SEO Starter Kit
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
So you are interested in learning SEO but you wonder where to start from. Let’s say you want to understanding the basics of SEO because you are going to hire an SEO expert. This article is a starting point for someone like you.
Understand the basics
Of course, you should start with having a broad idea of what SEO is. There are many ways to achieve this. You can first start with a book on SEO. There are a lot of them out there and reading them will give you a good introduction to how search engines operate and best ways to create optimized content. You can also read a few good introductory articles like this beginner’s guide to search engine optimization.
Learn From A-List SEO Blogs
One of the most effective ways of learning about SEO is to read top SEO blogs. You’ll find the list of top 25 SEO blogs here. These are the gurus of the field and have the best connections in the industry. They offer a lot of advices and you should read them regularly to be up to date with news and trends.
Be skeptical about what you read
Always remember that you are not reading a holly book. First, check the date of the post. If it’s too old, then you might want to make sure that what you are reading is still relevant. Check with other sources and see if other experts recommend the same technique. Be careful to understand when the article is promoting a black-hat technique.
Sometimes, and this is sad, advertising will be disguised as content. This is a reality for a lot of blogs out there and you should be vigilant with what you read. Sometimes, you end up working with a new tool that is supposed to be IT according to a top blogger, but in reality, it’s just a product still being tested.
Know the right SEO tools
You can’t be productive or successful in SEO if you don’t have the right tools. You will find a very thorough list of SEO tools in here. Learn to work with them and see how they can be useful with what you can achieve. You don’t have to use or work with all of them, but it is always good to know that there is a tool for a certain need. Who know when you will need to use that tool.
Experiment SEO
We all learn by doing. Therefore, it is a must to experiment different strategies and techniques to see how they work and in which context they are most effective. You should have one or many websites that you maintain as your ‘SEO living lab’. These are sites on which you try all sorts of experiments and see how those experiments respond. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a pattern that may be very valuable.
Work with SEO experts
There are things you will never be able to do in a cost effective way. Search engines and SEO are ever evolving and gurus will always be a few steps ahead of you. If you need to perform well on search engines, learn to rely on SEO experts and you will save a lot of time and money. Even if your objective is to become a top SEO expert, you should still be working with the top guys because collaboration and cooperation will always give better results that working alone in your corner. As a direct consequence of this reality, you should always be networking with people who are in the SEO industry. The more you are connected, the better it is going to be for you.
Paid-Ads or SEO: Which One Gives Best Results?
In a previous article, I have labeled SEO as being a form of spam. Well, I found this interesting article from Forbes that lists the best marketing techniques that can be used today. It all looks like spamming is pretty effective way of generating sales! My opinion is that this is so because of the persuasive power of a promotional page that is encountered by someone who got to that page by using a search engine. This persuasive power comes from the fact that we are not trained to recognize found-through-searching pages as having promotional content!
When it comes to traditional advertising (like on TV), we all have developed reflexes to identify and avoid advertising as they are shown. We have this part of our brain that detects patterns and is capable of understanding that a certain object is aimed at promoting a certain product. For example, we have the reflex of muting the TV and do stuff during commercial breaks. However, we are not used to the idea that people can use search engines and inflirtrate keywords to advertise. This is because most of us still have not added this new pattern of advertising to our cognitive repertoire.
The SEO professional’s job is to exploit this potential to the max. That is, promotional stuff has to be disguised as real content. And it must be subtle in the way that people will not be able to detect that someone is promoting a product or service. When people see a paid ad (like Google AdWords), they understand that it is for generating sales. But when it is a blog page, it is as if the guy next door was so happy about using a product.
My conclusion is that compared to paid-ads, SEO ads value from a marketing point of view. That value is about not giving the impression that people are dealing with ads.
Top Ten Ways to Make Money With Your Open Source Products
Gone are the days that some could label open source development as being communistic. Today, many firms make money with open source development. This is a survey of the top ten ways to make money with your open source products:
- Support: offer support around your open source product. Of course this is an easy one as most open source firms base their income on support.
- Sales: well, this is an easy one too. Not because the product is licensed under GPL that anybody can go on and play with its source code. We see more an more of these kind of products that are often sold as ‘Enterprise’ versions of the open source product.
- Extensions & plugins: Well, this is a good way to get money, especially from enterprise customers. Every software is always a couple of functions short of customers expectations. Extensions are a great way to overcome this unavoidable issue.
- Subscriptions: since most software products need maintenance, it might be a good idea to sell the product for free, but collect a subscription for updates.
- Consulting: well, this is for those who are not in the open source development team, but who offer customization services around open source products. You could also offer project management services for customers who are going to deploy your product. Also, Software as a service (SaaS) is a great example of how open source firms make money.
- Build yourself a reputation: a lot of programmers have gained notoriety by being lead developers or architects in open source projects. If you write good code, then going open source is a good opportunity to show off your talent.
- Publish a book: you’ve been building this amazing open source application? Then share your knowledge of the system by writing a book. This goes for those who have built extensions and plugins for open source platform.
- Give conferences: if you ever become a super start (or even a small star), people might actually want to pay to see and hear you. Conferences actually have something that books cannot offer: close contact with the guru.
- Advertising: well, you could actually get a lot of traffic to your website. Why not sell ads? Of course, you might not make a lot of money, but its not costing you anything to have a little extra from AdSense.
- Donations:If you do all or some of the above, why not ask for donations? I mean all those who use the software, but don’t pay on any of the above things still are gaining value from your product. Some of them might actually be conscious of this fact and give a donation.
All these ways of generating revenue are based on the fact that open source software ads a certain value that closed source software does not have. This added value gives a competitive advantage to the open source developer who can then sell byproducts of the knowledge that he has around the open source product. Of course, these are many other ways to make money with open source software. Let me know if there are some that I forgot.
Forget About Traffic: Bounce Rate is Key To AdSense Revenue
I find a lot of blog articles that advise getting traffic for better AdSense revenue. To my opinion, bounce rate is a better indicator of AdSense revenue. Of course, if a good bounce rate is backed up by traffic, then nobody would complain. But lets imagine a website that gets 10k pageviews a day with a bounce rate of 100%. Is this site likely to have any AdSense revenue? Most likely not because people, well, bounce back and don’t click on anything!
Well, this brings me to another metric that is greatly correlated with AdSense revenue: pageviews per visitor. This is of course very related to the bounce rate, but higher is better. When a website has high pageviews per user, it is most likely to succeed in making money by doing some AdSense camouflage, because the more people are surfing the site, the more likely they are going to click on an ad.
But lets make this clear, having high bounce rate will equal low pageviews. High bounce rate is an indication that something is wrong with the site’s content or design, which repulses visitors from interacting with the website. If bounce rate is low, it most likely means that the website has good content and design.
This reality brings us to the conclusion that nothing is better than good content, design and usability. Lets all call these things user experience. Good user experience equals good AdSense revenue!
How Can Professional SEO Services Be Good for Your Business
Professional SEO services are often thought as expensive services that do not guarantee results. The general case against SEO is that nothing can ever replace good content. There is also a strong belief among SEO skeptics that good content can only be created by business visionaries. Finally, most brick and mortar business owners are not familiar with the concept of Internet traffic. In brick and mortar businesses, traffic is generated by location, location and location! In other words, traffic to the business is the traffic that a certain physical location provides. If the business is located in a crowded area, then the business could have a lot of visitors that could lead to a lot of sales. Things are a bit different in e-businesses: traffic mus be created and location must be earned. In this article, I will explain why not only professional SEO services can help grow an e-business, but that they are actually a bargain when it comes to the total cost of promoting. After all, no one would think of opening a brick and mortar business in an isolated place!
First things first, one must understand the importance of the Internet and words in today’s world of information. The Internet is a great promotion channel that all marketers must take into consideration in their marketing strategy. From here, the question is how can we get more exposure on the Internet? To answer this question, lets look at the most visited website in the world: Google. According to compete.com, Google has more something like 150 Million unique visitors in a month. Now what does Google do? it provides search services. Ahah!! If website is linked on every search request that is ran on Google, then that website would have 150 Million visitors in a month! This is exactly why professional SEO services are a must for every e-business: they will guarantee that a share of this huge user base will be redirected to your website.
Now, a question still remains: why would someone pay X-hundred dollars an hour to someone just to write text? The answer is simple: complexity and specialization. Every business has a core competency. Unless you are an SEO expert and are offering professional SEO services, chances are that SEO is not among your competencies. Today, the Internet ecosystem has become so complex that it is cost effective to deal with professionals than to do things the amateur way. On the other hand, when you outsource search engine optimization efforts, you save resources to execute activities that are within your core competence.
In conclusion, SEO is a must for all businesses and its must be performed by professionals. At the end of the day, you will save money and make more profit if you let experts handle this part of the business.
Search Engine Optimization vs Traditional Promotion: The Power of Words
Lets take a look at the promotion pyramid from Ames:
As we go from the bottom to the top of the pyramid, the cost per contact goes high. Now, the good thing with the Internet is that it covers all these promotion channels but at lower costs. This is most true for lower level channels such as Media advertising, public relations and direct mails, but it is especially advantageous for the top channels.
In my opinion, SEO is similar to personal selling. This is so be cause of the aggregation power of search engines. When people land on your website through a search engine, it is because there is a good chance that they are looking for your service. Why? because you are using the same words that visitors are searching for. Since the customer is fed by information that he is looking for, the effect is the same as in personal sales: messages are precisely targeted to the customer and a kind of interaction occurs between the customer and the website.
Now, the real advantage of SEO relies in the fact that it offers great economies of scale compared to direct sale. SEO effort is spent once for all potential customers, while personal sales effort is spent every time for a client. Of course, SEO effort needs to be maintained but every time, it is scaled to all customers. Some would argue that SEO will not be able to offer the same kind of sales potential and it is entirely true. An experienced sales representative will be able to do things that programmed applications will not be able to do. But there is one thing that SEO can do with economies of scale: cut costs, which is the best incentive to buy.
From now on, the challenge in marketing is in targeting the right words as well as expressing the right ideas. In doing so, both service supplier and client will save costs.