These ancient Chinese texts contain lessons for anybody wanting to create effective search engine optimization

Perhaps the most applicable passage I’ve read in the translations from Sun Tzu’s  texts on the ‘Art of War’ is the following:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

How does that apply to SEO Tips? Well, obviously your enemy is your competitors and you need to know something about their strategy and their capabilities to effectively compete with them and you need to know your own capabilities and weaknesses – hence you can bring in expertise to help you in areas you are weak in.

But in SEO, there is another party that you have to know, the judge and adjudicator, Google. Completely impartial until you make a move, Google can be your friend or your enemy and as an enemy, it can take you out of the battle completely. It always amazes me the number of SEO experts around who do not know the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines.

Do you know specifically what techniques are going to make Google your enemy and get your site penalized? Find out. Seek out an alliance with Google and you will prosper.  Sun Tzu says: “We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.”

Make it your business to become acquainted with the designs of Google now.

When a client is not making money from their website, the first thing they do is run to you looking for SEO Tips. Quick solutions to drive more traffic to their website, but any astute advisor should always look a bit further than just how many visitors are landing on the page. The real number is what percentage of these visitors are turning into buyers. The conversion rate.

Here are some of the things you might assess:

1. Using Analytics (Presuming you have it installed), look at the average time visitors are spending on your website. I have seen websites that rank in the first five places in Google for highly searched keywords not return a single inquiry simply because the color of the website projected the wrong image. A simple color change increased conversion.
2. Does the website get the message to visitors quickly. Remember you have about 6 seconds to convince a new visitor that your website is worth their time. If it is a flash site, that 6 seconds may be just a load status bar.
3. Is it easy for people to contact you? Remember, there are many distractions online that can take away somebody who is ready to take action – someone may IM them, or an email they have been waiting for may arrive and they are distracted, then never come back to your website. I have seen a simple change on a website increase the conversion rate by 400%. That change was just putting a simple contact form on the top of the right hand column of every page.

Before you invest in a whole lot of SEO work for your site, ask  yourself if you are really making the most of the traffic you’re currently getting. It is much cheaper to convert existing traffic than it is to generate new leads and you’ll cut down on the senseless link and article pollution on the internet. Keep a small, tidy internet footprint and make the most of what you have.

I had an interesting discussion a couple of days ago with a gentleman by the name of Lawrence E. Hughes, an evangelist of IPv6 who runs one of the only IPv6 testing centres in the world, right here in Cebu, Philippines. It is Mr. Lawrence’s view that most of the world will switch to this new Internet protocol by the end of the year with or without the US, probably without.

It seems extraordinary that the country that drove the Internet could be dragging it’s heels on something so seemingly important, but there is a good reason for it. We have to switch, because we will probably run out of IPv4 IP addresses by the end of the year – that is except the US which has around 4 IP addresses for every citizen  (They allocated them), while the rest of the world has .2 of an IP for every citizen.

And the US has resisted change in the past to it’s detriment – remember Deming, the statistician who, shunned by Detroit, went on to influence Japanese industry to embark on a program which ultimately resulted in them dominating the motor car industry? And no prizes for guessing which country is at the forefront of IPv6 technology.

Anyway, according to Lawrence E. Hughes, there is a 35 year jump in technology from IPv4 to IPv6. So what does that mean to users, SEO specialists, webmasters? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing is certain – things will radically change and unless you embrace change in a big way, you are doomed to go the way of the Detroit industrialists.

IPv6 will provide secure point-to-point, direct connections between computers, without the many hops that IPv4 makes us take – so that certainly means faster connections with existing lines. It also means accessing people’s computers directly, so it probably means doing SEO on a portion of a hard drive instead of some files on an internet server.  It means masses more information becoming available and perhaps clouds being made up of individual’s computers. And it means to me, that social networking will truly become the dominant internet activity.

What about the portals? and Google? – Certainly there will still be a need for portals and Google is very much out of step with the rest of their complacent countrymen in that they are embracing IPv6.  But the big picture is that Asia is leading the way in this new chapter of internet history and they have certainly thought more about the consequences. The next Gorilla in the room may well  be Asian.

There is a game I like to play often, using my imagination – I call it “If I were Google”, and I do this because Google has the money to buy any expertise it needs to buy and Google’s survival at the top still depends on it returning relevant results to your search queries and they are not necessarily the websites that have put the most money into SEO and link building.

SO, Google came to prominence through having this patented system of counting back-links. I like to call it ‘peer endorsement’, it’s based on the premise that if a website is an authority on a subject and therefore worth listing high in the results, there must be other sites, particularly sites related to that subject endorsing it. This system has worked for Google as it is harder to cheat, but then it has spawned this massive industry called link building who’s sole objective is to cheat it.

I would go as far as to say that ‘Link building’ probably accounts for a visible portion of the annual GDP of countries like India.

But then this link building really is different from genuine peer endorsement in that it is in ‘anchor text’ and genuine peer endorsement usually isn’t.

Anchor text linking means that the keywords themselves are linked to the website using HTML and all SEO people use Anchor text.

Have you ever seen a genuine endorsement of a website linked with anchor text? I don’t think I have and I believe that this is because

1. Most people don’t know how to do it and
2. The point of the endorsement is to tell their readers about that website, not to help it rank higher in Google.

So if I were Google, I would place very little relevance on anchor text links and instead determine the relevant keywords for the link from the nearest sub-heading and the text surrounding the link – and I’m talking about genuine http://www.relevantwebsite.com type links.

And then, I’m one man with an imagination. Google can buy a hundred like me and so they probably did everything I’m suggesting a couple years back. Meanwhile, the SEO industry barrels on like a freight train, impressing traffic hungry business with their ‘secrets’ and churning out millions of links that probably have very little relevance in Google’s algorithms.

I was devastated yesterday when I checked the rankings of one of our websites – it had slid down a couple of places  in Google in about 20 keywords.  I rushed to the search engine to find out which one of our low-life competitors had trumped us, but what I found caught me completely by surprise.

It was we who had trumped us in Google.

How? well we had a whole lot of Web 2.0 posts on the internet that had been there a while and done nothing and we commented on them – I just had all the guys and girls put comments on these posts from our account and wham! Straight to number 1. Unbelievable.

Never, never underestimate the power of Web 2.0, but remember – it is a bit like news or current affairs – it needs to stay fresh and be freshened up – or it ends up in the bin with all the other stale leftovers.

What are the right keywords for an SEO campaign?

That is the million dollar question and the answer is as much a business strategy as an SEO one.

It would be very ambitious to target top level keywords for your business – for instance if you are a business advisor, you will find the keywords ‘business advisor’ very hard indeed to do well in.  So what keywords do you target? To find that answer, you have to take a look at your business and your expertise – perhaps the type of clients you attract and the type of clients you want.

For instance, if you spent the early part of your working career in the automotive industry and your contacts and clients are in that industry, should you add the keyword automotive to the mix? Or do you think those clients are a pain in the ass and your passion is to help people starting a hairdressing salon – well that is a good starting point, but perhaps you should first do an analysis of the demand in that sector….

Next, you have to research your chosen keywords to discover if anybody is even searching it – It would be an absolute disaster to throw thousands of dollars at this and months of your time only to find you are number 1 in Google and the traffic to your website has not increased at all. This is where you probably should enlist the help of a good SEO company. But beware, there are many around who will be happy to rank you in non-performing keywords, because competition is much lighter there and it is easy to achieve results.

Here it is always better to test your chosen keywords for performance and some others too, with a Pay Per Click campaign with a good Adwords management team. Here you will find some surprises – for instance, who would have thought that the keywords with the highest conversion rate for a fence manufacturer and installation company would be ‘fencing materials’ -It seems that many people searching for fencing materials decide they would rather have an installed fence when they begin to search.

You have no way of knowing that without doing an Adwords or PPC campaign, so if you don’t test the keywords first, but simply launch into a lengthy SEO campaign, you could miss your best business opportunity.

Selecting the right keywords for your SEO campaign is not something you do with an automated program. It is also not something you simply leave to your “SEO guru”. The inquiries and ultimately clients you attract in the future will be largely due to the keywords you choose now.

Choose Carefully

I really worry about having standard one-size-fits-all “SEO Packs” for clients – because Search Engine Optimization is not a product, it’s a competition and the results you get depend on so many factors, it’s not funny. There is no real deliverable in SEO – the result you want is to beat some other people and get to the front page of the search engines at their expense.

The best analogy I can think of is competitive running. Not every runner can come in the top ten in any competition – of the thousands who compete, there are just ten – and in fact with SEO it’s even worse, one competitor can have five of those ten spots, or all ten.

You could think of generic keywords as being the Olympics – score the gold in ‘websites’ or ‘SEO’ or ‘business advisor’ or whatever is the main generic keyword in your business. And like the Olympics, the competition is tough and it takes some real commitment to get to the top or even in the top ten.

But then there are a whole bunch of regional championships, more specific keyword phrases “SEO company in California”, “Web design, Sydney”, “How to choose the right web design company” and so on. You have far more chance of making it in these competitions – often they are dominated by last years winners who are resting on their laurels and sometimes you’ll find winners who didn’t even know they were in the race – They just stumbled onto the field and were running to get away from the stampede.

And often the more targeted keywords bring good quality traffic with a much higher proportion of buyers than generic keywords.

So having a one-size-fits-all SEO pack is like assigning the same caliber trainers and giving the same training program to olympic competitors as you are to regional ones and allowing them to expect good results. The SEO work that clients need really depends on the race they are in and the competition they are up against.

So the best thing clients can get, is a good assessment from an SEO company followed by a pay per click campaign with good adwords management by an experienced campaign manager to identify the best performing keywords for a long term investment in time.

Unless you are targeting a set of keywords that nobody dominates (which probably means there are very few searches for those keywords), the process of getting organic (free) traffic to your website is a long one and a lot of homework is necessary to ensure you get it right and don’t go down the wrong road, optimising keywords that bring your website very little traffic, or a lot of the wrong kind of traffic.

You can shortcut the process of getting traffic and at the same time get very good intelligence on the best keywords to target with PPC (pay per click) advertising. Running a PPC campaign at the start of your SEO campaign will cost a little more, but you will start to get inquiries immediately and more importantly, you will know the keywords which are going to be most productive for your business.

Those of us running PPC campaigns are usually quite mystified at the difference between keyword traffic estimated by Google’s own suggestion tool and the reality once a campaign starts. Equally as inconclusive are the results given by different keyword research tools like Wordtracker – they are often completely opposed – and all are apparently using the same logs – those of the search engines themselves.

While I’m not trying to dismiss keyword research tools altogether, they are still an important part of the process, they only provide a best guess – Pay per click campaigns provide hard facts.

A properly run pay per click campaign will benefit you in the following ways:

1. It will bring you leads in a very short time frame.
2. It will tell you which keywords are actually getting the most searches – no guesswork.
3. More importantly, it will tell you which keywords are bringing inquiries (valuable leads as opposed to tyre kickers)It will tell you the kind of message the market responds best to – (so you can develop your other advertising and even your website around that)
4. It will give you a database of interested people that you can market back to.

By basing your longer term SEO campaign on the hard facts you get from a Pay Per Click campaign and not on best guesses you get from research tools, you will give yourself the best possible chance of dominating the most valuable keywords for your business – ensuring your online success.