SEO As a Business

Most of the Fortune 500 who are pursuing SEO strategies are doing it through highly paid consultants. I have a friend who was recently employed by a mid-sized consulting company and they were doing a very healty business in SEO and SEM. Well into the millions of dollars. There biggest issue was finding people who could do the daily tactical stuff that was needed. They were pretty much resorting to hiring several people out of college to do the mundane day-to-day stuff while being managed by someone who knew their s#!t.

One important thing to take note of though is that the Fortune 500s don’t use the same tactics we do in the gambling industry, or in other mom and pop sized industries. Some of the important things we do is set up link directories on our sites, exchange links and compromise our copy to be search engine friendly. The Fortune 500 don’t generally do these things, so they need different sorts of tactics.

If you are feeling confused I will point you to the articles and forums at seochat.com. Spend a few weeks reading up on everything there. At first you will be more confused, but after reading enough posts and the advice from quality forum members, you will start to form a clear enough picture. After that it is all trial and error. SEO is a long-term activity, I fully expect it to take 3 years to take full advantage of the strategy I am pursuing.

As for tools for checking things out, I can recommend seomoz.org or digitalpoint.com as places to start.

Just put: 66.294.93.104 in your address bar. This is the next version of the Google SERP results. They appear sporadically now, but should stabilize according to Matt Cutts by end March. This datacenter has been live at google.com for about 15-30 minutes a day as they test. But you can always go directly to it by putting in the IP Address–I believe they are calling this ‘Big Daddy’–Also a lot less Spam in our area too, not gone but a lot of those sites like crap.russia.slots.ru or gamble.online.12345.it etc. that were previously 888 Spam are gone.

webber,

I appreciate your response, but I have a few comments…

1) The only thing I have seen Major Companies do to expand their Web presence (i.e. garner traffic) from an SEO perspective is waste a bunch of money on Overcrap. Now, of course I am not talking about the kind of companies that could pay Yahoo pr Google hundreds of millions of dollars to appear in their generic SERPs – if this even happens.

2) How could some fresh-out college students ever duplicate what we do? It’s a learned skill that takes a long time (at least for me) to master (and I definitely have NOT mastered it!!). But, I mean I can literally create 3 different articles and use techniques (including Web Design techniques) that will make, lets say Article #1 a potential winner in Yahoo, Article # 2 a potential Top-10 page in Google and article #3 a potential winner in MSN.

How would a college kid with no experience know what Keyword Density even was much less how to use it?

3) I have been saying for the past 2 years that linking, or at least the IMPORTANCE placed on linking, has to be abolished by the SEs, especially Google. It allows spamsters to totally manipulate the results. Although I do some linking, I have many results in Big Daddy that, based on their positions, have seemingly been given credit based on their content. I say this because my minimally linked sites are coming up with results far ahead of sites with hundreds or even thousands of incoming links. My only conclusion is that new Algo changes *MAY BE* reducing the weight given to links–just an opinion, but I would think this HAD TO HAPPEN. I mean the Google results of recent times are mostly crap, other than a few content sites that always seem to be there near the top, like casino.com or Doms site etc.

So what techniques do these companies employ and how different can they be from what you or I do? Just my 2 cents.

Now I AM confused. I explained how to check future rankings above. Just use the IP address of Big Daddy–its no secret. As far as secrets for obtaining rankings? Its just hard work. I dont do much linking but I have won several awards for Creative Writing. As I may have mentioned before, I am a writer and a software developer–usually technical people cannot write and writers aren’t the most technical of individuals. I think this combination is what helps me in this business.

For example, let’s say you have a business that sells widgets. I could write 500 words on ‘Blue Widgets’ for your Blue Widgets product page and 500 DIFFERENT AND UNIQUE words on ‘Red Widgets’ for your Red Widgets products page etc. I am not trying to pat myself on the back, but I think this is a talent that not a lot of people have. And 200 colors of widgets later, I will have written several volumes on widgets for your widgets website and your widgets pages will be ranking well. I will also tweak the HTML so that the keyword density, Title and Descriptions are perfect for whatever SE we are optimizing for.

So here’s a way to get traffic in this business: Review every online slot machine (I think there are something like 2000 of them) and create an optimized page of about 350-600 words for each one. Get back to us in ten years and let us know how it went! ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Say you are not into slots, poker then? You could write for the rest of your life and not cover poker! Tournament results, games, strategies, blogs, you name it?

You just need to be creative.

In closing I like to ‘trick’ myself into thinking that each page I create will be an extra $10/month -on average-in income for life. This doesn’t sound like much, big deal $10/month but when I have 100 pages completed and ranked, well there’s $1000/month and I never have to create those pages again. Now, this is just a ballpark, but in this area its very attainable. As we all know, you may get a couple pages that rank well and bring in most of your income, and the average per month could be well higher than $10/month and some never rank at all. This is just a figure I use to motivate myself because its an easily attainable goal. If you are NOT making at least $10/month per page of your sites after about 18 months, I would say you could be doing better.

This motivates me when I am developing, writing etc etc for months on end without seeing any results. Finally, I spend 95% of my time writing and 5% linking. This is the business model I use because I think the importance of linking must be reduced in the future-so I dont focus a ton on it now-how else can these SEs fight spam? I mean they have 2 choices, either drastically reduce the importance of linking OR go site by site to weed out the offenders. I mean, what would be easier?

Hope this helps.