Wingnut SEO

As I work away in my medium sized agency in the middle of America, working with one of the our Pay Per Click (PPC) E-commerce clients, I am reminded of a game that I played in grade school called Lemonade Stand. Looking at it now I notice the similarities it has to the PPC accounts I run.

The goal of Lemonade stand was to make as much money as possible within a 30-day period. The player had complete control over every aspect of the business including cost of goods, pricing, purchasing supplies and budget.

There of course was a big unknown, and that was the weather. That unknown could make or break your day. If the weather was hot and sunny a lemonade stand operator could raise the price and still maintain volume and ultimately make more money. If it were raining and cold, a player would be lucky to break even.

This is not unlike running a PPC campaign. Being a Search Manager I have control over my cost per click, keywords, ad-copy, and managing my clients budget. Of course my big unknown is search volume. Search volume is what will ultimately drive sales volume. Factors that influence search volume:

• Seasonality of the product
• What engines the campaigns are running on
• What keywords are bought
• The Quality Score - how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query
• Max Cost Per Click

The list goes on and on. Without search volume, I am sitting at my lemonade stand in the rain and watching my ice cubes melt. With it, however, I am a lemonade tycoon!

-Dan Tisser - Sr. Search Marketing Manager

Tim Nash opened his Q&A the other day, so I asked the question that is on everyones mind:

“Does Matt Cutts have a XML sitemap printed on his bed sheets, you know, for the ladies”

In a timely fashion I received this in response:

“Thank you for your question.  Unfortunately we did not use this because - Yes he does but his robots.txt file prevents them crawling on his index.”

Thank you, Tim Nash, you clearly are a mad genius.  Hilarious.

So I have been doing a little experimenting with social media as of late. This experiment goes on in a couple places that I am not going to name because I don’t want to call out/embarrass anyone by this… I have not done this on sites where I am normally a frequent user.

The premise for this experiment was “Create a social media profile with a girl name and cute picture - create another with a boy name and decent boy picture. Be active on each of these about the same amount and invite friends and comment in about the same way.”

After a month of “research” the girl-name/cute picture has three times as many “friends” and receives generally positive messages nearly daily and responses to “her” comments. While the boy-name was shot down on even his first comment and made fun of, and to date has no direct messages.

Conclusion - By having boobs you make friends more quickly and slow the generally “quick-witted-sarcastic-hate filled-comments” that reside in the vast majority of the male social media people.

To further justify my conclusion (and what prompted me actually posting about this experiment) I direct your attention to this hot sphinn topic. I made this same list, but since I don’t have boobs no one cares.

Just to be clear, I am not bitter about this. Shana really does deserve this biglist mention because she is a rather awesome blogger.

I just got lucky with a fan-boi post.

I have had a bit of writers block as of late - until something happened today.

This morning I got a random IM from none other than top sphinner, nowsourcing. It was simple, just a “Hello there, you’re wingnut over at sphinn right?” and a little conversation where he asked questions about me and seemed genuinely interested.

I didn’t recognize who it was at first, I had just been set free from an absurdly early meeting and had only started on my first cup of coffee. After coming out of my morning haze, however, it was just cool. A blogger that I read all the time. Decided to take the time and say hi to me… a no-name nobody.

How cool is that? Not only do I now think he’s one awesome guy but I’m also following him on twitter, stalking him on sphinn, added him to my buddy list on AIM, and am more likely to reference his posts on my blog (not to mention this fan-boi post.)

It just goes to show you what that little extra bit of time it takes to say hey to someone can do for your networking. I think it’s just a great lesson for everyone, not just the big names. Social media is about being social and nothing is more social than saying hi and being nice to the people around you… even the quiet ones standing against the wall.

Post from yesterday -  2 links from this blog - and my spyware site is ranking for the keywords I wanted - page one.

Lessons learned:
1.) Blogs get spidered very quickly
2.) URL is very important if you are trying to rank for a specific keyword.  Duh.

I started a spyware distribution site… ItouchGame.com.  I feel badly about it… but it brings in so much money it is sick.  So if you are here don’t go to this site… but I needed the link love :D  *snicker*

Oh man… I finally jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and holy hell.  I’m addicted.  It’s not all that cool, but so simple I love it.  I like knowing what everyone is doing.  As of yet I haven’t updated with my BlackBerry… but I will.   I know I will.  This scares me…

Once that starts it’s game over.   I’m far, far too addicted to things like this… and with Twitter… It’s going to take over all my down-time on public transit.  Sigh, I’m going to miss that valuable nap time.

Well, I need more followers and people to follow… so Follow me by clicking here or look me up my screen name is Wingnut_ 

1. Content – Make sure that the most important keywords are in the first 250 words of the story if possible, content is king.

2. Title Tag – Make sure there is a title that uses the important keywords for that story or page

3. Description Meta Tag – Make sure there is a good description tag for every new page. Make it keyword heavy and still easy for humans to read and understand what the page is about.

4. URL of Page – If possible make sure new page URL contains most important keywords – not just numbers. (like this blog… I’ll change that one day)
   

5. H1 Tags – Make sure the <h1> tag is being used for story titles.

6. Keywords Meta Tag – Although the keywords tag isn’t weighted as heavily in Google, many search engines still take these into account so it does not hurt to have them.

7. Social Media – Submit content to Digg, Stumble, Reddit or other social media sites in your niche. Using “link baiting” titles and short descriptions when submitting.

Taking a page out of the MMORPG china farmers handbook for success in business I present to you an idea that - if not already being done, I have not heard of it (if you have please let me know and I’ll take this post down) - this will soon be something that will start happening.

Social Media Avatar POWER LEVELING!

That’s right, I fear in the near future we should expect to see people building their living on gaining (then selling) popularity in the social media circles - making up “characters” and building huge friend lists that include A-List social media giants - to sell later on for someone to take over.

How will we even know? As long as the person who buys it isn’t an idiot, and tries (even just a little) to speak in the same tone as the character that was built up.

The reasons to buy a popular character is clear in MMORPG’s - PHAT LOOTS.

The same is turning true for popular avatars in social media circles. How much more often to you click on an article Sphunn by DoshDosh, TheNanny612, or aimClear?

If you could buy their avatar/persona and were able to keep in character when posting to a social media site how much traffic could you get? Probably a lot. The question is - How much is that worth? Again, probably a lot (depending on your business)

Would farming this kind of reputation be hard to do? Not really. You could have 7-9 different profiles pretty easy (that is to say without trying very hard/putting more than 2 hours a day into it) depending on the social media site you are on.

Since you are out there reading the blogs so you can comment about them - and already reading the comments other people are making so you can get involved in the community - it really wouldn’t be too complicated to game the system this way. Hell you could even start conversations and reply to yourself. (I suppose having multiple personalities IRL would help)

Actually…If I had the time/no conscience I’d start doing this.

I was reading an article today, written by Robert Musud, about What Employers Need to know about Employee Blogging. This caught my attention more because recently my company started its own blog and of course I asked for some link love, all links are good links.

I didn’t worry about it, because I am really happy with my company and the people I work with… but what happens if/when I am not? An unlikely situation in the foreseeable future.

What I worry about more is what happens if I have an opinion that doesn’t fit with the company? In Robert’s article he speaks about people being fired over posting racy pictures or speaking ill of their employers - but how far of a cry is that from catching flack from saying something the company wouldn’t? Since they are linked to me does everything I write reflect on them? Damn right it does.

Before I got the link with my company’s blog I really didn’t worry about what I wrote. I would rant about things and curse up a storm when I felt it was needed.

Now though, I am starting to wonder if by directing my fellow employees to my blog - did I do myself a disservice? Do I now have to bite my tongue rather than speaking freely? It feels like I just turned my personal blog into a work blog. I asked for a link without even thinking about that. Foolish.

I think when it comes down to it - it depends on the company. With where I work, I think I have more leeway when it comes to what I write in my blog - as long as I’m not an idiot.

It is something to keep in mind though, and I guess I’ll see what comes of it.