At last, I can find enough time to update our blog with a few recent discussions I had with some fellow search engine optimization experts, thanks to Jody, John, and Motoko for their time and the opportunity. I’ve included the question I’d like best, and added a link for you to follow if you wish to read the rest of these interviews…
[John Myers] What advice would you give to a small business planning on developing SEO activity from scratch?
You came to right place J. OK, seriously, the first step is to clarify what you are trying to sell and to whom. Make sure you get it right because everything else depends on it, and I have seen many small business owners enlightened by having to go through the SEO process. In fact, I think it should be very much part of the value proposition coming from SEO experts, as there’s a chance that you’re the closest thing to a marketing agency they have ever hired. An excellent resource for this that we feature in the SEO Bootcamp at SEO Samba is Pragmatic
Marketing
Read the rest of the interview here with John here: http://jons-domain.blogspot.com/2009/02/rhythm-and-seo-combined-jon-myers.html
[Motoko Hunt] SEO is no longer just about the web site. Blog, video sharing and so many social media applications are out there. I am sure that it is getting to be very challenging to all the site owners especially to small-medium businesses with limited budget and manpower. Any advice on where to start?
A number of applications (.http://www.twhirl.org/, http://ping.fm, http://friendfeed.com/ ) have hit the marketplace recently that seek to aggregate social channels into a single broadcasting interface. While interesting and useful to their target users, most focus on building as large of a distribution network as possible for individual mass-market users.
We address this challenge differently with SEO Samba and focus on the needs of small and medium business web marketers and giving additional ammunition to our SEO firm partners. We see organic search as a field increasingly going beyond text results indeed. Social applications, news, blogs, video are all “free-to-play” marketing channels but are costly to research, select, manage and integrate with other marketing endeavors. And from a SERP standpoint, there is more to it. As Google puts it in their FAQ, “Social media is great! But there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.” At SEO Samba, we discriminate and prioritize channels to focus on the ones that have the potential to generate highest volume of direct traffic and business activity while improving your rankings in search engines. In addition, we address the manpower challenge faced by SMB by providing a high level of integration and minimizing web marketers’ content creation efforts. For example, our first universal search module (provided free of charge) is a news module that provides a Google News-ready structure, news articles that are search optimized according to your chosen best practices, search friendly scrollers, automated RSS feeds creation, integrated with email newsletter platforms such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response etc. You can publish news across all your sites with a single click then aggregate news items across web sites to create unique newsletters and market to a cross segment of your email list, and, finally, save these newsletters with one click to any of your web sites. Each of our upcoming modules will provide the same level of details to ensure web site visibility, while expanding the least time possible from a user, content writer, marketer and SEO experts’ perspectives.
Read the rest of the interview with Motoko here: http://ajpr.com/wordpress/conferences/michael-leconte
[Jody Nimetz]: Many suggest that SEO is dead? Do you agree or is SEO just finding its legs?
[Michel Leconte]: At this juncture, I believe that SEO is a by-product of “freedom of enterprise” expression. The day it dies, it will be an indicator that we loose our freedom to engage in a free-to-enterprise system. In effect, SEO will die the day there’s only paid-for-placement. However, that business model, like Goto.com found out in its time, is not sustainable in an open network. Only controlled Internet access could maintain an artificial order, de facto restraining listing in such ways. Microsoft and AOL could not impose their vision of the world back in the early days, and no one can seriously contemplate proposing this model to consumers again at this stage and expect them to accept it willingly. Now, do not get me wrong here. I’m not saying that if SEO exists as an industry in your country, then you can establish the fact that you live in a democratic state.
China with its developing SEO industry is an illustration of this. I’m just saying that if SEO exists and then dies off, I’d be worried. I’d be worried because I can imagine a landscape where search engine queries would be made by other forms of artificial intelligence based on an expressed or implied need from a human. And I still see a need for SEO on the seller side. Closer to home, I can see a decrease in search engines crawling web sites to retrieve content and use RSS coupled with an updated and harden version of Ping to display updates in real time while weighing interest from social venues metrics. But even then, this trade, albeit with a different name, would survive.
As long as free-to-use, relatively efficient large distribution channels are available, sellers will compete to position a product or a service in front of buyers. Even channel fragmentation from personalization technologies will not prevent SEO, or whatever acronym its successor will bear, from existing. It will merely create sub-specializations by consumer profiles…following traditional marketing agency segmentation models (GenX, babyboomers specialists..etc..) only in a more refined way.
SEO gives the impression that it’s perpetually looking for its bearings, and in a reactive mode. This is to be expected from a trade that is living off understanding changes occurring in application’s algorithm controlled by other entities. Indeed, the relationship is not one of equals. For SEO to perform, one needs to understand the interest of search engines. On that count, I’m observing that their concern for SEO stems from a quality assurance rather than a business development angle. The mere fact that our designated interlocutor at the largest search engine is the head of the spam team (even if he’s a great evangelist) is telling in that sense. Thanks to our previous experiences working at search engine companies, SEO Samba has integrated this dimension to make websites compliant with published guidelines at the outset. I think there’s also an opportunity for less of a schizophrenic relationship between search engines and SEO, but that’s a different discussion altogether.
Read the rest of the interview with Jody here: http://www.marketing-jive.com/2009/02/interview-with-michel-leconte-ceo-of.html
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