s about putting relevant information in front of you.

Facebook describes it’s advertisers as word of mouth by scale, talking about th “like” speaking to brand advertisers offering emotional connection and brand recall

Google +1s can actually reduce ctr as it reduces quality score.

Is only seeing things we want right? Would we only see things that make us feel comfortable rather than things we need to see or know about (interesting point)

The danger is social media becomes an echo chamber showing us things you 0nly want to see.

As consumers, we want the product we don’t know yet, if we;re only being fed things we’ve seen before, how does that happen?

But we don’t want things that challenge our beliefs

We need new ways of categorising.

Better than “people I like” would be “People like me”

Amazon recommendations work like this and don’t make an echo chamber

We’re now talking abotu Hunch. It plays you music based upon questions you answer. The suggestion is plugging something similar into search.

We can sell advertising based upo n this model

You can use data to provide an incredibly accurate profile of the consumer to show them the right adverts allowing them to show adverts at the right time to the right person.

Promoted tweets will show adverts based upon what it thinks I’m interested in.

Facebook shows the social graph allowing it to become the largest ad network showing targetted adverts.

Have to say, this is a very impressive presentation with the faux hand gestures showing the movies….very clever with the TV of the future

We’re now onto cookies and the eprivacy act.If you have a website that reaches out to or markets to another of the european countries, you have to comply now.

Germany banned the “like” button. The information Officer in Ireland needs to decide on these things.

Conclusions

If you want to rank, you need to get social and search results don’t matter

You need social context as you need engagement, as it shapes personalisation

Personalisation, Profiles & Privacy by @ciaranj #searchlove is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward

I’m not sharing this Awesome!!!! They’re really giving up some awesome shit

Psych!!!

Head to Head Give it up at #searchlove is a post from: SEO-Ward by Jim Seward