Great Quote From Awin - And So True For SEO

The following quote can be found on an intriguing page on the Affiliate Window website:



But I think it makes so much better sense as:



But to me SEO is not only a science but an ART!

I'm sure most SEO's recognise the problem when those people you're involved with too easily see a set of circumstances and automatically assign causality to something that best suits their agenda.

I'm anal about getting down to real cause and effect. I obsess over data. I've proven over and over again that each visitor is not created equal.

The issue often arises in communicating cause an effect. This is difficult in traditional industries, but when you mix in the huge number of factors that affect rankings and revenue per visitor it leaves even more room for misunderstandings to arise.

Here's an example. Say you change the focus of your "intent" keyword and achieve a nil-sum improvement in terms of traffic numbers, but you get better converting traffic, what data should you be looking at?

Ok, here's some "intent" keywords from a client and the conversion rates from the keyphrases that include that particular keyword:

(site average) 3.54%
buy - 2.66%
best - 5.56%
cheap - 2.79%
cheapest - 3.70%
deal - 5.26%
price - 2.65%
delivery - 5.88%
" uk" - 6.56%
sale - 11.25%

Now it's just too simplistic to say that you should focus primarily on "sale" as it converts at 11.25% when you need to build in the volume of traffic available into your strategy.

Good SEO, to me, is about weighing up the keywords that drive traffic, those that convert, the product data available, their/your ability to implement SEO improvements and the overall marketing objectives of the organisations you're involved in.

One thing that does annoy me in this industry (Mark - I'm moaning as requested) is that people too easily say "X" is a cause of "Y" when there are several factors that go into event "Y" occurring - some in our control, some not; some are as a result of SEO, some not.

My biggest fear is SEO has turned into an "in box, out box" industry where people only care about visitor numbers and don't look into profitability or completely disregard the impact of SEO.

To me SEO isn't necessarily about increasing total visitor numbers, its about increasing the value gained from each visitor whilst ensuring that SEO contributes positively to the bottom line - just like affiliate marketing should do.

My hope is that affiliates, merchants and website owners become a bit more analytical and use the power that the analytics tools availabe to them. The only issue is that we all need to look at the data that matters and think long and hard, explore all other less convenient answers before assign causality.

Luckily I've been in the game for 12 years and spent the previous 3 years studying statistics and causality via an Economics degree, so I've seen all the "excuses" "reasons" under the sun. The real reason is often something a bit more tangential than you think.

Now go and read Freakonomics for real world examples of why relying on the most obvious conclusions can be the most misleading - and this has never been more true than with today's Search Engines.


N.b. I'm still catching up on emails sent during my jollies. So if I've not got back to yet, hold tight.

Thanks Guys For Barbados But I Won't Be Going Next Year

I must admit that this year's Affiliate Future Barbados event was fantastic and I must really thank Chris from Sunshine for making it happen and the guys for making it so enjoyable. The biggest thanks to two people though: firstly J Lil for being a great host and being there for me when I nearly went to prison! And also Charley Shiner making the nights hilarious - I still don't believe you found those knickers on the floor of the McBrides! I'm sure they were personally retrieved! But also thanks to him I've got inspiration for a cracking blog! A cracking domain name has just been purchased :-)

Also a big thanks to Ant from Love it Large (launching soon) and Cho Yung Tea (going to put an order in!) who sponsored the Rum Ball Rally and made it such a hoot. It was hard work trying to organise it with J Lil but I'm sure everyone enjoyed it.

The thing is that I won't be trying to win a ticket for next year. The reasons being that despite there's talk of even more people going next year, I feel that its about time that people that have never been before should have more chance of going - I've now been 4 times (3 with Affiliate Future) and its such a hoot that others should enjoy it. Another reason is that, what with getting married this year, hopefully Laura will be about 7 months pregnant (if all things work out) so I can't really leave her.

But here's a few pics to leave you with (I didn't get my camera out much)

Risking life and limb:


Team Fun II Celebrating finding a goat, or was it a sheep?


Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated snails do it:


Might as well get another pic in whilst we wait for the beers to arrive:


Is it illegal to drink and drive in Barbados?


Didn't find any


Not the only day that Tom wished he didn't get up in the morning:


He was pretty pleased to catch this fish


Nadeem takes a break from Marilyn:


Sexy Beast Ray:


Its Still There:


Fat Rain:


Bird:


Lizard thingy:


Kat hitting the waves


Scene From James Bond:


Not Scene From James Bond:


Just look at the colour of the sea:


It was only a couple of feet:


I just love Crane Beach:


The effects of over-exposure to the sun:

Avoid Paid Posts - So Official It Hurts (Or Should Do)

Don't you just love those people that start businesses based on a misunderstanding of Google's T&C's or at least don't modify them as they change?

Going back over Matt Cutt's presentation "Straight from Google: What You Need to Know" (.ppt) there's a slide (44) that is entitled "Avoid paid posts" - how much more obvious does it need to be? But if you still can't grasp the concept here's the slide:



But what does "spam" mean and what does "not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites" mean? To my mind it's a bit too muddy for my liking.

If people take the "spam" element as content that is completely, or largely unrelated to the theme of the site the "content for links" sits on then there are a number of people that should be VERY worried!

And what's more, the declaration element is getting even fuzzier when you consider that Matt allegedly dumped Shoemoney on Twitter for a paid-per-tweet. As a side note, I did think Shoemaker's reply a bit childish!

Ahhh! So There's A Name For It: Katamari Philosophy

I've always believed in this tactic but never knew the name for it. My view has always been that as an affiliate blogger that you should focus on a small niche such as "trainers for one-legged pygmies" (no offence to people with one leg or pygmies of course!) and then you should gradually roll out of that niche as you gain a level respect and coverage of that is sufficient to sustain it.

So reading Matt Cutt's presentation: “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know” from WordCamp San Francisco and in particular slide 33 and then searching on it I found Andrew's description of the Katamari Philosophy:



I know that I missed this presentation, but I can't be aware of EVERY piece of SEO dialogue :-(.

Other things that Matt said was that you shouldn't obssess about links and page range. And I completely agree with that. If I'm in a niche that I'm totally confident about then I spend about 0.5% on overtly thinking of links, 95% thinking of content and 4.5% thinking of (and implementing) the on page SEO.

There's many affiliate blogs that have worked well at gaining a reputation that in term generate inbound links and it doesn't take me how to do it, every second tweet seems to be about it these days, but just try and be original and don't fall in to the trap of having a formulaic approach to building reputation by thinking that if a post has A,B and C that it will DEFINITELY work.

I'm currently implementing the Katamari Philosophy on the small niche (relatively) that I bang on about into a less small niche and its a fascinating process. What's more interesting and satisfying is when you work in only slightly related niches and as you imply the Katamari Philosophy they're consumed by the new site:



An example of this would be my Easter Eggs site linking towards my generic chocolate site - relevant and fair to link.

But then you can also use other, generally non-related sites but which has a slightly related post to help gain support (links and traffic) to both your other niches and the Katamari site. This may be a post about a chocolate football on my old Euro 2008 site linking to both the chocolate site for that product or the Easter eggs site via a link to a general post about football Easter eggs.

Again, as you dominate the micro-niches and then the larger niche then you can use those to spawn new micro-niches and start the process again.

Am I the only one that finds affiliate site evolution interesting? :-(

Want To Work With/For Get Visible? SEO Consultants Required

Things are going a bit mental here. I'm getting a flood of potential business through and I'm just not able to deal with it all. I'm looking for some people with a proven track record to initially sub-contract and then, if desired, become an employed SEO Consultant.

Things are a bit fluid at the moment and I'm yet to work out the final details of what's needed based on client requirements etc, but if anyone is provisionally interested as consulting for Get Visible, then could you drop me a line with your experience, location and details.

Obviously your details will be kept in the strictest confidence and IR35 would need to be considered.