Well,  I don’t normally write something that is self promotional but to be honest, this isn’t really self promotional, it’s just something I think is worth being touched upon.

As the title suggests, pay on results SEO is what I want to talk about. Some time ago we were carrying out a marketing campaign to create some exposure for the business and a prospect responded. It’s not unusual to get a few responses from a marketing campaign that involves hundreds of contacts but this was a little bit different. The prospect contacted us and made an offer. Simply put, we were told that they would only pay if we (unlike most SEO agencies) were willing to carry the entire burden of risk until we had succeeded with the campaign. This got me thinking, why hadn’t I thought of this, and who else uses this model? A little research revealed a number of SEO companies that offer a pay on results scheme but not strictly pay on results. More like, pay a bit now and pay some later or something along the lines of a money back guarantee. Which gets my knickers all a bit twisted, I feel it is a little misleading. In fact I would find it amusing if this blog ranked page 1 for the term so people could see what I am talking about at the same time. Having said that, there are genuine pay on result SEO consultants willing to genuinely take the risk to get paid when they succeed. Good on you.

Anyway, aside from the rant, I do believe the concept of pay on results SEO to be a very reasonable expectation in our industry. SEO reminds me of what finance was like in the 80s and 90s, a little unregulated and full of sharks looking to make a quick buck, taking huge commissions.  And so with having a results based offering I think we can begin to improve to credibility of the SEO industry. Mind you, I wouldn’t want it to start sounding like one of those many, many no win no fee companies.

I wonder if the real question is of viability…

How many companies can realistically offer such a scheme, are they bank financed? Can they really afford the risk? Are they over committed with running overheads and salaries? Is it more viable for larger companies or smaller companies? And why is it not more common? Or is it just a simple case of, why bother? Perhaps there are enough companies out there willing to just stump up massive up-front fees.

I really hope this didn’t seem too self promotional but if you’re into business or SEO, email us or comment to let us know what you think.

Cheers,

There has been an awful lot of fuss surrounding the new ‘plus your world’ feature; complaints made by many corners of the internet world.

So what’s the big deal?

Well, in one camp there is the argument that Google can use its search monopoly to force its social network in front of millions (billions?) of people who use Google search regularly, giving it an unfair advantage in the social network market space. Google is of course insisting that it is purely to enable the search giant to personalize results, providing relevant content that your social contacts may have also recommended.

That’s fair enough I suppose, but then I don’t actually use any of my social spaces to get friendly recommendations and to be honest I’m quite happy seeking out information for myself by myself. If I want a recommendation I’ll ask a friend in person, or do we not see our friends anymore?

Another camp accuses Google of violating rights to privacy and then there is anti-trust which is an issue I won’t get into now. But don’t get me wrong I’m not against ‘SPYW’, in fact I think its good that Google want to try and further integrate the social factor into its SERPs

So how does all this affect SEO?

Well, not as much as I think people fear it will. What we strive to accomplish in SEO is to drive new traffic to a website via top SE rankings. As individuals we are regularly looking for unique things online, stuff which is unlikely to be found within your social network, so in this case I believe most searches will remain unaffected by SPYW, I also still think most people will stick to Facebook for the majority of their online social activity. Also one has to remember that if a company (perhaps a client) is being talked about within a Google + network and then a member of that network is searching and Google brings it up as a recommendation, then that’s quite useful for us, as in a way, they have done some of our own work for us. According to analytics it will look like organic traffic, unless of course a new metric is accounted for in analytics in time to come.

So by now most of us will have seen lots of talk about how social networking can be used as part of ones SEO strategy. The theory is that if we create enough buzz in the social arenas of Facebook, Twitter, linkedin and others, that the likes of Google will look favorably upon those who are being talked about. So far in my hours of reading I have seen how this is most relevant to blogs. Yes, I can understand that in the case of a blog, having it talked about and spread across social networks is important and highly desirable. So how does this fit into the world of business? Lets face it, the internet is a great social tool, but its also a crucial sales tool for hundreds of thousands of businesses. This is where I am skeptical; we often get asked by clients and prospects about being on Facebook as they have heard this will be good for business. This only really applies to businesses that have a deeply rooted social aspect. Most companies won’t benefit from trying to create buzz out of something no one is that interested in talking about. The other issue I have a problem with was mentioned in an earlier post, and that is the abuse of creating an artificial social buzz. You can now buy Facebook fans in thousands, Twitter followers and Google +1s, just as I expected would happen. Generally speaking I think its a good idea that search engines may use social signals but only if the algorithm can be tuned to detect irregular social patterns.

But its not all bad..

There are a number of ways I believe non-social companies can benefit from using the social arenas. The first one is for companies to offer customer support through Facebook. This would allow customers and prospects alike to post questions and queries that others may also want to ask, a bit like a self generating FAQ. This has got to be good for businesses and customers. Another way is to get more social, and a great example of this is the Nightlife Exchange Project directed by Smirnoff. Of course it helps if you have a big budget to get social and it also helps of sell a product which is consumed in social environments but the concept of companies bringing people together through a social project is a fantastic excuse to generate social buzz online. And then of course there are competitions; why not give away free products in a competition conducted on Facebook, we all like a freebie.

(I have noticed that I am getting traffic about how to dislike – unfortunately this post doesn’t tell you how, but that’s in part due to the fact you can’t! Please read on though, as all my posts are interesting.)

You may be aware of Google’s new +1 button and for those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s basically like the Facebook like or thumbs up in Youtube. In principle it seems a good idea, I for one have installed it on my blog but there are a few unanswered and unsettling questions surrounding this newfangled obsession to share our opinion on everything. According to a research group there is some suggestion and some evidence that it could affect search rankings in Google. Obviously you would think that’s great except for one small thing; doesn’t this make it easier for organizations to game the system? If I ran a large organization surely I could artificially increase the amount of +1s by instructing my fellow disciples to +1 it and therefore achieve high rankings? I’ve seen it done countless times on bookmarking sites like Digg, whereby some average promotional material has 3000 diggs and therefore I cannot get away from its super high ranking. No I don’t want to read about Toyota’s environmental commitments or get slimmer with some magical diet pill!

The other camp suggest that it should make no difference but I can’t see that as being true because one of Google’s signal is click through rate, and that will surely increase the more +1s it has and naturally ones ranking should improve. Anyone seen a reccommendation for Rebecca Black next to a video of Godsmack or some other totally unrelated video? I think if Google is going to make this work it needs to make the impact of increased +1s based on the user interaction post or pre +1 clicking. Otherwise we will have hoards of people affiliated with large companies clicking +1 just for the sake of it, and without having navigating through the website or actually reading any content associated.

It really all boils down to the individual value of the +1, but I won’t be surprised to see certain pages achieving astronomical +1s for something that is really essentially of limited interest. Time will tell.

Through the years I (owner of MurdenEnterprise) have seen numerous debates on whether search engine optimisation is a justified method of marketing. The SEO industry has a bit of a poor reputation for gaming the system into thinking certain sites deserve to the be the first ones we look at. After all I’m sure Google would prefer it if all commercial ventures just used Adwords. Any decent SEO consultant or company will work hard to dispel the myth that it is somehow cheating and I believe they can do this in a number of ways. Firstly I think people need to begin to understand that although SEO appears to be one of those job types with no distinguished rule book or set procedures it does actually play an extremely important role in the world of marketing. One hopes that as time goes on and search engines get smarter, so that the unregulated SEO environment will become stricter and tougher on those who abuse it. To help customers understand the relevance of this work one only needs to look at how often they use a search engine on a daily basis, and with £1 in 4 of marketing budgets spent online it has become big business. The reality is that the most convenient way to search for information or for a good deal is online – who doesn’t do that? At the same time businesses working within a tight budget need marketing strategies that get the most bang for buck. No one likes to watch pointless adverts on television and we skip past the majority of them in magazines and yet with search engines that problem is well, less of a problem. People are in control when they load up a search engine, they are in control of what they want to see and that’s where businesses need to spend their time – in front of actively searching consumers.

So why is it considered shady by some, cheating by others and frowned upon by search engines if its so ideal? Well herein lies the problem; it is all too easy to promote pages and website to page 1 of Google for example even if they’re not directly relevant. This creates an unfair environment for those looking to genuinely promote a product directly relevant to their big keywords against those USING shady methods to promote sites that are vaguely relevant or just complete rip offs altogether. Unfortunately doing it the honest way takes longer and costs more. When promoting a website, we are looking to attract interested consumers or readers and to do that we need to be in all kinds of places, social ones included to create the buzz and backlinks. The difficulty is when we mix that with the urgency of profit making in a capitalist environment then larger companies begin to see that it is not cost effective to use this method. So what do they do? They create spaces online where they can artificially re-create that buzz or social interest and of course link to their clients site, and sadly it works quite well. At least for now.

MurdenEnterprise believe that in order to restore dignity and honesty as well as transparency search engines should work on an algorithm that not only discounts blatant link farms (those that are not clearly marked directories) but gateway pages that contain numerous anchors, but only when the anchors are dense and unrelated. If a page can be indexed and sees anchors that are relevant then that should be okay, just not if the same page discusses 25 different topics containing 60 anchors all within 600 words. This way companies using gateway techniques will be forced to buy more domains, more pages with more content just to represent a link to 1 client – this could begin to seem a little less cost effective.

The end goal would be that there is no easy way to build reputation and authority other than to do what they should be doing anyway, getting out there and proving themselves worthy of the top spot.

So it’s been a little while since Google rolled out the controversial Panda algorithm update here in the UK. Luckily for us we never use any unethical or spammy techniques so no clients have been affected! Sometimes we wish it would make MORE of an impact so those websites held high in Google by the use of gateway pages would come crashing down in a heap of flames – we can only hope!

As you can see we have added a blog page – this is to act almost as an interactive forum in which people may add their views or questions to any of the topics posted.