Kikabink News

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I got spammed by an SEO consulting company yesterday. I get hundreds of spam emails per day, but this particular email stood out because it was sent by an Australian company based in my own city. A company that should have known better. (I’m tempted to name and shame them, but I really don’t want to give them any link value!)

Since we offer Internet marketing services, seeing this email made me MAD. It’s actions like this that give our industry a bad name. But I’m even more stunned at how DUMB this company is to send out generic emails offering its SEO services. There are so many things wrong with this picture, I couldn’t possibly list them all in this email, but let’s discuss three aspects that should have been obvious:

1. Sending out spam is against the law. I believe sending unsolicited commercial email is illegal in the United States and other countries. It certainly is in Australia, and has been for many years now. As a prospective client: could I really trust a company that so blatantly breaks the law?

2. Sending out spam is wrong from an Internet marketing point of view. It shows disrespect to Internet users and also makes me wonder: what would this company do regarding SEO if I did engage them? What kind of black or grey hat tactics would they use that might jeopardize my business?

3. The email itself was not personally addressed to anyone at our firm, and was a generic offer to provide SEO services. Had the sender bothered to look at our website they would have noticed that we were a COMPETITOR. One operating in the same city and country at that!

Actually, there’s a fourth issue worth mentioning…

4. Out of curiosity I visited the company’s website. The headline read: “Guaranteed Lowest Prices for Web Marketing & SEO”. Now, maybe there is a market for “cheap” web marketing and search engine optimization services. But to me, that’s a bit like a law firm advertising itself with the same line: “Guaranteed Lowest Prices for Legal Advice.”

Um… do you want the cheapest legal advice around… or do you want the best, most cost-effective legal advice that delivers the results you want? The same principle applies to Internet marketing services – especially SEO. Do you want to pay the cheapest prices… or do you want to get the best results for your money?

Cost-effective… value for money… affordable. They’re all terms that may be appropriate. But “Guaranteed Lowest Prices” sounds like their running a discount store. Not the kind of company I would want as my trusted SEO advisor…

Amazon is introducing a payment service for other online marketers and retailers to use.

Called “Checkout by Amazon” the service will let other websites use Amazon’s one-click ordering system, calculate sales tax and shipping costs, and let their customers track the shipment of their purchases.

Checkout by Amazon, along with the more basic, Amazon Simple Pay, which was launched on Tuesday, will compete with PayPal and Google Checkout, among other payment services. For both services, Amazon will charge a transaction fee that starts at 2.9 percent of the order amount, plus 30 cents per order (the fee goes down to 1.9 percent for sites doing more than $100,000 a month in sales). For transactions less than $10, Amazon charges 5 percent plus 5 cents.

While large retailers – likely to regard Amazon as a major competitor - may be reluctant to adopt the service, Checkout by Amazon (or Amazon Simple Pay), may appeal to plenty of small sites eager to provide customers with more payment options.

Sources: Brad Stone, “Amazon Offers Other Sites Use of Its Payment Service”, The New York Times, July 30, 2008, Erick Schonfeld, “Amazon Outsources Its Checkout Cart”, Tech Crunch, July 30, 2008

Well, in his blog post, Amit Singhal DOES explain the three main principles governing Google’s search technologies. And explaining the principles is probably as revealing as Google is willing to be…

So what are the three principles governing Google’s ranking technologies? They are as follows:

1. Understanding Pages

Google aims to understand pages by, firstly, associating important concepts to a page even if these aren’t obvious on the page. It also seeks to distinguish between important and less important words in the page, as well as the freshness of the information on the page.

2. Understanding Queries

Google aims to understand what users are looking for - beyond what they type into Google’s search box - by utilizing such technologies as its spelling suggestion system, synonyms system, and concept analysis system. This last system aims to identify critical concepts in the search query in order to deliver more relevant results.

3. Understanding Users

Here Google aims to return results people really want, not just what they seem to want by virtue of their search query. To this end, Google uses its localization system, a personalization technology, and other technologies to help interpret users’ real motivations.

So what does all this tell Internet marketers and search engine optimizers? Everything and nothing.

“Everything” because Amit’s post reinforces the fact that Google’s main aim (apart from global domination) is to deliver relevant results. Your best bet in optimizing your website(s) for given keywords and keyphrases is to offer content that is relevant to those search words.

Yet it also tells us nothing… simply because it tells us that Google’s main aim is to deliver relevant content.

We already know that Google wants to give people search results that are relevant to what they’re looking for!

What we don’t know is why and how Google’s algorithm reaches the conclusion that our competitor’s websites are more or less relevant than ours. And why this conclusion keeps on changing based on… what?

Sure, SEO experts have theories. Theories that are probably close to the truth.

But Google certainly ain’t gonna lay it out for us any time soon!

Source: Amit Singhal, “Technologies Behind Google Ranking”, Google Blog, July 16, 2008

No Internet marketer – well, no Internet marketer with at least a passing interest in search engine marketing – should be without:

1. The Firefox web browser - whether Firefox 2.0 or 3.0 (the latest version); or

2. The free SEO tools and software available from Aaron Wall’s Seobook.com website. These are available as plugins for Firefox.

I’ll cover some of these tools in future issues of Kikabink News. For now, though, let me explain why Aaron’s RankChecker tool is a must-have.

To put it simply, if you want to know how your website ranks for one or more keywords… RankChecker will tell you. You basically type in your domain name, type in however many keywords you wish to check, click “Start” and RankChecker will tell you where you rank (if at all) in Google (US and international), Yahoo Search, and Microsoft Live. You can also export the results in CSV format (i.e. to save in your spreadsheet program).

Click here to download or learn more about RankChecker (yes, it works with Firefox 3.0).

If you haven’t already, click here to download Firefox 3.0 (I’ve heard a couple people say it’s buggy but it seems fine to me… and it certainly leaves its main competitor in the dust).