For a couple months now I’ve seen it coming: the need to hire someone to take over some of what I’m doing, so that I can do more. I think the one thing that shocks most people who’ve never run their own business is that you don’t get paid for all the time you work. What do I mean?

Think about working in a corporate environment (I started my business life as a Corporate SEO). If someone calls to talk about a contract, you send it to your sales team. If you need copies made, you can drop them off with the Admin Assistant. When you receive an invoice, you forward it over to Accounting. If your computer goes down, you call IT and go out for coffee. And, at many companies these days, your pay is direct-deposited so you don’t even have to go to the bank.

All of those services fly out the window when you go out on your own. You are your own IT, Admin, Accounting, HR and Management teams. All of that in addition to the fact that you need to get your work done every day. But you can’t exactly send a client an invoice with “5 hours - Fixed my computer” on it, can you? And that is why people who have only worked for companies are shocked to find out I may only do 20 hours of “work” per week. Except that those 20 hours of work took 40 hours of supporting effort. Even getting paid requires me to drive to the bank to deposit checks a couple times a week.

So, a few months ago when I stood with a total of 9 clients and could see my work-hours quickly outgrowing my ability to be more efficient, I began to work on the next challenge: what do I hire out? Assuming I could only afford one employee at the current volume, do I hire an Admin Assistant to take calls, make copies, and help organize meetings? Should I hire a sales person to manage my current contracts and help me find new ones? Should I attempt to find another SEO/PPC expert to take on client work (and if so, how can I be sure I can trust them to uphold the level of quality I demand for my clients?)? Or should I bring on an intern and hope that the amount of smaller-tasks I can hand off to them will outweigh the training time?

I am notoriously demanding when it comes to resumes. I often say that the minute I find the first typo I toss the resume, which is not far from the truth. I expect that one-page of writing shouldn’t be difficult to produce, and that you should have it so polished by the time you’re ready to send it out that I won’t find a thing wrong with it (from a technical perspective anyway). When I receive a five-page resume, or one written in the third person (another story for another time) I have to wonder what some people are thinking. So what’s the best way to get a job with Untouchable Marketing? Don’t send a resume.

As it turns out, the old adages about networking are correct, and knowing people is often greater than knowing anything else. I am going to try out an intern-esque position on a contract basis for the next 15 weeks or so to see if the outsourcing of tasks outweighs the training time. The candidate is actually family of a good friend/business partner who’s situation is well-suited to working from home. He’s qualified and never had to submit a resume.

How will I judge the outcome as a success? Like everything I else I look at numbers. I will feel the experiment is worthwhile if the dollars I pay are returned 2x in either hard dollars, or client approval (as measured by frequency of emails and number of referrals). If the experiment doesn’t meet this goal, then at least I was able to help out a friend and find out that I need to look for a partner or an assistant next.

I was doing some searches for a problem I’m having with Firefox 3 randomly logging me out of AdWords when I came across this article.

From the article:

Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain, set up a server to display a “Thank you for your visit” message and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words “drive-by download” along with the ad. His ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about 0.16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.

What some people don’t understand about the AdWords system is that the primary traffic sources are not (as was the case in the late 90’s, early 00’s) banner advertising seen by an equal cross-section of tech-enabled humanity. The giveaway to the “success” of this experiment is revealed in two facts from the above paragraph: “combinations of the words ‘drive-by download’” and “6 cents per click.”

Because of the way AdWords works, his ad would only have been seen by those searching for “drive by download” or those reading content about “drive by downloads” (or, more recently, content related to those topics). Given that the only people searching for or reading about that type of activity are those who are already somewhat informed, or are becoming more informed, I would guess that had an actual virus or other malware been installed, there would be very limited damage overall.

And factoring in the 0.16% CTR, and low CPC, I’d say his ad was more than likely running alongside tech articles on the content network, where it would primarily be seen only by tech-savvy users on both sides of the fence.

Certainly, in my younger days when I was first exploring the world of hacking, if I saw someone advertising the download of this type of software, I would take them up on it just to capture their methods and code. Most of the “advanced users” I knew back then not only sat behind fortresses of firewalls and virus checkers, but many of us also browsed via ‘bottles’ where viruses could be trapped. Of the 409 clicks achieved by the experimenter, I’m guessing only a handful of those would have resulted in successful infections, and only a subset of those would have real results.

These type of misunderstandings are what lead to so many small business owners opening their wallets to AdWords and getting taken to the bank. I can’t count the number of times I have tried to dissuade people from adding keywords like “weather” to the keyword list for their golf club, dating, or business portal site in order to get more eyeballs.

The world of online marketing requires more lateral-thinking than any other advertising medium ever invented. If you don’t have the time (or the ability) to answer “Why?” 100 times a day, then you should seek assistance with your Web Marketing efforts.

The arguments against bulk submission of your website to hundreds of general directories can be summarized in the following way:

1. Search engines will frown upon you getting 1,000 new links in one day.
2. The value of 1,000 directory links from general-topic sites is next to nothing.
3. Topical directories that are hand-edited will provide much more link-value, so you should spend resources on that instead.

I’d like to use an opportunity (or “crisi-tunity” if you’re a Simpsons fan) that’s recently come up for me to refute some of these claims. But first, let me refute #1 right away…

Rate of Change
When search engine spiders visit your webpage, there is a certain process that occurs. The spider reads the HTML of the page, probably makes a few statistical notes (# of words, # of links (internal and external), URL parameters used, dates on the page, etc.) and then puts it in the queue for analysis by a heavier-duty piece of software.

Your site gets put in the queue to be spidered in a few different ways: someone with a search-engine toolbar visits your site, someone links to your site, someone does a search for your specific URL. All of which give the site a different priority, depending on whether or not it’s in the index. Statistically speaking, this means that your site and my site are almost never being spidered simultaneously.

When you add in the fact that your page can’t be indexed until it goes through the indexing algorithSimpsons fanm (the heavy-duty software I referenced above) which can take a couple days, there is just no way for your new pages and mine to be added to the index at the same time.

Because links are an element of the page, they are “counted” in the same manner. When you spread this example across 1,000 sites, all with different indexing periods and rates there is just no way for a search engine to “see” you receiving hundred of links at the same time. They will appear to trickle in over the course of several weeks or months, especially when you consider the fact that not all the approvals go through at once either. I run several directories, and I only approve submissions once or twice a week.

There, #1 is officially dead, no?

The meat and potatoes
Last year a friend of mine was designing a brand new website for a company that sold promotional items. They were starting off with a brand new domain and wanted to get search engine traffic right away. Although my buddy asked me if I would help out, at the time I was confined by an agreement to only perform SEO for one company. So instead I hooked him up with a few tips on on-page optimization and a vendor who does directory submission.

Long story short the company ended up bailing on my friend after he delivered the site. They never paid him, so all that happened was the new site was built and live with on-page SEO basics, and it was submitted to 1,000 general-topic directories. One year later, the company has basically dissolved, but their site still stands (along with some analytics code I told my buddy to put on the site). Here’s what has materialized:

• The site now has a pagerank of 4 (from N/A at the start).
• The site shows 553 backlinks in Yahoo.
• The site is receiving about 20 visitors a day from Google.

So it seems that those links are neither worthless nor ignored. They have produced tangible results in 2 major search engines. Granted, this won’t make you a million dollars, but for a $50 “fire-and-forget” submission package, why wouldn’t you?

What I Advocate and Response to #3
With regard to topical web directories and finding the really strong ones to submit to, I fully encourage you to take advantage. There will never, ever be anything wrong with achieving a high-quality link, from a site that is topically-related to yours.

However, if you have a brand new site where you’re just trying to get some “air under the wings” (or you’re running an Advanced Domaining Strategy) why not spend a little cash to get things moving? You can (and should) always supplement this with topical link-building, but that kind of strategy means you need to know your business, which is something you (conceivably) can’t outsource.

So spend your time building quality links, and outsource the foundational stuff.

To be good at any job, you need to like doing it.  Not just the ivory-tower, CEO-stuff.  But the boots-on, factory floor part, too.

An SEO should always be conscious of search.  Trying to find a new restaurant, looking for a specific book, or in the case of my next example: looking through an online help guide.

I was busy converting some old Overture campaigns to the new Panama system recently.  I was using their online help system to find out what [match type] meant (in the relative terminology of the system).  I found the information I was looking for in the 3rd result, titled: “Importing Campaigns”, which contained a concise definition for every field name used in the importing process.

Every time I needed to refer to that information, I searched for [match type].  But eventually, I realized how stupid it was to keep using that term, despite the fact that I knew the title of the article I wanted was “Importing Campaigns”.

So, the next time I needed that information I used the search term [importing campaigns].  It took me about 3 times as long to find the information I needed because my first expectation was that the page I was looking for would be SERP #1.  Nope.

Well, it couldn’t be any lower than #3.  Nope.

Result #6 was the page I was used to seeing.  So I went back to using [match type] to find the information I needed on importing.

What’s the takeaway? Well, if someone at Yahoo! was watching the logfiles, they’d probably see me importing campaigns, and searching over and over for [match type].   They’d think to themselves: “Wow, this guy is sure having trouble understanding match types.  But he’s must be having a pretty easy time with importing, because he only searched for it once.”  They might then conclude that I am new-ish to the SEM world, and that I don’t undertsand match types.

The course of action then is to improve the information on match types, and neglect the information on importing campaigns.  When all I really needed was for someone to rearrange the SERPs for the latter.

It’s subtle, but it’s something to think about.

The Article Distribution Service iSnare.com has been billed as one of the best tools around to increase a website’s presence. And I’ve been a big proponent of it since I first came across the service.

The idea is simple enough: submit an article to this service, it is reviewed by humans for quality and then gets auto-distributed to 1000s of article-aggregation websites, many on general topics, and a few on whatever topic you choose for your article.

After using it a few times, I began to notice that pages I promoted with the service would tend to rise in Google’s SERPs for my targeted terms, and then slowly fall back down. They would usually settle at higher positions than where they started, but I wondered why the Rome effect was so strong (that was a subtle reference to a rise/fall timeline).

So, I decided to study the Google results on fresh articles, and their mentions in search engines. I used the old trick of searching a unique phrase. On August 4th I used a unique phrase from each article on Google’s engine: 0 results. I then submitted both articles to iSnare for distribution. On August 8th I got an email that both articles had been approved and syndicated; a second Google search revealed 0 results for both.

0 results again on Aug. 9th. Then on Aug. 10th I saw the first signs of life: 7 results for Article 1 and 8 results for Article 2. By Aug. 15th, Article 1 had 437 results, and Article 2 had 458 results. There are two points of note here:

Point 1: I submitted both articles under the same category. They were approximately the same length (around 450 words). I submitted them on the same within minutes of each other, and yet Article 1 lagged behind Article 2 for some reason.

Point 2: At this point (Aug. 15th) there were no supplemental results for either article. All 400+ results were fully viewable in the main index.

On the 16th of August the dupe filter must have kicked in on Article 1, because supplementals appeared and total results dropped to 361. Article 2 continued to thrive with 556 results on the 16th, with still no supplementals showing.

Eventually the dupe filter must’ve kicked in on Article 2 as well, and by August 30th, both result counts were below 50 (39 and 34 for 1 & 2, respectively).

As of today, Big G shows 11 results, of a total of 16 for Article 1 (so, approx. 4 supplementals). Article 2 fared better in the end, today displaying 16 results of 22 total (so, approx. 6 supplementals).

The [recently exported] PageRank for the top 10 results on each article range from 0-2, with the majority being 0 (and 2 N/As!).

So now some theories:

1. Article 1’s target phrase was more competitive than Article 2’s. My theory is that the more competitive an area, the greater number of filters (or in some cases, reviews) a page must pass to become part of the index. This is explained best in the theory of long-tail keywords, where phrases that don’t mean much in a marketing sense have a lot of impact on John Q. Searcher.

2. To compete with social bookmarking, Google needs to be buzz-aware. When a site creates a certain amount of buzz (linking, textual-references, etc.) Google needs to get in there and evaluate it for ranking. It will weight these sites with additional trustrank to get on top of the coming wave. A second (and potentially third) filter will later decide if the page is worth keeping in the index. Possibly by analyzing search volume for a phrase vs. the amount of “buzz”.

What might a takeaway be from this experiment? In my case, the combination of the “buzz” created with the article distro, plus the already-established authority (or Trustrank) of the site was enough to put the [brand new] pages I was targeting into the top 10 for their intended keyphrase.

As with most SEO activities, it is recommended to use this tool appropriately, and in combination with other tools.
Any thoughts?

Update: Looks like Aaron Wall and I may have been thinking along some similar lines.  He just posted about  new domains getting ranked in Google over old sites, and mentioned the following:

“Also think of the search business model as though you are a search engine. To them, being the first person to do something is a sign of quality because to be the first person in a market requires some market timing / knowledge / investment / luck.”

“Catch a wave” theory, explained in financial terminology.

I was reading a thread about meta tags on the DigitalPoint forums today.

.NET magazine wrote an article on SEO recently and stated that meta tags no longer matter for search engine optimization. Were they correct to do so?

The SEO industry is in state where most of the mechanical aspects of optimization can be handled by a competent web designer who stays on top of the basics (.htaccess, robots.txt, static URLs), which is why we see so many design firms now touting that they can perform SEO while designing a site.

So that takes care of the ’search engine’ part of SEO. But what about optimization?

Search engines (specifically Google) still use meta tags, but not to rank your site. At least not directly.

Let’s start with three statements:

Fact 1: Google has access to your meta- title and description tags.

Fact 2: Google will display your title and description tags in search results, unless the engine feels that writing its own description from your text, or using your DMOZ entry is more relevant (algorithmically determined, happens less than 20% of the time in my experience).

Fact 3: Google will rearrange its search results by click through rate and other (measurable) factors to provide he most relevant results to users.

You may wish to debate fact #3, but for now let’s assume it’s true in this world.

The acceptance of these three facts means that you need to write a title and description that will impress visitors and increase your click through rate. A better visitor experience will push your site higher in the rankings.

So how do you write a good title and description? Well, that means it’s time to take a page from the PPC-world…

So it turns out the article I submitted to the MarketingPilgrim SEO Scholarship Contest was chosen as a finalist. This means my article will also be judged by a panel of professionals for the grand prize.

I had hesitated to enter the contest, but I’m glad that I did. I wanted to go a different direction than the previous entries, and talk less about why SEO is important and general, and tackle a specific issue that I had noticed causing problems for people. As I say in the article, I talked about the same thing at an AdWords conference and I had the whole table listening intently.

Anyway, if you’re arriving here for the first time, please be aware that I’ve recently taken down much of the content on this site and I’m gradually replacing it with better, more informational articles. I decided that since the guys over at MP were good enough to give me a big fat link to this site, I’d better make it worthwhile to visit. Bookmark my site and stop by later.

Or you might see me again in future articles!

Update: So I tied for second in the final round. One of the judges had this to say of my work:

I’ve got to give it up for the direct, hands-on learning and image integration shown by Ryan Bell in Instant PPC Success.

Thanks for a fun contest guys!

You’ve just completed your site. You have a unique offering to the public, but how are you going to get the word out?

If you’re going to get the maximum benefit from your future SEO activity you need to lay the proper foundation. Step one in the process is getting the proper URL structure set up.

The first decision you need to make is to decide whether you want your site to appear as www.mysite.com or just mysite.com in search results. There isn’t necessarily a difference, and it’s a matter of personal choice.

One factor that might help you make your decision is that less computer-savvy folks might be more inclined to add the www. before your address, whereas “techie” types will be more likely to use just mysite.com.

If your website is hosted on an Apache server, you can add this code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}  !^www.example.net$       [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)         http://www.example.net/$1  [L,R]

For an IIS server (with isapi_rewrite), you can use the following code:

Add this to your httpd.ini file:

RewriteCond Host: ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com$1 [I,RP]

If you want to rewrite your URL to the non-www version your Apache code would like:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Next up, creating the proper URL structure for your navigation.