Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

For the longest time, I have emphasized the importance of keywords, editorial content, etc for customers of my web development business, http://www.bestplainwebpages.com who need to optimize their position with search engines.

In fact, a mandatory preliminary requirement is getting a search engine to index a web site correctly, and at the right time. On top of this timing issue, you will need to have sufficient interest in the web site queued up (on the part of outside parties) to ensure that the search engine program will return to the site after the site is initially indexed, as you require, when new information is added to the site or the site contents change.

Meeting this preliminary requirement is a tough task. Once a site is "crawled" by a search engine indexing application, the only factor that will, most likely, lead to a re-crawling of the site is a volume of outside interest in the contents of the web site. To get this interest, you've got to get the incoming links to the site that everyone always talks about, but never really explains.

The incoming links that count aren't going to come from other search engine listings. They are going to come from honest interest on the part of "high rank" web sites in the information on your site.

You will either have the customer base to whom you can send an invitation to come to your site, or else you will need to build visits to the web site through Press Releases, or stories that you publish (or that are published in the name of your web business). In short, to get the exposure you will need to have the exposure. Chicken or the egg, which comes first?

Have a contingency plan, such as a Press Release campaign at the ready should the campaign not work out.

© Mike Blonder, 2006, All Rights Reserved

The web has changed much, certainly since its beginnings in the late 1980s, and through its "boom town" phase in the mid 1990s. Back then, it was a rather easy process to get a web site indexed and promoted on the web by search engines, almost a "build it and they will come" (phrase is gratefully reproduced from the film "Field of Dreams") type of setting.

Now you can build it and "they" will come, but "they" will be no more than computer programs built to find blocks of text and images (along with the respective addresses for the blocks of text and images) on the Transmission Control Program/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) network called the web. These programs will then collect and index that information without any regard for whether you're ready for them to do so, or not; therefore, test whatever you have locally before you publish on the web.

Also, you must understand that there is no correlation between these programs finding your block of text and images and useful hits from human beings on your web site. There is no imperative for anything whatsoever to happen. Most all of the Search Engine Optimization rules that you will find on the web are no longer the case; just keep this in mind.

If your site has been found too soon by these programs, then what has been indexed will not produce the results from searches that your site fundamentally needs to attract human beings.

Of course, if you are willing to pay someone to do something about it, then you may or may not get a search engine or two, or more to actually show your site, but that is another story to be told at another time.

Since "web 1.0" has now matured into a pure business play, "you get what you pay for." Let me cut to the core of this: blasting your address out to tons of search engines via so-called traffic building services is generally a waste of your precious cash. Better to spend your dough on Press Releases or a Blog to get some information out there, along with your web site address that will attract human beings to your site to review the information. If these humans like what they find and start to link to your pages, then you may start to get some promotion working for you through the search engines.

I work with this stuff every day through my web businesses, Best Plain Web Pages and Industrial Strength Ethernet and for my clients. I'm speaking from first hand experience. I review access logs on a regular basis and can tell a hit coming from a search engine query from a mile away. They are precious. Take it from someone who knows . . .

© Mike Blonder, 2006, All Rights Reserved

On Monday of this week (April 30th), the print edition of the Wall Street Journal® ran an article in its Small Business section on Search Engine Marketing, "In Search of Traffic" by Kelly R. Spors. This article was, in fact, the feature article of the entire section of the paper. Most of the "news" detailed by the article is, however, rather old and stale. "To be successful online, [small companies] must learn to harness one of the Web's most powerful tools: search engines." Duh. This has not been news since, let's conservatively say 1999, 8 years ago.

As well, Kelly R. Spors, suggests a strong ambivalence towards consultants (like me) who work with small companies to improve their rankings with search engines: Spors writes that "[e]ven worse, big competitors can afford to pour lots of resources into [search engine marketing] -- putting small companies at a bigger disadavantage" which is to say that the investment often pays off. In other words the big competitors are making the right move working with SEO types. But later in the same article Spors cautions: "businesses should be careful when hiring an SEO, because not every company offers the same expertise, says Ryan Allis, chief executive of Virante, a Durham, N.C., search-marketing consulting firm." This ambivalence reappears a bit later when Spors notes that "[t]hen there are fees. The prices for SEOs can be bewildering to many small business owners,. Costs can range from $500 a month to several thousand-for what often seem to be almost identical services".

Kelly Spors, I would suggest to you that successful search engine marketing is not the simple process that you suggest when you prescribe the following medicine: "Add lots of relevant descriptions to the site's text, including the search phrases for which you want a high ranking. Have other sites link to it. Offer a blog or other informational content for customers." As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, your prescription, for most sites, will end up a big goose egg (meaning a zero).

Bottom line, SEO expertise keeps pace with search engine technology and, therefore is a constantly moving target. What worked yesterday will not work today, etc. Never forget that you get what you pay for. If a business expects to sell a $1,000,000 or more, online, then, I think, an SEO budget of 5% ($50,000) per year makes sense.

On another note, I was surprised that the writer was not familiar with the "long tail" search notion, referring, instead, to a strategy of using outlying keywords, sufficiently off the track and down the list of keywords for a type of business, but specific enough to attract qualified clicks. If you are going to write for a general audience, then you ought to do them a favor and look into the concept and deliver the "skinny" in a form that the audience can run with. Kind of a drag.

The Journal has done this before, meaning the paper has written on online marketing topics from a very general standpoint. I deal with this stuff day-to-day via my business, best plain web pages and can say that the long tail search stuff does work. I've reviewed logs and have noted highly specific searches for a customer of mine that has a low Page Rank, but is nonetheless booking business.

Picking out of pocket keywords that are somehow quite specific is a valuable tool for smaller businesses to come to the table with some revenue fairly quickly after the launch of an online business. Double surprising is the fact that the title meta tag, together with the file name (whatever.htm or html) itself are heavily weighted; therefore put the specifics of your keywords right there and see what happens.

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Express Written Permission by the Writer

Lee Gomes writes for the "Portals" column, which runs in the "Marketplace" section of the Wall Street Journal®. Read his article, "PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait for a Huge Success" if you can. The article was published in the Wednesday, May 23, 2007 issue of The Journal.

This "PlentyOfFish" story is the kind of tale that we all want to hear. Markus Frind, a 28 year old online marketer located where he wants to be, in Vancouver, British Columbia, is making lots of dough online and all by himself. His site, PlentyOfFishruns just about all by itself. His staff amounts to one individual, himself. How much revenue? According to Gomes, "the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year."

Gomes looks further and notes more of what I want to hear: "How does he do it? In large part, by keeping things simple." Music to my ears. Check out Best Plain Web Pages for a look at how I see simplicity working for successful online sites.

So I went and visited the site myself and noted a couple of things: 1) Mr. Frind makes good use of CSS: The simple ad list that takes up most of every page is controlled by CSS and table tags (which do not want to go away) 2) Mr. Frind uses scripts when he needs to: for example to quickly capture page view information via Javascript (AJAX) and .asp for membership and 3) Page addresses are simple URLS without funny characters.

On the marketing side, his objective is clearly the best monetization that he can get from his site. The theme is very popular, dating, with a very, very large market. The revenue generator is advertising. The strategy is twofold: 1) as Mr. Gomes notes, "via Google's small text ads," and through 'affiliate marketing.'

The last bit, affiliate marketing, is of interest to me as I recently dipped my toe into the water of an online marketing approach, StomperNet that preaches affiliate marketing all day. I have mixed feelings about affiliate marketing; however, if you want to make money online, it would seem from Mr. Frind's achievement that the combination of a big, popular and pressing market (theme), together with affiliate marketing will make for lots of money.

Go get 'em

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved. No Reprint Without Prior Approval

Today's New York Times Online Edition ran an article on Google and it's search algorithm: "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine" by Saul Hansell. I read the article and was at a loss to find a lot new, despite Mr. Hansell's claim that his day at Google's headquarters afforded key engineers an opportunity to "[explain] more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works."

What was new for me was the apparent reality (implicit to what Mr. Hansell has to say, but not explicitly said) that Page Rank is merely a contributor to the order of results served up by Google's systems in response to queries. I got to this point from Mr. Hansell"s statement that "Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages. . . " If he has, in fact, gone beyond Page Rank, then I am not as concerned for clients with slipping Page Rank as I would otherwise be.

But Page Rank is not the point of this entry. The point is that, from my perch, Mr. Hansell's suggestion that Google has substantially improved the responses it serves up to queries, is (1) not the case, or (2) fine, but we still have lots and lots and lots of improvements to make. If either (1) or (2) are correct, there are plentiful opportunities in this online search arena.

Consider this query:

what does "sourceid=navclient" mean

What I am looking for is a definition of the phrase "sourceid=navclient." This phrase appears frequently in access logs that I review.

Google's systems never came close to serve a result at all pertinent to the query. The first result, Sacramento Blogs | SacStarts merely includes the exact phrase because the blog is now findable with Google.

So the vaunted algorithm can't do much with the term what; or with the phrase what does; or with the "distributed" phrase what does <> mean
(with a specific "word", "sourceid=navclient" plugged in the middle, within the opposite angle brackets)

In fact, the big picture is that Google does not serve results accurately to human language queries and, in fact, tries to fight the process by prodding posters not to include natural phraseology. For example, if you include the words "a, the, to", etc, within your query phrase to post in conformance with natural sentence structure, the systems' response will tell you that you needn't bother with the words since they are already included. This response is, on the one hand, smug and, on the other highly negative as human beings tend to communicate in sentences. In the case of my query, an inclusion of a question mark at the end did not help. Google's systems still did not "get it". The fact that the query syntax conformed to the syntax of a question was completely ignored by the lexical program.

In sum, unfortunately Mr. Hansell sees a big deal in some stuff that is still far short of the big deal that we all need to improve our searching online.

The flip side is that there is still tons of room for some entrepeneurs who may want to step up to the plate and duke it out with Godzilla.

©, 2007, Mike Blonder. All Rights Reserved. No Reprint without Prior Permission.