» SEO

A very simple yet effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique that I always recommend to my clients is to start out with a small Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign to measure the keyword effectiveness and then move onto SEO.  There are so many SEO consulting firms out there that focus purely on keyword traffic and I’ve never understood this approach.  The same rules that apply to an effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign should apply to a SEO strategy.

I guess the big question is, do you want traffic or conversions?  I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

The other supporting argument for this approach is that its a lot faster and efficient to A/B test a SEM campaign versus a SEO campaign.  How are you going to know what conversion funnel works the best?  Wait months for the SEO efforts to pay off?

Some folks just don’t want to spend the money on PPC.  I know that the ROI would be a lot better and its short sighted not to make a small investment up front on PPC.  So be smart, start with PPC and then transition to SEO or else you’ll find yourself at a dead end.

TechCrunch featured a company called InLinks.com yesterday and referred to it as “hard to detect”, as in the world of blackhat SEO.  I’m not so sure about that one.  Let’s face it, the folks at Google are pretty smart.  It took me a few minutes and I quickly discovered some of the publishers by performing a few simple Google searches.  Here are just a few of the publishers I discovered: The Hunters Mark, Krimson News, TheRandToday.com,  Stephan Miller and Peer1.  Michael Arrington, are you telling us Google can’t do this?

I think that building a business model based on what is considered a violation of Google’s terms wasn’t the smartest idea by New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz.  Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guru, specifically states on his blog, “Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines.”

There’s a lot of talk about this in the new media industry.  Olgivy commented that appearing on TechCrunch is normally a good thing - but not this time.

My advice, stay away!  Don’t touch this one with a ten foot pole whether your an advertiser or a publisher!

UPDATE:  The Hunters Mark posted a comment below today in regards to this post.  InLinks.com had an excerpt from their blog which when searched on Google was the only result which lead me to believe that either InLinks.com is using thier blog as an example or the Hunters Mark actually did act as a publisher on their behalf.  Either way, our agency tries to encourage best seo practices and found Inlinks.com business model unethical on many levels.  If the Hunters Mark was never a part of it, I apologize for the inacuracy, however, I can assure you that we did research this thoroughly.