Famous Marketer Seth Godin Gives Bad Seo Advice
If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, you probably don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a half dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.” He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the world. Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners. I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a strong response.
First let’s go over his position. His post entitled “Shortcuts That Aren’t So Short” compares SEO to taking short cuts and basically makes the case you see in the following quote:
“Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags?… Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.”
Unfortunately, his position is misleading and can be potentially deadly for your business. I don’t need to use a theoretical example this time. This problem is so widespread that I’m going to give a REAL life example I worked on THIS week. That’s right THIS WEEK! It contradicts all the major purists’ statements against SEO, including Seth Godin’s. One of my weekly projects is for a financial advisor that just launched a new website and blog a month ago. The author is a former newspaper journalist; and he’s off to a prolific blogging start (he posts daily) and his articles are EXCELLENT. His current traffic level is next to 0.
The problem is his blog is designed incorrectly. It uses the same title on all the pages and none of his posts target specific keywords. Additionally, the blog doesn’t ping anywhere when new posts are added, so none of his posts are showing up on any of the blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search. There are other issues as well, but that’s a simple beginning of what I’ll be working on with his site.
Basically his blog is invisible and nothing except fixing the design problems and targeting keywords is going to change that. He could continue to write all the GREAT posts he wants, but no one will be reading them. Why? Google has only indexed his front page and is never going to rank any of his posts for anything. He has great content, but no one’s reading it. What does he need? SEO. While I don’t like using that term, it is appropriate in this instance: he needs an SEO expert to rework his blogging strategy so his posts and blog rank on Google and drive new readers and new potential customers to his site. In the next month I’ll post detailed stats so my readers can see the gigantic traffic increases that are going to result DIRECTLY from my work with his site.
Not every example has to involve new sites or even significant design changes to make profitable gains in the search engine results pages. I recently changed 5 lines in the .htaccess and robots.txt for a particular website. That’s right, just 5 lines of code. It resulted in traffic increases of 20% with the raw traffic being 200 more DAILY visitors from Google. That’s a lot of traffic from changing 5 lines. So what happened? I told Google not to index the duplicate content portions of a particular website; among other things, this resulted in more page rank flowing to the internal pages as opposed to being wasted on duplicate content sections. Yeah, all that from 5 lines!!! Here is a link to a post by Shoe Money, a famous Internet Marketer and one of the top 100 bloggers according Technorati; recanting a similar story of changing only a few lines and seeing a big difference.
Now I’ll illustrate how SEO can help another HUGE A-list bogger like Seth Godin who already has an audience. Jason Calcanis, a very popular blogger, recently blasted SEO as bullshit and was met with a challenge by Neil Patel that said he could increase the traffic to Jason’s blog by over 20% by implementing some basic changes within only a few months. Jason, who already had a popular site, readers and a large audience, took the bet. Within two months his traffic was already up 20% and most of the changes recommended by Neil haven’t even been executed yet. You can read about that more at the link above. The unfortunate thing about this story is that Jason ended up getting SEO for free.
So now I’ll give my challenge (although I doubt he’ll respond) to Seth Godin: pay for my SEO services and I’ll increase your traffic by 20% or more (probably more like 40%) in 6 months. If I fail to have gains that substantial, I’ll give Seth all his money back. With all the increased traffic and subscribers I imagine even Seth Godin would sell more books and all that by implementing SEO and design changes.
Imagine if someone who isn’t already famous, who has to fight to get people to see their blog posts and is just building their online presence, takes Seth’s advice? They’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. Sure there are no magic shortcuts; you can’t just get a bunch of spammy links, but paying attention to keywords and using a design that encourages optimal search engine optimization has MAJOR positive effects when the other stuff is right too. It’s not a little thing, it’s huge and it can be the difference between your business website failing or being successful online.
Google is not as “smart” as people seem to think it is. It’s more like a 5 year old. You have to tell it specially what keywords and what neighborhoods to associate your site with. It WON’T do this automatically. Lots of sites with great content don’t have the rankings they deserve, and it’s usually do to SEO, design and marketing issues as opposed to content quality.
It’s also worth noting that Seth Godin’s blog is on Typepad and absolutely terribly optimized for SEO. If he didn’t have such a large pre-built audience, his blog would be mainly invisible. A few little changes would increase his traffic a ton, even with all the links and exposure he already has.
[tagsSeth Godin, bad SEO advice, search engine marketing[/tags
I Like Starbuck’s Quotes, Disclaimer And All | Conversational Marketing
This seems like an almost trivial thing to write about, but lately it’s been discussed in one of the major search marketing blogs: SEO Book. If you’ve been to Starbucks lately you may have noticed that printed on each coffee cup are quotes from various people throughout history. On the bottom of the same cup is a disclaimer stating that it’s the opinion of individual author and does not necessarily represent the opinion of Starbucks. Sounds pretty basic right?
What’s interesting is that there have been numerous posts where the author actually gets angry at Starbucks for posting a disclaimer and claims that should “back up” or vogue for the opinions on their cups.
Some of the geeks are getting a little to used to conversational marketing and they’re starting to view regular brick and mortar chain stores with the same expectations of what they read and see in the blogosphere. I don’t think (at least I hope not) that attitude will spread much out of the geek sector, but I thought it was worth pointing out this shift in view. Conversational marketing is characterized by a show of genuineness and even a successful online marketer like Aaron Wall expected Starbucks to stand behind their quotes. Personally, I don’t need to feel like Starbucks is having a conversation with me, I just want my coffee in a nice setting and I’m glad that an interesting quote is there for me to look at. Further, I would assume that’s probably the majority of their customers!
I personally don’t see anything wrong with a disclaimer, and view it as standard protocol for a large corporation. One of the most recent cups had a quote about evolution vs. intelligent design. Without that disclaimer, I could just picture some group getting all up in arms and suggesting a boycott. That type of bad PR is something a big company can’t afford.
We live in a hypersensitive society with leaders just looking to use stupid examples like a quote to gain free media exposure and rally people around a cause, regardless of how ridiculous it may appear (e.g teletubies, jeopardy, barney anyone?).
On the web, it’s common for small companies with blogs to make bold statements and even stand behind controversies. The reason why is because in the online world, strong opinions and being perceived as genuine can greatly improve your online presence by attracting thousands of links from bloggers looking for stuff to talk about. Also, a small company has a lot lower risk to reward ratio, because things like boycotts and bad pr are less likely to happen.
And after all is said and done, it’s just a quote on a coffee cup.
[tagsconversational marketing, starbucks[/tags
Beyond The Popularity Contest | Search Engine Marketing
In my last article I wrote about how search marketing is currently like a giant popularity contest. This begs the question of what’s going to come next as Google’s and the other engines’ algorithms keep evolving and take into account more and more data. What will this mean for search marketers?
Although Google is doing some of this now, as technology increases, personalized historical search data and end user behavior analytics (or which site you click on when looking at list of items and how long you stay there) will gradually become more and more important until they spark the next major shift in SEO strategy.
I predict technology will take the search market from being “the popular web” to a contest of usability combined with messaging. The stockier your site and the higher percentage of return visits, the more it meets the needs of the users who found it from the keyword searches you’re targeting, the better it will rank. I wouldn’t expect this to happen anytime soon, but it’ll definitely be interesting.
Take, for example, the keyword “blue widgets.”
Currently, if you build a site on “blue widgets” and you become popular and encourage a lot of bloggers to link to your site using “blue widgets,” you may rank for that term, even if the majority of searchers finding your site from that search don’t find what they’re looking for and quickly bounce to another site. In the next wave of Search Engine marketing, if that scenario came to pass, Google would understand that your site wasn’t meeting their needs and it would start dropping it in the regular search engine results pages (maybe it would continue to rank well if you applied a filter or did a blog search), while a less popular site that really met the needs of users searching for a specific keyword may start rising for that keyword, even if it doesn’t have anywhere near the link popularity that the previous site had.
Very interesting. At this point I think the search engine marketers will split their time between analyzing and improving usability and continuing their current link building / baiting, and viral marketing strategies.
Just a thought.
[tagssearch engine marketing, SEM, web 3.0, usability[/tags
The World’s Largest Popularity Contest | Search Engine Marketing
Currently, search engine marketing is best described by the phrase “popular.” This may change in the future, but right now, to rank in a competitive search term, you have to be popular; you know, like way back in high school where there was a division between the “cool kids†and everyone else.
Google uses specific metrics to rank websites. Some of them have to do with the keywords and structure of the site, and others have to do with how many links point to a site and what type and subject the sites are linking to. As soon as Google (ore the other engines, but since Google is the most important, I’ll almost always use it in my examples) starts using metric X as a guide for relevancy, a million marketers try to manipulate the hell out of metric X until it no longer works as well before. To counter this trend, the search engines have to continually add more and more metrics, or things to measure, to their algorithms.
Search Engine Wars | Domination Of Google, Decline Of Yahoo And Msn
For those of you that aren’t addicted to search engine marketing blogs the results regarding the current search engine market share have been released from a number of different sources each one using separate metrics. They been complied and analyzed by Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland here (it’s a VERY long article).
Here’s the jist. Most the sources agree Google is dominant and it’s market is increasing. Yahoo is plummeting, and MSN Live has just leveled off after severely plummeting for months. Ask is still around and holding it’s very niche market share just fine.
So basically, Google is THE search engine and Yahoo has lost much of the market share it had.
What to watch for:
There have been numerous negative rumors flying around the blogosphere about the integrity of Yahoo’s search results being comprised from paid listings and webmasters getting more of their pages indexed if they put Yahoo search on their site. That’s not good when their market share is already on such shaky ground. I predict Yahoo’s Search Engine percentage will decrease even more in the next 6 months.
Can Microsoft save MSN Live?
I don’t know. They haven’t been doing well with Vista, but I don’t think they’ll give up this easily.
How big can Google’s peace of the pie get?
I wonder how large or dominant a single company can get, before a new competitor emerges, the company splinters or something else happens.
[tagssearch engine wars, Google market share[/tags
