Website Design

I woke up this morning and had gotten an email from John asking me to take a look at a post over in another forum, that I’m a member of. The thread is talking about search engine optimization being dead and while I believe it is dead and will get into that in just a moment I want to address a point John made in the thread about using W3C.

W3C does not have anything to do with SEO and validating your site is not going to help you get traffic. You chances are better showing up at the Indy 500 with a 3 hp go kart than to make a living with traffic you get from validating your site.

Now on to the death of SEO.

I think SEO has been dying for a long time but the personalization is not what is killing it. About the only people that know what personalization is, is the SEO’s. The average Joe is going to go to Google and type in what they are searching for and that will be that. They do not spend enough time online to worry about personalizing their search results. I spend about 15 hours a day online and have not personalized mine, until about 5 minutes ago just to see what all the fuse is about. I do not see this becoming something that is used very much.

But I do believe SEO is dead

1.I’ve seen more than my fair share of people that are asking questions about SEO one day and the next day they have started an SEO business.

It has to be one of if not the easiest business to start. All you need is a website and to spend an hour on a couple forums and you have enough information to fake it tell you make it.

2.The guy that has just started his SEO business feels that he can charge $100.00 a month and get 100 customers and live happily ever after. This is not the case, in most cases SEO is a full time job and to get one site to rank can take you 60 hours a week for the next 8 months.

3.Most people want to promise the ranking for 10 keywords but to get the traffic needed to run an online business you need more in the range of 10,000.

4.The average Joe does not have the dedication to run his own business much less spend the needed time on your site to make it rank and get the traffic needed to run a real business.

5. The average customer is not going to wait for more than about 3 months without seeing the needed results before wanting out of the game.

6.The client agrees on getting so many keywords ranked in the top ten but when he finds those keywords do not bring in enough traffic to sustain his/her site they become upset and want more for the same price.

7.There are no guarantees, no matter how much you know or how many sites you have ranked in the past there are no guarantees that you will be able to rank the next one.

8.Doing it correctly means trying to rank the client for enough keywords that it will have an impact on his/her business. In most cases this means thousands of keywords. After making a list of the keywords you now need to build thousands of pages of unique text. After that you need to optimize those pages and start link building for each page.

I no longer do SEO, but have done it on and off in the past and have worked with customers who make in excess of $100,000.00 per month. I’ve also seen more than my fair share of so called SEO’s asking for help in finding clients and a lot of them do cold calling.

If the SEO’s are able to make you so much money than why do so many of them go to forums and cold calling to get clients.
Because their services do not work for themselves, yet they want to sell the services that they already can not make work to you.

Most of the SEO’s that have figured out how to make it work only do consulting or sell ebooks. They know it is both a pain in the ass and a huge responsibility to take on a client. By selling an ebook or only telling the client what to do they place a spacer between themselves and the responsibility.

I guess what I’m saying is that SEO is dead because

1.Most SEO’s do not know how to rank a site
2.The SEO does not charge enough money for the service and is unable to complete the task
3.The SEO is only trying to rank the site for a couple keywords

In most cases once a customer gets burned by a service he goes looking for other ways to make money and is no longer willing to spend more money for the SEO service.

1. I get 100′s of emails everyday from people wanting to do link exchanges, some of them are rather rude.

2. A lot of times people will remove your link after a week or so.

3. It is believed that the major search engines discount reciprocal links.

4. There are a lot better ways to get one way links without doing link exchanges.

5. If the site you have link exchanged with goes out of business you end up with a site full of dead links.

6. Most link exchanges will never send you any traffic.

7. A lot of link exchanges end up on small islands with no incoming traffic.

8. Link exchanges can end up on a page with thousands of outgoing links.

9. Link exchanges create a neighborhood and the people your neighbors exchange links with become associated with you. If they don’t do good it can affect you.

10. People will use nofollow tags in your link exchange.

11. Link exchanges are very time consuming.

12. A lot of people feel that link exchange emails are equal to spam. By sending link request emails people associate your company with spammers.

13. Maybe it is just me but I see sites that are listed on link exchange pages as being struggling small business and the ones sending me emails in even worst shape.

14. Link exchange software leaves a foot print and can get you banned.

15. There are a million ways to get both better and faster links than doing link exchanges.

I use to do link exchanges when I first started my business but have since learned to hate them.

I try not to get into debates with people but sometimes I just can not help myself. This guy is posting on forums and has a link back to his, “become a millionaire and never work book”. I am tired of these people that do not have a clue in the world how to make money but want to sell their full proof plans to everyone else.

If the plan is so full proof, than why waste time writing a book about it?

Why sell the book, you have already made your millions, why not help out the little guy for free?

There are no full proof plans and there is no one size fits all for every business online. But this guy is trying to sell to the really stupid and he posted on a thread I started, he must think I’m really stupid. I figure once you try and bull shit me, I have every right to out you, for what I think you are.

He has an ebook with only two copies left. I wonder if he realizes that an ebook does not run out, it is like The Energizer Bunny it keeps going and going.

He claims to have been in a top secret meeting with the top gurus from Myspace. I did not even know that such a group existed. But he says the group gave him permission to create this ebook but later says they are upset and want the ebook done away with so it will only last for a limited time. These secret Myspace gurus do not sound very smart. Why have a meeting and tell everyone about how you are making millions if you do not want anyone to know?

Here is a guy that spent 3 months of late nights and early mornings writing this ebook just to help me out. He did say “we” so I have to figure it was him and his team writing the ebook. They added in another $200.00 worth of bonuses and sell the whole thing for $17.00.

He and his team are not trying to help me out because they are selling it to me, which causes me to have to wonder who the book is for?

If he can make this money without having to do anything, than why spend 3 months of working almost 20 hours a day to write this book and to include his whole team means he has to split the money with them and once the book is written you still have to market it.

It does not make sense to me.

How about this.

Here is a guy that does not have a clue how to make money online but wants to pretend like he does. He spends a couple days writing an ebook and claims he went to a secret meeting and got the information. Maybe they all had to dress in black and were black hoods to hide their true identities. But he most likely found all or most of the information online.

He figures if he can make $17.00 a day it will be better than nothing. He claims that there is a rush because the Myspace gurus are hunting him down. He then guarantees that if you are not happy with the book after 90 days he will return your $17.00. In 90 days he will have a new user name and a new book to sell, so it is no big deal.

My theory makes a lot more sense for several reasons.
1. The top Myspace gurus had a secret black hood meeting that they let you in on.

Why upset these people by exposing all their secrets?

Maybe there is another meeting next month and I’m sure you want be invited back.

2. Why spend 3 months working 20 hour days to write a book, when you can do nothing and make thousands per day.

3. Why has no one else heard of the secret Myspace gurus society?
4. How did they find this nobody and why did they invite him to their secret meeting?

5. Will the guy that invited him be kicked out of the secret black hood Myspace gurus behind closed door club?

I just made my first YouTube video for one of our clients.

I wonder if I can make it play here

Silicone Bracelets

I’ve been working with a silicone bracelet site for the last two months and I’ve had quite a time with it. The biggest problem is that none of the search terms will bring in enough traffic to amount to a whole lot. I’ve thought about this a good bit and decided to create sub-domain names and try and come up with a couple search terms for each of the sub-domain names.

A couple of the sub-domain names are a lot closer to being finished but I decided to start marketing the bracelet sub-domain name first because I felt it would be able to bring in more traffic then the others. Some of the search terms we came up with should be fairly easy to rank for like Buy Bracelets, Basics Bracelets, Attractive Bracelets, Create a Bracelet and many others.

I want to see if I can get the search terms showing up in the search engines in the next 7 days as well as get the sub-domain name to get 2,000 unique visitors per day in the next 7 days.