Rick Maggio

SEO, the Internet and nonsensical banter

 

The Myth of Ethical SEO

Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Rick Maggio

SEO comprises all activities involved in increasing a website’s exposure in the search engines. It involves many different strategies which, in essence, manipulate search results. Week after week, I read a slew of SEO bloggers who write about practicing ‘ethical’ SEO techniques. They preach about what is and isn’t ethical when it comes to search engine optimization. Some talk about the evils of practices like link renting and social bookmarking. Others frown upon practices such as keyword stuffing, and blog/forum spamming. What all these bloggers have in common is that they believe their own bullshit.


Why SEO May Be Fundamentally Unethical

As SEOs, we know that links are one of the most powerful forces in determining search engine rankings. Search engines value links because people will naturally link to the best content. In all honesty, most link building techniques involve unnaturally building links to a website. That is, they focus on creating and encouraging others (who wouldn’t have otherwise linked) to link to a website. Would it be fair to say that link building, fundamentally, is an unethical practice?

Content creation and link baiting seem to be the only link building strategies for naturally, and ethically, building links. By creating great content, others are more likely to link to you. Directory submission, link requests/exchanges, article marketing, etc. are all strategies of unnaturally building links to a website. Many of us spend hours ‘encouraging’ other sites to pass links to us, which is about as unnatural as it gets.

Re-defining Ethical SEO

SEO, as its core, isn’t a particularly ethical process. To begin with, the nice people at Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have created fantastic tools useful for finding information on the internet. As SEOs we seek to inhibit the search engines’ ability to naturally provide results.

We rewrite copy, build links, cleanup code and much more to move our clients to the top of search results pages. While many SEOs won’t say it, we essentially ‘trick’ the search engines into thinking that our clients offer the best information for targeted sets of keyword searches.

In my humble opinion, ethical SEO simply means that your client understands the level of risks being taken to achieve desired goals. The responsibility of any SEO is to make clients aware of the risks, if any, that different SEO strategies will have on their business. Really, this relationship is similar to the relationship between a stock broker and an investor.

No matter what their goals, each client should be made aware of risks, if any, that may be taken to achieve results. Sometimes the risks are fairly small or non-existent. Other clients seek more aggressive link-building techniques that can without doubt cause problems in the long run.

Maybe it’s time for SEOs to get off the soap box with regards to ethics and best practices. Honesty with clients is the only ethic worth talking about. Drawing a fine line between honest and dishonest SEO practices isn’t worth the time or effort and is easily debated.

Twitter Madness

Posted on March 25th, 2009 by Rick Maggio

My Sentiments Exactly!

Creating Wordpress Themes to Build Backlinks

Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Rick Maggio

I think that WordPress is one of the greatest CMS tools around. I’ve blogged a bit about how WordPress can be used not only to blog, but also to run an entire website. Part of the reason that WordPress and other open source CMSs have developed into such a powerful tool is the strength and size of the community behind them. With thousands of plug-ins and themes, a not-so-saavy web entrepreneur can easily create a personalized and feature-rich website in a matter of minutes.

One way to contribute to the WordPress community and also build the strength of your website is to sponsor or create free WordPress themes. Within the footer of your theme, include a keyword-rich link back to your website. As WordPress users download your theme and implement it into their website, you gain backlinks. Since a typical free theme offered on WordPress.com can be downloaded thousands of times, a single theme can eventually be the source of several hundred or thousand links.

Tips for using wordpress themes for backlinking

* Create a theme relevant to the website you are promoting. For example, if you sell auto parts, create a WordPress themes have to do with cars or auto racing. This makes it more likely that the content of blogs linking to you are relevant for your niche.

* Build a great theme – Truly great themes are downloaded more often and utilized for longer periods of time. Since the most valuable links can come from established and reputable websites, you want to do everything you can to encourage bloggers to keep your theme for a long time. As blogs using your theme gain reputation, the benefit to you becomes greater. A slick, feature rich theme is more likely to accomplish this. In short, build crap and that’s the result you can expect…

* Don’t link-stuff – Don’t go and stuff multiple links in the footer of your theme. Wordpress users can easily delete your links anyways and stuffing several spammy links in the footer is a sure way to make this happen. Most WordPress users don’t mind giving a little credit to the theme creator but they don’t want to support spam either. Be reasonable and you’ll be rewarded.

The downside to WordPress theme linking

For every 10 people that start a blog, probably only 1 or 2 probably stick with it past the first couple of months. Many of the backlinks that you will get from this strategy will be from low-quality blogs. In fact, many of the links you get will come and go before you see any search engine benefit. However, the greater number of downloads you get, the better chance you have that an existing, established blog switches to your theme or that the 1 or 2 new bloggers mentioned above take your theme and build something great with it. The secret is in the marketing.

Marketing your WordPress theme

The best way to get your theme out there is to submit it to Wordpress. If they accept and your theme and it is unique and pretty good, you’re certain to get at least hundreds of downloads over time. Read the WordPress requirements before submitting as they are stingy about accepting themes. Whether you get into WordPress.com or not, consider submitting your theme to several of the other websites that promote WordPress themes. There are a bunch of these and some are worth more time than others (I especially like this one). It’s worth putting some quality time into marketing your theme!

Is Organic Ranking the Most Important Metric?

Posted on February 3rd, 2009 by Rick Maggio

I came across a great ‘Whiteboard Friday‘ post by Rand over at SEOMOZ today. He’s does a great job of explaining both sides of the debate about whether measuring organic search rankings for individual keywords is important, or at least the most important seo metic.

So many SEO agencies and their clients alike focus attention on reporting their rankings for specific keyword phrases. One problem with this approach is that the the search results are constantly changing. A search for keyword phrase ‘X’ in one place at one time may yield a different set of results than a search for the same phrase somewhere else at the same or a different time. Also, as the search engines become better at delivering search results, I think we can expect more fluctuations in search results based on news events, geo-targeting and many other factors.

It seems that a good way to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign is to measure the actual quantity and quality of overall traffic, as opposed to search rankings for individual keywords. Focus on your ultimate goal (converting users) and not on having bragging rights for ‘owning’ a given search query. Then again, explaining this to clients can be a bit of a challenge. Maybe try sending them a link to Rand’s video

Google Chrome Crashes (for me)

Posted on January 19th, 2009 by Rick Maggio

So, I’ve been using Google chrome on and off since it launched 4 months ago. I started using this browser because, as much as I sometimes hate Google, I happen to believe that many of their products are pretty good.

Initially, Google made some pretty confident claims about the capabilities of their new browser. One claim about the browser is that it would not crash, or is at least less likely to crash, because of a browser tabbing system that allows each open tab in the browser to work completely independently. They said that, if one tab were to have difficulty loading a page, it would not crash the entire browser, but would just close the tab in question. This is an approach that the other major web browsers have not yet taken.

Well, for the first time that I’ve managed to make Google Chrome Crash. My Evidence:

After 4 months of use, one crash isn’t that bad. I think I make my regular browser, Firefox, crash about once every other day, although it gets a lot more use and has many more add-ons. I still dig Google chrome but am still am not willing to make it my primary web browser.

 
 
 

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