I noticed some time ago that there’s no simple way to get answers to marketing questions online any more. Forums have become bloated with random chatter and social cliques and news sites are one-way conversations. I wanted to bring back signal with as little noise as possible and I see Yahoo Answers as the closest model to achieving this.

I would therefore like to introduce you all to Search Marketing Talk, a Q&A website for your SEO, PPC, Social, Domainer, Affiliate, Development and Analytics needs. To summarise:

• Ask and answer any on-topic question for free
• Vote questions and answers up and down
• The person who asks the question can choose the best answer
• Earn points for answering questions and extra points for giving the best answer
• The more points you earn, the more exposure you get
• Gain business referrals by being seen as the expert in your niche – promo yourself in your profile

The main rules are:

• No self-promo in questions or answers
• No link dropping – that’s what your profile is for
• No being a dick

I hope you find it useful and I appreciate any help in spreading the word via Twitter, Facebook, Email or Carrier Pigeon.

Rob

Overview

Recessions are a time for belt-tightening within companies and most in-house SEOs have probably already been approached by their CMO / Marketing Director, asking for ways to cut costs and make better use of existing resources. There’s only so-many pages you can tweak or site architecture issues you can fix before SEO comes down to one thing – links.

Links are costly, whether you buy them, ask for them or bait them – time is money and links take up valuable time and resources. If your company is like the many that I’ve worked with, you’re probably already attracting links in the form of display advertising and affiliate links, but these add nothing to your site’s authority or rankings. Ad tracking systems such as Doubleclick block search engines from following their links and most affiliate systems and providers send crawlers through a slurry of ugly redirects.

Now is the perfect time to convince your fellow marketers that old-school tracking solutions add very little value to the business, whilst an in-house SEO friendly solution could significantly boost revenues from Search and reduce link development costs.

The Old Solution

Companies in the most aggressive industries such as Poker realised the value of affiliate links many years ago, with most now running an in-house program with search engine friendly URLs. These consisted of a tagged-up URL e.g.

http://www.example.com/?affiliate=123456

This URL then dropped an affiliate cookie and 301 Redirected users and search engines back to a clean URL e.g.

http://www.example.com/

As Google tends to pass authority down through 301 redirects (especially within the same hostname), it meant that every poker affiliate was effectively strengthening the website that they were promoting. This significantly reduced the number of links that a poker site would have to acquire in order to compete in the space, reducing costs whilst freeing up resources.

This technique is slowly becoming less effective however, having discussed the matter with other SEOs (most with gaming experience) on a “Give It Up” conference session at SMX London this year. My personal view is that this has more to do with gaming affiliates pushing clicks through their own tracking, before redirecting people through the actual affiliate link – although it could also be a dampener put in place by Google.

The New Improved Solution

At the previously mentioned conference, I discussed some other possible solutions to harnessing affiliate link juice during my presentation. My personal favourite was the use of a # anchor on the end of URLs. The # symbol was traditionally used to link to sections within a page (useful in the old days of single-page university thesis) and more recently to combat issues with AJAX. Search Engines have confirmed that they totally ignore the # on URLs, not even causing duplication issues, unlike a query string. In other words;

http://www.example.com/dir/file.html#123456

…is seen as identical to:

http://www.example.com/dir/file.html

Unfortunately (as far as I’m aware) browsers do not parse the anchor (or “fragment”) back to the web server, which means that some JavaScript is needed. This can be implemented in the same way as a Google Analytics tracking pixel e.g.

<script type="text/javascript">
var isSSL = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://www." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cimg src='" + isSSL + "example.com/affiliatetracker.php?affiliate=" + self.document.location.hash.substring(1) + "' />"));
</script>

Affiliates can now link to any page on your site with this JavaScript on, you’ll log their affiliate ID via the # anchor and drop an appropriate first-party cookie. This implementation would be as cross-browser compatible as any web analytics solution and therefore trusted by affiliates to give accurate results.

Option 2

If JavaScript isn’t your cup of tea, how about taking advantage of the canonical link tag? Google states that the tag helps them to identify and remove duplicate URLs from their index. It’s suggested that link juice also flows correctly into the main URL specified in the tag. Rather than using a 301 Redirect (useful in the old days, when Google would have seen affiliate URLs as duplicate pages) we can send traffic directly to pages with the query string intact e.g.

http://www.example.com/dir/file.html?id=123456

With the following link tag in the page’s HTML:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/dir/file.html” />

I personally see Option 1 as the safer bet, although they’re both good alternatives to traditional affiliate tracking.

What Are The Advantages?

Although many large affiliates use their own tracking systems on affiliate links, a good percentage will use your links in the format that you supply them – especially in less competitive markets or where product feeds are concerned.

If you have a product catalogue, how much would it cost you to acquire quality links into every product page?

When affiliate links pass-on juice, not only can you develop links at zero cost, the links will most likely use your product names for their anchor text – giving you a significant “exact match” link advantage over your competitors. If a link costs you $200 in man-power to acquire and you have 200 active affiliates that install the new affiliate link format, that’s a cost saving of at least $40,000 in link development. Not to mention the fact that most affiliates will link to multiple sections of your site or even every product page!

A recession is the perfect time to pour R&D into SEO and other marketing channels, you’ll be surprised how many new ideas can be developed with very little expense for the business.

Running dozens/hundreds of websites can be an expensive business, hosting alone can cost upwards of $250 a year for each site. SEOs will often look to host each website on a different IP range or in a totally different country. You may want to host country-specific sites in their target country, but not want to have to replicate your CMS or custom platform on every hosting server. A slightly darker reason for spreading your sites across different hosts would be to manage micro-sites that appear independent and use them to point link juice into your website.

One experiment I made last year was a script to auto-upload and update WordPress blogs no matter where they were hosted. Most web hosts don’t offer SSH access though and managing a large number of files via a PHP FTP class can get very messy. This also didn’t reduce costs, as each hosting account still required a MySQL database and all the pre-requisites for running WP.

A better solution comes in the form of copying the way that web proxies work. You’ve probably come across web proxies when investigating duplicate/scraped content; they basically allow someone to view a web page without leaking their browser, location or IP details to the website owner or their analytics provider. They’re mostly used by school kids to circumvent website restrictions, the tin-foil hat brigade, and by those living in countries with repressive regimes. The part that we’re interested in though is how the script visits a URL, temporarily stores the HTML, images plus JS/CSS and then displays the page without ever leaving the proxy site. Any web page can be viewed on the proxy site’s domain, without the proxy user noticing any difference.

Using these principles, I’m going to show you how you can manage all of your websites on a single, good quality, hosting account, whilst making them appear to be hosted on different hosts.

Step 1
Find a really reliable web host with high uptime and powerful servers. I use VPS Link for my VPSs and LiquidWeb for my hosting accounts. The larger your planned network will be, the more you should invest in this single site hosting. This will be our “hub site”.

Step 2
Create a simple Content Management System that can load different templates and content based on the URL parameter parsed to it (e.g. ?site=1). Alternatively you can use an existing CMS and adapt it to load data from different databases, depending on the variable sent to it. For WordPress you can make the following change to wp-config.php:

define('DB_NAME', 'database'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value


To:

switch ($_GET[site]) {
case "1":
define('DB_NAME', 'database1'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username1'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password1'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
break;
case "2":
define('DB_NAME', 'database2'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username2'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password2'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
break;
case "3":
define('DB_NAME', 'database3'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username3'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password3'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
break;
default:
define('DB_NAME', 'database'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
break;
}

I’ll be releasing a free Open Source (GPL) application shortly which will manage this and your blogs for you using a simple browser based GUI.

Step 3
Register as many free or cheap hosting accounts as you’d like, each will be displaying a unique website. You’d be surprised how many companies offer free hosting in exchange for a simple advertisement or link on your site. Each host must support PHP and use Apache Web Server (this qualifies 99% of web hosts). No MySQL databases or special PHP functions are needed. These will host our “node sites”.

Step 4
Now this is where the magic happens. We’re going to upload just 2 files to each of our new node site hosting accounts. After this, you’ll never have to FTP into or touch the hosting account again thanks to our proxy technique. The files that we’ll be uploading are a .htaccess file and a PHP script. I’ve reduced this technique down to just needing a .htaccess file in the past, although this requires a mod_proxy plugin which most free or cheap hosting companies will not support (Hat tip to Mike for pointing this out). Anyways…..

Create a simple text file in Notepad or equivalent named .htaccess and paste in the following:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog-app.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ blog-app.php?secret=monkey&u=$1 [PT,L,NE,QSA]

Once uploaded, this file will activate the mod_rewrite module in Apache (it’s the module that handles your 301 redirects usually) and points any requests (other than for /blog-app.php) to /blog-app.php?secret=monkey&u=$1 without changing the URL in the user’s browser. You’ll notice 2 variables in the URL we’re pointing to, the first (secret) is a security key that I’d recommend changing to a unique alphanumeric password and the second replaces $1 with the URL path requested. e.g. http://www.example.com/dir/test.html gets internally pointed to http://www.example.com/blog-app.php?secret=monkey&u=dir/test.html.

Step 5
Now the next bit of code is a big’en! It’s work-in-progress and therefore a little messy, although basically acts as our proxy. After checking that the request is genuine (using the secret variable), it will proceed to grab content from our hub site. So http://www.example.com/dir/test.html goes to http://www.example.com/blog-app.php?secret=monkey&u=dir/test.html which requests content, images and files from http://www.hubsite.com/dir/test.html?site=2.

Create a new plain text file called blog-app.php and paste in…

< ?php
error_reporting(0);

if ($error404) {
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
print "< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN\">
<html><head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Not Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL ".$_SERVER[PHP_SELF]." was not found on this server.</p>
</body></html>";
exit;
}
?>

(Thanks to the PHP Proxy project for some of this code)

Step 6
Edit the above files as needed and then upload across your node site hosting accounts. You’ll only need to change the $proxyfrom and $siteid variables for each site, where $siteid is a unique ID and $proxyfrom is the root URL of the domain used on that specific node site.

Hopefully this will be of some help to the advanced readers of my blog. If this might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphs to you, keep an eye out for the release of my Blog-App PHP application that puts all of this behind a simple user interface.

Do you rank for the term [seo]? If not, why not?

I used to hear this question from prospective clients around 3 years ago whilst heading up the SEO department at a London based marketing agency. The question was usually asked by SMEs, in the belief that either Google recommended the agencies in the top 10, or that a #1 ranking for [seo] meant that their website could also get a #1 ranking for a completely different search term with ease. This myth was happily spread by those already ranking for term, many of which were using very dubious link acquisition tactics to keep their sites on the first page at the time (and most have since dropped).

Fast forward to the present day, I now work at a Search Marketing consultancy called Ayima. Does Ayima rank for [seo]? Nope. It’s not because we can’t rank for the term, we just haven’t tried yet. The reason behind this is simple, our company isn’t looking to take on the smaller clients, and referrals from the term [seo] tend to be just that. The big brands that we’re lucky enough to work with, have all approached us through the reputation of those working at our company and referrals from happy clients. The Marketing Director or Online Marketing Manager at a large FTSE 100 would much rather gain recommendations from colleagues, friends and existing partners than open up a browser and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. Ayima currently ranks #1 for the term [search marketing consultancy] and top 10 for [search marketing] in the UK, thanks to our industry friends, bloggers and association memberships. The terms are searched for less frequently than [seo], although they’re more often used by people looking for a long-term managed solution rather than a quick fix “Submit your site to 10,000 search engines” or “Guaranteed Top 10″ approach.

Not everyone is looking to catch a big-fish client though, some agencies prefer to take on a large number of small clients, not to mention the many freelance SEO consultants out there. So how do you rank for the term [seo]?

The Risky Option
After creating a page of content on SEO or optimising your website’s homepage for the term, you could simply go out and buy a bunch of links from other Internet Marketing websites and blogs. You’d be surprised at how many SEOs sell links to other SEO companies for a relatively small amount of money. In the UK, you could probably get into the top 5 for the term with a link budget of just £5,000 – especially if your website has been around for a few years and has already built up some authority. It sounds tempting, although remember that your company’s website is part of your overall brand and reputation. Some SEOs are willing to stab their competitors in the back and could report you to Google, putting your website and existing search traffic at risk.

The Safe Option
If you’re willing to put in the hours, it wouldn’t be hard to get a top 10 ranking for [seo] using whiter-than-white tactics. Here are some ideas:

• Change Your Name – If you offer SEO and you want to target the search term [seo], make sure that everyone knows your company as Widget SEO, not just Widget. Change your logo, your copyright notices and every mention of your company name to ensure that people will only ever link to you as Widget SEO.
• Become A Member (of anything) – There are dozens of regional, national and global industry associations for online marketing, so join them. Also register your company on LinkedIn, Twitter, industry forums and anywhere with a profile. Each member will usually get a follow’d link to their company website. You often can’t pick the anchor text, but you’re already called Widget SEO anyway, aren’t you.
• Get Blogging – It’s an obvious thing to say, although a large proportion of SEO agencies and consultants still don’t have a blog or don’t use it effectively. Get yourseocompany.com/blog/ set-up, post regularly and don’t just talk about what everyone else is saying. With a bit of promotion and some links from industry friends, you’ll start building links into your site in no time. Most importantly, use your company’s main site template for your blog and keep the top navigation bar intact to ensure that your blog’s link-juice flows into the rest of the site.
• Attend Conferences – $1,000 doesn’t just get you new ideas at an SEO conference, it also gets you links. Most of the people you’ll talk to at one of these events will have a blog, an on-topic blog with lots of authority juiciness. Swap business cards, become friends, whore yourself out, tell them that you’re a big fan of their blog. A $1,000 conference pass, divided by 5 links from new friends, equals just $200 per link. Pretty darn cheap I’d say. If you consider yourself to be an expert in your field, apply to speak at an event. You’ll usually get your conference pass for free and can get even more links from the event website and your fellow panellists. Excluding travel costs, that means free links! Find your local SEO conference and get registering.
• Sponsor Events – There are literally hundreds of SEO gatherings all over the world, all looking to get someone to pay for their beer. I help to run one such event, called LondonSEO, which has struggled to find a sponsor on one occasion. Large events often have websites which are authority hubs, overflowing with potential link juiciness. Offer to sponsor a local event and it won’t just be a reputation and brand builder – their sponsor link to you is worth its weight in gold.
• Get Local – Geo-specific SEO related searches get a lot more traffic than you think. The people searching for these terms are often willing to pay more for a local SEO as well. Our clients like us to be on-site regularly for meetings, strategy planning and inter-department brainstorming. Why not rank for [seo london]? An agency called Sale Per Click has even managed to bypass LondonSEO for the term [london seo] by submitting their business to Google Local with a company name of just “SEO”! As Google Local splits search terms into Business and Location, you just have to set your company name as the term you’re looking to rank for. Local Search is big, so get learning about it or attend SMX Local in July.

The Muppet Option
Don’t be a muppet! Untargeted comment spam and spamming communities such as Sphinn won’t help when targeting SEO terms. You’ll get reported to the search engines, banned and your brand will be in tatters. Save the risky tactics for your affiliate sites and keep your company away from the mud.

I love those “full service ad agencies” that try to specialise in everything and excel at nothing. My favourite are those that try to embrace online marketing/conversion through offline advertising and getting it oh-so-wrong. As an affiliate, these lapses in judgement can become a big money maker if used and abused correctly.

Have you ever seen an advert for an online product/service on a train, tube, bus or plane that hardly even mentions the web address? As I now live in the sunny beach resort of Southend, I travel for 50 minutes into London each day, surrounded by advertising that everyone ends up reading (it’s the only way to avoid eye contact and social interaction on public transport). I then travel for a further 5-10 minutes into Farringdon on the Underground, where the Ayima office is based. In the train carriages, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the ad posters are looking for people to convert online. This makes sense as 99.999% of people travelling into/out-of London will use the internet regularly and most likely go online within minutes of leaving the train, at either work or home.

The part that the ad agencies get wrong, is the emphasis on brand and slogans over URLs and contact details. They take for granted that the brand they’re promoting has a strong SEO and PPC presence, as a badly constructed ad will result in people Googling the slogan or brand, rather than recognising and responding to the URL. If an affiliate notices an offline ad early enough and reacts to it immediately, big money can be made.

In the UK, many slogans and marketing messages aren’t trademarked as they’re too generic or it’s seen as a waste of budget. This leaves affiliates open to use them for their own means. Is the slogan and brand variations registered as a domain? How many links does the brand have with these phrases in the anchor text? How many links with the right anchor text would it take to compete with the brand for their own brand terms and marketing messages?

If Acme Co. created a “widget” and then launched an offline marketing campaign of “got widgets?” and a discrete web address of www.acme.com/widgets, imagine how many searches there would be for “got widgets”! Imagine if you got in early and registered gotwidgets.com (or any other gTLD) and then set-up an affiliate site on that domain to sell Acme Co’s products. If you bought enough links with the right anchor text in, you could easily outrank the main brand site and also get direct traffic thanks to Acme Co’s ad agency spending $$$’s promoting the term that you rank #1 for. You’d be surprised how well it can work and how many ad agencies are continuously getting it wrong.

Can’t wait for your new domain to rank naturally? I usually do a nice PPC campaign for their brand terms during the weekend until I get good listings. Because commuters will recognise the slogan in your domain, you’ll get massive clickthrough and conversion rates.

You may find this a little sketchy on the legal side of things though, so make sure you consult a lawyer before using any of these ideas.

I’ve been moaning to people about this for a while, although as it still hasn’t been fixed I thought I’d shout a bit louder.

I’ve recently bought a house in mighty Essex and currently pondering over whether to buy a car or not (I never needed one when living in Central London). As a result, I’ve been running searches for terms like [mortgages] and [cars]. For both of these terms, Google Universal kicks in and displays news results, which is totally understandable. What I don’t get is why they insist on showing US news for searches that clearly require domestic information.

Google already knows that if I’m searching for these terms, I’m only going to be interested in information relevant to me – so why bother showing me stuff that I’m never going to click on? I don’t want news about Bush screwing up the US economy even further, or that the Hummer now comes in Lavender Blue. I do want to know what’s happening to the Bank of England base rate and that I should hold off from buying a Mini until a new model is released in the UK next year.

Please stop showing me news results from New York Times or Wall Street Journal; I’m on a UK IP address, with a en-GB browser and searching via Google.co.uk – why on earth would these sources be of interest to me on these terms? It’s understandable for terms such as [poker], where global news is more relevant, but at least stick in a filter that thinks before it sticks “Paulson Says Housing Woes to Worsen” on the first page of UK mortgage results.

It’s this year’s buzzword and the topic that every search conference goer is talking about, although most people are still unsure about what Universal Search is and how it affects them. The term is used by Google to describe their rollout of a new search result format, combining maps, images, video, news, products and blogs into the main search listings.

Although Google has been offering this data via its “OneBox” for a number of years now, the new format will actually integrate the new data sources into the web search listings. It effectively means that a website ranking 9th or 10th in the web results for a term, could get pushed onto the second page by a video clip or news article outranking them in the new result set.

Google thinks that this new style of results will be more helpful for the searcher and will show them information that they may not have thought to look for otherwise. It’s not surprising that the overall take up of Blog Search and News Search has been slow since launch, with the average Google user only knowing how to use the main search box and rarely venturing onto the other search tabs. The new result set will neglect the need to actively seek out these features, helping a user to find what they want first time. It’s important that the roll-out is carried out correctly however, which is why the process has been a gradual one. Someone searching for car prices doesn’t want to see an image of the vehicle and you don’t expect to see a blog result when seeking professional medical advice. The algorithm needs to determine which data sources are most appropriate for each topic, which is where search and click data will most likely play an important role.

How does this affect your company? Firstly you may find that you web page rankings drop as a result of other content sources outranking them. Listings for images, news and video, also take up more screen space than a normal web listing, so your 5th position ranking may now require the user to scroll down in order to see it.

Other than trying to increase your rankings for key terms, your best defence is to try and get your content included in the various new search types. If your company builds or manufactures a product, remember to use the product make and model as the file name on images and to use “alt” attributes in your <img> tag to describe the product. Keep your company blog up to date and remember to add Google to your list of search providers to ping. Keep an archive of your press releases and publish industry news in order to get into Google News. Demonstrate and promote your products using vodcasts (video podcasts) and upload them to YouTube. As with web pages, it’s important to build links to your content, images and video in order to increase its perceived popularity. This is often a much easier task than with web pages, as the medium has only recently started to be promoted in this fashion. Just because your web ranking may drop, doesn’t mean that your other content can’t be number one. Universal Search is here to stay and will be the default search result format for all Google users. It is important to embrace the issues and opportunities now in order to stay in front of your competitors.

I’m sure that we’re all still in the morning stage after losing our beloved ThreadWatch, although there’s a new site in town – and I’m not just on the rebound!

Threadwatcher.com is a sparky new SEM/internet news portal launched by Earl Grey (Syndk8), which takes a lot of influences from Threadwatch and in my personal opinion, many from The Register as well. Now apart from SearchEngineWatch (like our new look?), Threadwatch and The Register were/are my top must-visits of the day. Combining them into one juicy SEO/internet geekfest is just, well… a dream come true. It’s not the busiest site in the world in terms of visitors, stories or comments at the moment, although it’s down to us as an industry to change that.

My only concerns:

1. Keeping content fresh and interesting requires a big commitment from the editors.
2. Although Threadwatch has always been “edgy”, Syndk8 is way beyond that. Threadwatcher.com may not need to appeal to the mainstream SEM industry, but at least has to be inviting to the typical ThreadWatch reader. Anyone who has read Syndk8 knows what the language and tone is like (which is fine for its audience), but I don’t think that such a writing style will go down well with Threadwatcher’s target audience.
3. No geeky gadget section! I’ll make the site my browser homepage if a gadget tab is added

Anyway, take a look, register your username on the site and have a browse around. I think you’ll grow to like it and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

It looks like that crafty Naylor guy has asked his blog readership to vote for him on the “Nicest Bloke In SEO” poll. I’m really lagging behind, which is not nice. If you’re one of the 5 people who read my ramblings here, vote for me now and you could win a date with The Lisa*!

* Lisa doesn’t know yet, although I’m sure she’ll be OK with me using her in this fashion

Adam Lasnik joked during lunch at SMX and at the SEOmoz party that I was “that guy who hates Google”. Maybe some of my blog posts such as “Hacking Your Way To Number One” gave him that impression, although I do truly love Google. It’s my default search engine of choice, my email provider, my calendar organiser and my income source. Sure, I’ve said lots of negative things towards the Big G, although correcting these issues will only make the company stronger.

I also cannot think of one person I dislike at Google; my comments about Matt Cutts’ views on paid links were aimed at challenging Google’s policies and plans on this matter – not challenging Matt on a personal level. I don’t really speak to Matt much at conferences as he’s usually busy in big crowds of star-struck newbies, although I’ve had a few drinks with Brian White, Vanessa Fox and Amanda Camp before and think they’re top notch. I’ve also seen a glimpse of the future and was very impressed after chatting with Google Webmaster Central intern, errr… Red Googler (sorry that I can’t remember your name despite you telling me several hundred times).

So in summary, please don’t hate me just because I’m evil. Anyway, more tips and tricks on how to spam and hack Google coming soon