Whether you like it or not, everyone is buying links to increase PR and ranking.

Buying links is one of those funny things, that every SEO professional has done… and in all the forums, blogs and articles we claim that we will never do it. (but deep inside we have all done it at some stage in our painful link building life)

The problem is that buying links is like having “just one” chocolate cookie… once you like the taste, it’s difficult to have just one!

Because, hey… if you have one, why not 2, or 3… or 4…
who will realize?
Who will really know?

But the problem is when you have too many cookies….
Because too many cookies is not a viable way to go in any type of healthy diet! (just look at the skin color of the cookie monster!)

So what happens when SEO companies just depend mainly in the idea of acquiring links?
Well… sooner or later they will realize that this type of strategy can’t be sustained as a long term solution.

In my point of view, there are mainly 5 points that make buying links a flawed approach for any serious link builder.

1. Links change all the time:

Call it Mayday, Google Slap, or Panda Update… the reality is that the effectiveness of links change all the time, and the link that was valuable yesterday, today may be less effective. Buying links can be like buying shares… you never really know what you are buying and 9 times out of 10… you think you have something more valuable than you really have.

2. At the mercy of the link buyer:

Many times I have seen sites that promote “sponsored” links and after they have achieved their quota of “sold” links… the site magically appears for sale in Flippa.

The fact is, once the seller has cashed in selling some links the site can be sold to another webmaster. As soon aa the new webmaster obtains control of the site, it’s most probable, the new will quickly remove any type of “sold” links previously.

It’s important to keep in mind that any webmaster that creates a site just to monetize by selling links, will have zero loyalty towards his/her own site and towards the buyers of links in that site generates.

3. Once you pay, the magic is gone:

Pretty obvious huh?
But it seems that many link-buyers forget the fact that their whole strategy depends on a link in a site that they have no control.
Therefore if your ranking depends only in artificially created “authority” , the authority of your site will simply disappear as soon as your network of paid links is discovered or as soon as the sites selling links suffer from an energetic Google slap and they loose all their “fantastic” page rank.

4. Giving ammunition to your competitors:

It doesn’t matter in what industry you are playing, business owners now have the tools to analyze your backlinks and finding the obvious paid links it’s not rocket science . The problem is when the person that detects your paid links decides to play fire with fire.

Then buying links becomes as ridiculous as a Pay-per-click bid war… there are no real winners and at the end the money invested in “buying” could have been better invested in building real authority, and improving your own online marketing strategy

5. Destroys your creativity:

If SEO was based on links, then all of us, SEO consultants, we will be link traders and not consultants. SEO it’s about creativity, about finding the way to get a proper balance between content, links, website construction and user experience. Once you fall into the trap that buying links solve your problems, you start digging your own grave without even knowing it. Because while you spend a large of amount of your budget in acquiring links, your SEO competitors may be building proper relations with REAL authority sites in your same industry.

So regardless what we think about buying links, this is a phenomenon that it’s likely not change in the near future.

May be if Google cleans up the whole page rank factor the buying and selling of links will certainly be affected, butwhether we like it or not, like in any other industry there will always be companies that will try to cash in on the idea of capitalizing in the uncertainty of the market.

And like the famous tour of France, SEO is for sure one of the toughest races in the world. In our case ranking for sporadic keywords, could be considered a good result on certain stages of the tour. Well, it’s pretty clear, that there are thousands of eager “riders” willing to cut all type of corners to achieve the victory line as possible, even if by trying to do so, they end up ruining their chances to win the whole tour.

The following Post wasn’t approved in SEOMoz users blog…  Go and figure.

So many serious people… so many SEO practitioners, so many SEO gurus… so many SEO companies calling me asking me: “How do we know if you are a real SEO professional”.

The answer is: You don’t!

May be instead let’s presume  … there are no SEO practitioners… there are no SEO gurus… there are no SEO professionals….

Instead we are just all freaking trying to learn, trying to experiment, trying to understand, trying to keep up with what the industry does.

It seems there is no sense of humor .

So here you go…. smile a bit… chillax SEO Jedi masters out there.

Tip from Gab: Don’t take it so serious and may be when you laugh about it, you will start learning faster and ranking better.

]]> http://www.internetninja.com.au/why-the-seo-industry-needs-to-chill-out-a-bit/feed/ 15 http://www.internetninja.com.au/getting-banned-from-google/ http://www.internetninja.com.au/getting-banned-from-google/#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 01:07:18 +0000 Gabriel Machuret http://www.internetninja.com.au/?p=792

Seriously. Can I?

how difficult is to get a website banned from Google? How easy is it?

Can I get your website banned? or …
Can a group of Indian link builders working for peanuts can screw your site?

Seriously… how difficult it’s to get banned by Google…. because all the GURUS love to talk about “the FEAR of GOOGLE”? and all the Self-proclaimed experts talk about “how easy is to get your site banned from Google if you choose the wrong SEO provider”.

Because… in case you forgot already

• SEO is death
• SEO will be gone in a few years.
• Don’t link build a lot otherwise you get banned.
• Don’t try to trick google…
• Don’t make fun of Matt Cutts… (Actually I really like Matt Cutts…)
• Don’t try to decrease link building … otherwise your ranking goes down… but don’t over do it… otherwise you get banned….
• Don’t trust an Australian SEO professional with Spanish accent (oops wait, that’s me!)
• SEO is death (did I mention that already????? )

Fear… fear…. 2012 is right here!!!

So what I decide to get one of my sites banned….  can I actually do it just by link building?

What if I OVER link build… what if I try to ride the bull… will the bull go back and bite me?  (can bulls bite?)

I think it’s time to post some DATA, some real facts and not stupid theories of what works and what doesn’t work.

EVERY SINGLE WEEK I get calls from customers, friends, peers with “what If I do….” “do you think google will be upset if i do ….”

My answer it’s always the same: Google is not ONE person… Google is an algorithm… a piece of software… similar to your toaster… similar to your coffee maker. (but a bit more expensive and with a cooler logo)

Clearly Google has change the way we interact, the way we think, even the way we talk…. but also for many small business owners, now Google represents the fear of loosing traffic, the fear of loosing leads…  and more customers come to me these days,  with the fear of screwing things. The Feat of loosing their business if they hire the wrong SEO company.

But how easy it’s to screw a site?

I mean… if it was soooo easy, any one could screw their competitors ?

If banning sites can be predicted then we can all predict the end of our competitors sites?

So here is my challenge:

I will hire dodgy SEO companies to link building for 1 a brand new site.

Objectives:

To rank the site for it’s name. <— pretty easy don’t you think?

Once the site ranks for it’s own name… I will pay this dodgy link builders….  to rank for a new keyword.

For this, I will try to see how far the algorithm will go with my low quality link building…

I will test :

Link building from “bad sites” and try to define exactly what a “bad site is”

Excessive link building.

Doing link BLASTS <—- I seriously hate this type of strategy

Using duplicate content in all the pages

Avoiding any contextual links… only low level profile links.

how long will this site rank and what impact this link building will have in my ranking?

Things I will not do:

Link any of my REAL/PROPER/AUTHORITY sites to the experiment site.

Use the site in shared hosting with other REAL/PROPER sites.

Create Unique Content for the site…. (in fact I will just have duplicate content)

Get any High Authority backlink… I just want to get crappy low level backlinks… The lower the better baby…!

So why the experiment?

Because to judge, we need to understand first.

Obviously this experiment it’s not trying to define the importance of quality, the importance of writing for users and not for search engines… but the idea is to be able to publish some figures to understand the way the algorithm behaves vs low level links.

My theory is that the ranking will rise fast and will drop fast.

Will the site get banned?

I don’t think so… it will just take the same effort to rank it again…. and the whole process will be an eternal waste of time process.

But hey… I guess I have to try it before guessing…. stay tuned.

So what happens when you are really trying to compete in an industry where Money Talks

Forget affiliate marketing, forget adsense, forget tiny mini sites…  let’s talk about REAL money…  let’s talk about markets where the competitors are in FACT companies with HUGE budgets willing to do anything to get that ranking.

What decides the ranking?

Who decides who gets the top positions?

Well… it all depends on the currency my friend$$$$$$

Money talks… money talks when doing link building, money talks when building authority, when you are creatingg content…. It’s all matter of how much can you put towards building PR, strength, backlinks, social media, link bait, authority, viral content.

Call it whatever you want to call it, social media, brand awareness, link strategy, link bait, fans, friends, followers, partners or affiliates:

All starts with cash and only the ones that invest that cash in a wise manner will be victorious at the end of the day.

So now I’m suppose to talk about:….  “how to invest your money when you really want to compete in an insane difficult industry”

Budget

Tiny Budget: Let say $100 to $200 per month

Get a SEO guy (not a firm) to help you to build some links. These links are usually the same links you can get if you bother to do some normal type

Contextual Links

Social Links

Directory Links

Profile Links

Press Release Links

Blog Comments

Guest Posts

PDF/SlideShow Sharing sites

Video / Web 2.0 sites

These type of link building it’s the conventional link building, it’s what I do for 80% of my customers and what you should expect from any so-called normal SEO professional.

In a few words, you can’t expect to dominate the universe with a budget like this, but if your competition it’s not very strong (let say, small niche in your local city).. then this type of strategy WILL BRING YOU NICE results.

Mainly for 2 reasons:

You are doing something ^_^

and

Your competitor it’s doing nothing.

Pretty basic don’t you think?

Sometimes… we really over complicate things..

$500 to $1000 per month:

This is when you are really in need of links that will make a difference vs your competition. We are talking about valuable links. Links that when the competition found them, they will have difficulties matching them…

So in this case, It hurts me to say this: Content may be the king.

Top content submitted to guest blogs and to online magazines can bring proper love of authority sites and obviously some nice juice backlinks.

When you have this type of budget, then you can speed up things by investing in premium submission of Press Release services when your PR it’s guarantee to:

a) be syndicated to top news sites

b) be published in Google News

c) be given the green light to publish your juicy do follow-anchor keyword.

At this level of budget, it’s when you are start looking at deep-linking and when you can target 10-20 keywords to different areas of your site.

My theory: If you can’t achieve top 3… don’t even bother and move to a different keyword… and by having enough money and resources to play with, this is when you can really invest in proper analysis of your competitors strategy and match their type of backlinks, being sure your links bring the required authority to get the respect of Google.

The links to obtain then are:

Premium links in Associations or Niche related directories.

Potential sponsorship of niche related communities

Links in Paid business directories like Business.com , BOW (best of the web), Yahoo Directory, etc.

Premium Press Release in PRweb (example the top of the range is $360) but once published your PR gets hosted at PRweb

Also the option to start investing in top paid directories, here is a list of interesting places where your investment can bring some good ranking (remember… you are trying to get links that your competitor can’t get for free)

dir.yahoo.com

alihaohao.com

botw.org

business.com

clora.net

rtlp.org

aussie.org

buzzle.com

clush.com

dirbull.com

Over 1K per month…

Before you post a stupid comment about “I don’t know what type of people invest over 1K per month…” think again.

We are talking about markets where one, or one lead sale can bring over $10.000 (just one sale!) so clearly investing $1000, $2000, or more per month it’s a no brainer!

This is not for “how to make a cup cake” website, this is for b2b or sites where ranking = revenue…

So with over 1K per month… we can start working on the idea of creating an overall authority…
this means, we have a proper link building velocity plan and strategy… and we know where our monthly budget will be invested..

So this is when we can create cycles of link building that will target different areas, different keywords consolidating our site not as one keyword wonder, but a serious “Authority” in our industry, topic…

We have to show consistency …. we want to show that we are still creating buzz.

This type of budget obviously becomes better and better with time… because after you have paid one time inclusions in Authority Directories or where you have already created TOP CONTENT… your content and links will remain … this means: your authority can only increase with time.

Obviously the problem is obvious: If you have that type of budget, there is a big chance your competition also has a serious budget, so this is when you and your SEO teeam needs to be as original as possible.

Link bait, Joint Ventures and social media take place at this stage to guarantee you can create links that your competitors, just can’t buy.

At the end of the day, you may say that money talks… but like in anything in life, money doesn’t determine success… (but hell sometimes makes things easier)

The important thing to realize is , this is not just about buying links or paying for link building…. once you really want to compete, your content, the quality of your site, sooner or later will have to go under the microscope of the SERPS and the end user… so be wise, invest in strategies that will bring a permanent improvement to your site, instead of working on towards achieving just “ranking” …

God.. I hate the word SEO packages….. and to be honest as an SEO professional, that’s why I have been calling my services: SEO packages.

So this is the story…

For years I have been selling SEO packages in the same way than everyone does: Selling it as a retail product. But to be honest, there is a problem with this “pre-made type of solutions” : SEO is based on specific conditions of any website, any website has a different age, backlinks, authority, structure… and obviously it competes in different industry. Like a doctor you can’t really diagnose the same illness to each patient…. and in the same way, you can prescribe the same medicament.

The problem with SEO packages is that they work like a 20 “gym-sessions” gift voucher. Once you finish the 20 sessions… good luck mate, please buy again.

If you haven’t lost weight? Buy more.
If you haven’t achieve your fitness goal? Buy more.

Because you like it or not… SEO experts, SEO companies… LOOOOOOOVE to charge you per month.
But many times small business in Australia, have no clear idea what they are getting for this monthly service.

In fact it’s not uncommon to find business owners that have been screwed by SEO companies and after 2K – 3K they still rank in page 5, for a longtail that simply brings no traffic whatsoever .

So the reason to launch this service: SEO for a Year – it’s to be able to provide SEO in my terms.

No rush. No bulk – crap links. No trying to upsell you extra stuff. Just you and me working together for 1 year, towards getting TOP ranking for 2 key keywords for your business.

To be honest? I never expected such a great result. Since launched in January the 1st.. I have been lucky enough to work with 16 companies that have decided to trust me in helping them to develop a proper SEO plan.

Self-marketing-plug-post?

100% yes.

But beyond the point of promoting my own service…I just want to give relevance to the importance of providing something with value.

Yes… call me crazy but… mmm what about if us, the SEO professionals… stop providing lame services that make no difference, and stand up and decide to raise our game.
What about if we change the way we offer services and we grow a pair of B*lls and offer ranking guarantees? or money back guarantee? or a precise link building strategy plan with serious goals, and exact time frame and a decent offer in plain terms that brings some real results to our clients?

For all of you interested in knowing a bit more, check SEO for a Year or contact me using the form in this site.

Usually I get hired as an SEO consultant to help people with SEO before a site it’s up and running… in this cases I work with developers, programmers, trying to cordinate the SEO part or the things to do…. before we launch the site.

In developing your websites, you should try and have your online strategy drive your technical implementation and not the other way around… well… at least that’s my point of view.

In many cases, this has little bearing on the final cost of the project (if considered from the beginning) but can hugely affect whether your site will be a success or not. Taking the time to answer a few questions will help you formulate and pick the best technical solution for your website, but one that makes your SEO efforts much easier too.

While there are a number of consideration to keep in mind when making technical decisions, these are straightforward, and easy to come to grips with if you make a bit of an effort. At the very least, things to keep in mind (and ask your technical implementation team about), include

* URL rewriting – this is the difference between a link like http://yoursite.com/?p=424245 and http://yoursite.com/products/widgetA … the latte is better for SEO

* Handling duplicate content, or canonicalization – most search engines penalize duplicate content

* Handling error messages

* Internal site linking structures

You therefore need to have the right capacity built into your technical requirements. Mentions in the press, or links from popular bookmarking sites can instantly drive a large volume of traffic to your site. Do you have a plan to deal with traffic spikes?

Your final technical solution will also need to provide you with tools, or use existing tools and services, to measure, monitor and report your SEO efforts.

This includes not just web log analysis, but other web analytics and conversion tracking software. There are a lot of tools available for use in SEO, and to build a technical solution that does not allow you to incorporate them is a waste of resources. Until you can measure both the traffic you are getting, and the conversions (or impact on your bottom line), you are flying blind, and potentially wasting resources and effort on the wrong things.

While you might not be technically competent enough to draw up the entire technical implementation plan, you can certainly quickly learn enough to be able to judge the merits of any such plan that is presented to you.

Remember, your website and SEO strategies should drive the technical requirements and implementation, and not the other way around

It’s all about the money … it’s all about your investment.. it’s all about ranking higher in Google. So if you want to rank higher you need to invest , you need to pay. Oh yes.. you need to go to your paypal account and pay someone : An SEO consultant, a link building, a link seller, a high Page Rank directory , an SEO company, article writer or someone lese….

Off course you can take the path of : DIY SEO… do it youself baby… learn the process… work hard… and try to rank it yourself: But you are still investing time, energy and resources.

I will love to say that if we work hard on a site, Google will realize that we are part of the “good guys” and it will rank our site. But the reality is… you need to pay baby.

So the question is : how much to pay?

The answer is simple: How much ranking 1st means to you.

This week I had a chat with a potential customer. His objective was to make over $60.000 per month from his new online endevour.
Dam! 60K per month… not a bad business if you ask me. That’s over $700.000 per year.

- So what is your marketing budget?
- Mmmm very limited.
- How are you planning to get the traffic then?
- By organic traffic.
- Does your website ranks already?
- No… I don’t have a site yet.

Oh dear….

Because regardless if you have a website about washing machines, mortgages, criminal lawyers of house painters. Regardless what your business is all about what you need it’s ranking.
Brand awareness? Can wait.
Customer Loyalty? Can wait.
Traffic… can’t wait.
Ranking … can’t wait

Because ranking … brings traffic and if you are smart puppy that means CUSTOMERS.

So or you invest, or you allowed your competitors to invest… and that’s when SEO becomes a really unfair situation for the “broke website owner”.
The longer you go without link building… the longer you go without ranking, the stronger your competitor gets.

90% of my clients in the last 2 years still hold their ranking…
Not because I’m an amazing dude… but mainly because their competitors gave up in their SEO objectives…. outranking them it’s now simply to hard so their ranking it’s guarantee we assume lazy people will remain lazy.

God I love lazy sites…

So the main question once again is…

who to pay, and how much to pay for SEO….

And once again the answer seems to point to : understanding the Return in Investment for your SEO strategy.

How much business could your site generate if you achieve top position for your target keyword?
If you can answer that question… and if you trust you understand your market properly, then investing in SEO it’s a no brainer.

Obviously the problem of this silly-SEO-game it’s that top ranking doesn’t mean more customers. Let’s be honest.. if your product it’s rubish… your convertion will decrease regardless any type of ranking or traffic increase.

A small change can bring huge results.

I believe that in this industry, a small increase in ranking can bring a serious amount of traffic… and I also believe once small business owners have decided to embrasse the idea of working towards a better positioning for their websites, their overall marketing menthality seems to improve.

This means… they seem to be more open to the ideas of improving their website, invest better copy, split testing, consider different marketing strategies and even look at different ways to study their incoming traffic.

So what if you don’t have money?

You can always go DIY SEO… but if you go that path, be honest enough to confess that if you failed it’s not because SEO doesn’t work… but because you didn’t took SEO seriously enough.

If you go to jail… do you want the free lawyer provided by court?
or do you think the investment in the best defense lawyer in town will be a smart move?

Your call… your life… your website.

if you want to go for the DIY SEO path… then be sure to take the DIY process at serious as possible.

This means: Track your results…. experiment and test. Keep record of what you are doing and how much time are you investing in doing your own link building, keyword research or competition analysis.

Think about it.
Why do you want to spend 12 hours writing 10 articles where you can outsource these taks for less $30?
If you think one hour of your time is worth less than $3.. then go for it.

There are a few things you should outsource…
and not try to do yourself…
specially if you are serious about it.

Don’t try to remove your own mollars.
Don’t try to build a dog kennel… (trust me, it never really looks like a proper kennel).
Don’t try to make your own Big Mac (it never taste of look the same)
Don’t try to “represent yourself” in court (please don’t try it)
Don’t try to cut your kids hair (Ask my wife about it)

But if you really want to rank 1st in Google…. trust me ….
sooner or later you will end up investing some
cash
dreams
resources
tears
stress
and time.

And keep in mind: There is no refund option in the Customer Support Offices of Google…

Taking the time to draw up an effective SEO strategy and plan for your website will help you answer some rather fundamental questions about what you should be doing, driven in no small part by the output of your research into your current situation, and your competition. In a few words… not every single SEO strategy needs to be the same, it all depends of where you are, and what are your objectives .

Therefor to start with the “right step”, you will need to have a plan in place before you start producing content or building links.

Your specific strategy will also determine what sort of search engine marketing (SEM), if any, you will be doing, and ultimately, it will also drive the technical decisions you make for your site.

While the strategy will be the overarching plan and vision, the SEO plan will detail how this will be implemented in reality. To be sure of a successful website, your SEO strategy effort should examine and cover several distinct (though sometimes overlapping) areas;

1) Website Content
All websites, including ecommerce sites, have content requirements. Content is how people find you, and indeed how they decide whether to do business with you. You will need to address every aspect of this critical area, from the creation of content, how it will be displayed and presented to your site’s users, and how you will handle any modifications and archiving of old content.

The nature of the content will also need to be covered.

Will the site have a blog, press releases, or just product and service descriptions? Will the users be invited to provide content, in the form of comments, a wiki or a forum? Will the content be syndicated? And just as important, will the content on the site be anything other than text? Many sites today do provide images, audio and even video. A decision will also need to be taken on which content on the site will be indexed in search engines, and what might for example, be available only to people who have logged onto the site.

2) Link building (pretty dam important point)

Getting your link building strategy correct is definitely one of the pillars of any successful SEO effort. As a website owner, you have a wide variety of choices and sources for inbound links to your site. These include directory submissions, blog comments, social media and bookmarking sites, comments on forums, mentions in the press, and links (free and paid) on other sites relevant to your niche.

Getting the right links from the right sources will be just as important to your search engine rankings as will good content. While great content will naturally and over time foster links to your site, this is usually not enough these days. You will need to have a plan for generating these external links yourself.

3) Social Media

Although I believe SEO rules vs Social Media… there are a lot of of social media websites and services that allow you to engage with your target audience in a meaningful and rewarding way, if done properly. In many ways, this is a more recent extension of the traditional link-building strategy. Sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, have redefined the inbound link acquisition landscape for many websites. So we can use social media not so much for “friends” and “followers” but more for links..

4) Search engine targeting

The ‘SE’ in SEO does refer to search engines. That said, not all search engines are created equally, and your strategy should at least cover which search engines you intend to target. Some websites for example, would do much better to target regional or niche search engines instead of trying to blast the Big 3.

There are a lot of search engines on the internet besides Bing, Google and Yahoo!, and a good understanding of where you expect your clients to be coming from will help you make the right decision. In addition, the big search engines have ‘search engine verticals’.

This is just a fancy way of referring to how Google for example, will return different results for Google News, Google Blogs, Google Video etc., and how sometimes these results are blended into the standard Google search results.

5) SEM

Many website owners find it helpful to use search engine marketing (like PPC), in parallel with their SEO efforts. This is particularly true for brand new sites. PPC can help you quickly evaluate and assess the utility of various different keywords. As an example, the Google AdWords program provides you with tools allowing you to target the same keywords in your PPC adverts that you are targeting on the various pages on your site.
This allows you to get reasonably accurate metrics for how traffic driven by these keywords will perform on your site once your SEO efforts start to pay off and you begin to get decent organic traffic.

The end result of all this assessment, will be a workable SEO plan. The plan will cover both internal optimizations and direct your external efforts. At the very least, you will have a checklist for what needs to be done, even as you work out the details of how it will achieved.
Your plan and strategy documents should not be produced once, and then filed away, but should constantly be referred to as a roadmap, and updated to reflect new development and changes in overall goals.

Or… you can hire me lol.

Yes… I know… I know… your toy is bigger than mine. I know you rank higher than me… I know your keyword is more difficult that mine.

Before you start bragging about ranking, about your own SEO skills, let’s write a post explaining exactly what keyword difficulty is all about.

When selecting a keyword to try to rank, you are not competing vs the 18.000.000 results you see in Google…

You are not competing even the 100.000 first results

You are not competing even the 100 first results.

You are competing only against 1 website. Number 1.

That’s it. The real difficulty of a keyword is who is in 1st position…. and if that’s a difficult one… then think who is in 2nd position and who it in 3rd position.

The reason why I write this is because usually in the SEO clown-sphere,  you see self-proclaimed experts that clap about great ranking in a very competitive industry or keyword, when the reality is:

Difficulty is only based on the effort other sites are doing towards ranking for the same keyword as you

That’s it….

End of the story.

You may boost your ego by thinking… hey I’m n first page with over 250 billion competitive sites… but let’s analyze your words.

“Competitive sites?”

Are the 250 billion sites doing active link building for YOUR keyword?

I don’t think so… in fact in many cases, not even all the 10 pages in the 1st page of Google, are in fact link building and doing an active effort to rank for THAT keyword.

Example: government websites.

The government ranks based on Authority, and authority that is usually general and not keyword based.

The government doesn’t have an SEO team. They don’t even do any link building.

Why?

They don’t care… they don’t need to do it.

So if the government is in 1st place… you are competing vs a high page rank authority instead of a keyword based authority . Therefor you can always outrank that government site with just plain and simple link building for your keyword.

Sound’s easy?

Well… it is not so complicate to be honest.

So let’s recap …

Stop thinking that the amount of searches are the competition you are facing.

Just think on the New York Marathon

Do you really think the All time Professional Marathon runners that travel from Africa to New York are concern about “Peter the father of 3 boys running the marathon for the 1st time to promote his local charity”?

Mmm I don’t think so: Because Peter is not a competitor…. is just a runner.

So time to reduce your ego and concentrate on: how the hell is also trying to rank for my keyword.

That’s it. Keep it simple . Don’t ever thinking it.

And in case you are interested…… this bad ass … is the guy to beat.

TRUST ME: HE WILL OUTRANK YOU BY FAR!!!

Yesterday I was watching TV with the kids and before I took them to bed I saw and Ad for Ivehicle, a new website that wants to  steal some of the market in the Automobile Buy and Sell website market.

In Australia we have seen a lot of these sites from Drive.com.au , Carsales.com.au , Buycar.com.au , Carsguide.com.au …. and a bunch more of sites with a huge authority in the car/auto market.

That’s why I found amazing that a new website was promoting their services on a TV ad.

For sure if they are promoting on the TV, they must have a huge budget and they have done their marketing online homework already.

Well.. once again (for a change!) Gab was wrong.

Obviously IVehicle is run by car dealers and not by people with any type of online marketing idea or strategy….. because once I saw the ad… the first thing that I did was to head to google and search for

IVehicle.

Well… my surprise was to find these results:

(click on the graphic to see the results)

To save your time let me save you some time: They don’t appear in the 1st page in Google…

In a few word: Ivehicle doesn’t even appear for the keyword Ivehicle .… mmmm not very impressive.

So I decided to check the site and once again Surprise Surprise: A site that hasn’t been indexed by google… a site with no backlinks… a site that in a few words doesn’t even exist in Google.

So this made me think about the way some Australian companies invest their money in conventional marketing to promote their websites when they are failing in the basics of Online Marketing.

Let’s make this clear: I’m not bashing the idea of TV marketing… I wish I had the budget to waste in this type of marketing, but why should I spend 20 times more money than I need when my site is not even ready to compete vs the other websites in my market/industry.

So will IVehicle will succeed in their task to dominate the market in their region?

Well, I seriously doubt it.

You can’t run an online business when you don’t give priority t the most BASIC online standards your site needs to have to achieve any online marketing success.

A TV ad is not  a magic bullet, instead is a nice and fancy way to go bankrupt . Do you want to achive long term marketing success… well, LEARN ABOUT Online Marketing. Be Smart, be different… you can’t compete with the TOP DOGS in your industry using the same expensive techniques.

Look at this poor and humble site….
Internet Marketing budget: Zero.
Online Marketing Success? You bet.
Why? Gets Traffic, gets new customer, gets new friends, get my name across and achieve a nice ranking and reputation.

So… if you are Ivehicle manager, CEO or person responsible of Internet Marketing, may be you need a Ninja helping you to invest your money in what really makes a difference online.