Now, I’m going to assume that you have a blog. If not, go out and buy a good domain, get some hosting and install WordPress. While you’re at it, I would recommend investing in Chris Pearson’s stellar Thesis theme. Once you’ve got your blog up and running, start working on content. And by content, I mean stuff that you think your market would be interested in. By all means, resist the urge to publish self-promotional fluff and try to write with the interests of your market in mind.

If you haven’t already done so, go get a Twitter account. Try to secure an account that either a) reflects your brand name, or b) reflects your target keywords. Theme your account along the lines of your website (logo, colours, background, etc) and link back to your main site from your profile. At this stage, you should also sign up for accounts at Bit.ly and TwitterFeed. Bit.ly will let you track clicks on links dropped in your tweets, and TwitterFeed will auto post your new blog posts to Twitter.

Then go build a Facebook page for your website / product / service. Again, try to be consistent with your use of colour, logo, catchphrases, etc. and be sure to cross-link your Facebook page with your blog and your Twitter account. Add one of the RSS apps that allow you to publish blog posts to your page, and submit your blog feed. You can also sync your Twitter account with Facebook, in one of two ways. Firstly, you can add the “Notes” application and import your blog posts or tweets via RSS. Alternately, I discovered another app by a company called Involver that allows you to add a dedicated Twitter tab to your Page. Note: the “official” Twitter Facebook app will *not* allow you to publish to a page; only to a personal account as far as I know.

It may seem like a lot of work, but once this system is up-and-running your blog content will be syndicated to both Twitter and Facebook automagically. While there is no direct SEO benefit to be had by using this strategy (aside from indexing and some minor link juice flow), it would be foolish to think that Google is not looking at social traffic patterns and other such metrics to determine trust factors; especially in light of Larry Page’s quote in the first paragraph.

While the example above is limited to Twitter and Facebook, it could easily be extended to social networks beyond those mentioned.  Friendfeed, for example, allows you to sync your account with your Twitter account for cross population.  For those willing to invest some time and effort, there are loads of opportunities for creative content syndication within social media.

Last Minute Update: As of August 20, 2009, Facebook Syndicates Updates From Pages To Twitter, Still Holds User Updates Hostage.

Cloaking is not unlike playing a game of Russian roulette. It’s a practice that violates the webmaster guidelines provided by the major search engines, and it is not recommended to those individuals unwilling to sacrifice their website for short-term financial gain. On the other hand if you have dozens of websites, none of which perform particularly well, what do you have to lose? Cloaking could provide you with the means of recapturing the investment you have already made in sites with little hope of ever making money.

A while ago on Twitter, Michael Gray asked his followers for topic ideas for a new blog post. I suggested that he put the gray back in @graywolf by writing a post on cloaking; the what, how, why, etc. He responded by pointing out that the post was not intended for his site, and that it wouldn’t be an appropriate topic for the site he was writing for. I suggested it to him because it’s a topic that I rarely see discussed on any of the popular webmaster forums, blogs and community sites. When such topics are discussed it’s usually in the context of webmaster ethics. Unfortunately, such conversations tend to become very juvenile, very fast. Ethics aside, I believe there is a strong business case to be made in favour of aggressive marketing for under performing websites.

Let’s say you have a small network of 25 websites, and you have invested 25 hours of your time into each of them. Let’s assume, for the purposes of this article, that you value your time at $25 an hour. That leaves you with over $15000 dollars invested in your sites. Again, let’s assume your network is under performing financially, and you are earning say $25 per day across all sites. That works out to $750 per month, and it will take you 20 months at those profit levels to recoup your initial investment. That’s almost two years before your sites become profitable! So let’s pretend that you’ve decided to cloak your content, serving adverts in place of your content, and your network is now producing $100 per day. That works out to $3000 per month, and if you can stay under the radar, you will have recouped your costs in 5 months. Everything after that is pure profit! In the time it would have taken you to break even prior to cloaking your content (20 months), you now have the potential to profit by $45000. To me, it seems like a reasonable gamble to consider. How many of us are ever going to make that kind of money from a small network of very average websites full of very average content?

In a previous life, I worked with a company that was willing to engage in aggressive marketing from time to time. In most cases it was for research purposes, but at times the profit motive trumped other considerations. It was business, after all. We had one site that ranked all over the place for a swath of brand-name-products in a particular sporting industry niche, and it earned around $30 a day from organic search traffic. The decision was made to start cloaking to see if we could increase revenue. Literally overnight, the site started earning hundreds of dollars a day. The only thing we changed was the positioning of our advertisements; content was pushed below the fold and ads were given prominence on the page if referrer=search engine x. In the months that followed, the site made more money than we ever would have thought. Eventually, it got smacked down, the cloaking was removed, a re-inclusion request was filed, the content got reworked, and a few new links were acquired. Everything went back to normal within a few months. It continues to earn passive income to this day, but it made a whole lot of money for a number of months. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you do decide to dabble in the dark arts in an attempt to squeeze more profit out of your websites, there are a number of things to consider. For starters, you will have to try to insulate your sites from penalty as best as you can. This means that you’ll have to be very thorough in your implementation. If you are are going to cloak, you cannot rely on simple user agent cloaking. Cloaking by user agent is really simple to sniff out. You can test this yourself by using the user-agent switcher for firefox. With this extension, you will be able to see a webpage the way it is displayed to specific user agents. If a page is displayed to you one way while your user agent is mozilla, and displayed to you another way when your user agent is googlebot, the website in question is most likely cloaking. If you want to be effective in your cloaking efforts, you might consider cloaking by user-agent, IP address, referrer, browser and perhaps even language or OS. I think it’s safe to assume that visitors from Mountain View are not there to read your very average content…

1. Go to KnowEm.com and register your brand name / business name / individual name on all of the sites in your niche.  Then use the accounts to build authority, trust and credibility.  Engage with the community.  Share your ideas and insights.

2. Write a press release about something / anything even somewhat newsworthy.  Optimize it and distribute it through PR.com, PRWeb.com, etc.  Upload it to Scribd and other such document hosting sites.  Email it directly to blogs, news sites, etc in your niche.  Get the word out.

3. If you don’t own yourname.com or yourkeyword(s).com, go to your favourite domain registrar and purchase one of them. You’ll also need some decent hosting; I highly recommend (MT)MediaTemple. Then you’ll want to install WordPress, and start building your website / blog.  You might want to check out Chris Pearson’s excellent Thesis theme, too.

4. Write a couple kickass articles, and offer them up to related sites for publication.  This is called guest posting.  Don’t forget to give yourself some good anchor text when linking back to your blog or website. Use Google News to find publishing partners in your niche, and try to establish a rapport with them.

5. For the weaker articles developed in step 4, give them a quick copy edit and distribute them via article distribution sites like EzineArticles.  Again, give yourself some decent anchor text in the body of the article and again in the footer.

6. Build a slideshow and post it to Slideshare, or shoot a quick video and post it to YouTube. Optimize the titles, descriptions, tags, etc to reflect your brand name / business name / individual name.

7. If you are a local business, be sure to claim your local listings at the search engines, review sites, etc. If you’re an individual, claim your Google profile and link to a handful of the accounts you set up in step 1.

As mentioned above, this probably won’t help you much if you are trying to rank for something competitive (think credit cards, mortgage insurance, poker, etc).  Tip: don’t be afraid to buy some links to the pages / content you’ve created above (aside from your own site, that is) to give them some extra ranking power and to help flow link juice back to your main site.  I mean, seriously…do you think Google is going to penalize Slideshare or PRWeb for buying links?

My response included a healthy reminder that SEO is a process, not a project. I ended up turning down the work, because I felt that their approach to internet marketing was short-sighted and contrary to the goal of developing defensible websites. While I was somewhat annoyed at having wasted a few hours of my time, the experience got me thinking about the disconnect that exists between people that understand the power of SEO as a distinct element within their marketing mix, and people that chase rankings for the sake of rankings.

What amused me most while looking at their sites was how incredibly well they were ranking. They were, on average, first page for all of their major terms across a small network of sites in a fairly competitive travel niche. Even more surprising was that they had next-to-no decent links from outside their own network of sites. I have to admit, I was shocked to see such impressive rankings built upon such a weak foundation.

At some point, it’s important to recognize that rankings for the sake of rankings are a wasted effort. Furthermore, good rankings built upon a foundation of low-quality links from within an easily identifiable network of partner sites will be short-lived at best. The goal of every forward-thinking publisher should be to build sites that are *not* solely dependent on search engine traffic. If you have top rankings for competitive keywords, and you still haven’t managed to acquire a self-reinforcing market position, you probably don’t deserve the rankings you’ve acquired in the first place.

I don’t consider myself a rockstar SEO on the level of @graywolf or @gregboser or @davenaylor or @aaronwall, but I’ve been in the trenches long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. Trying to build a sustainable, profitable business on a short-sighted SEO strategy is a recipe for failure, plain and simple. If I owned the sites referenced above, my primary focus would be on converting my existing visitors into proper customers. In many cases, publishers do not need higher rankings and more traffic. They simply have to adapt their mindset to focus on conversion. Ciao for now, folks!

I’m going to assume that you have optimized your site/content to reflect your target locale; cityname + target terms in <title> elements, cityname + target terms + variants in meta description, etc.  So the main focus of this article will be on link acquisition; how to acquire high-quality, one-way inbound links for your local business website.

As with any businesses endeavor, competitive intelligence ought to be your starting point.  Without knowing what you are up against, you have no basis on which to develop a meaningful link development strategy.  It’s no secret that link development is the cornerstone of SEO, so your goal at this point is to deconstruct the link profiles of your competitors.

To get started, you’ll need a list of local terms you want to rank for.  After you have compiled your list, go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and perform searches for each of them.  Grab the url’s for the first 30 sites ranking at each of the search engines for your target terms.  Then you’ll want to run those url’s through Yahoo Site Explorer to determine which sites are linking to your competitors.  Now go out and find a way to get links from those same sites!

Admittedly, this is an extremely simplified process.  There’s a lot of other things to consider when building quality links, but this should help the beginners out there get started.  I’ll be sure to do a follow-up post sometime in the near future with some more advanced tactics.  So until then…