SEO
as a Standalone Product
Search
algorithms are still in their infancy. Many people will still be able to run
successful businesses doing nothing but SEO for at least a few years to come.
When I was new to SEO, and only knew a bit about it, I did not have a strong
brand or understand marketing well. I did things like rank people for terms
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars while charging them a one-time $300 fee.
Did my efforts pay off? Sure, but due to my ignorance of the business end of
the process, I still almost wound up bankrupt because I undercharged for
services.
As you learn
more about the value of SEO and how it integrates into the web, you should be
able to increase your income or social reach significantly. Only by pairing SEO
with other marketing methods or viewing the web through a larger lens will you
be able to fully appreciate the value of SEO.
If you do not
know what PPC, CSS, SSI, CMS, or many of the acronyms mean, it does not make
sense to try to learn all of them in one day. It took me a couple of years to
learn what I have written in this e-book. With that said, in many areas it is
sufficient to understand how or why something works, without knowing all
the
On
top of being a book to read, I also wanted this book to act as a reference
guide. The index makes it quick and easy to flip through to a specific area if
you want to look at something more in-depth later.
While
some of this guide talks about technical details, they may not be that
important for the average webmaster to know. For example, latent semantic indexing
finds mathematical patterns in language and determines what concepts a page
represents using mathematics to represent those words. All most people really
need to know about latent semantic indexing is that those types of algorithms
would favor natural writing over unnatural keyword stuffed gibberish.
There
are many other algorithms and ideas driving search, but at the end of the day,
the end goal of all the algorithms is to favor useful content that people care
about so the results are relevant, which, in turn, allows the engines to make
more money serving ads.
Content
has many meanings though, and there are different ways to make content useful
to different people. This is not a rule-filled, exact guide for what you should
do to promote your site. Think of it more as a guide to a way of thinking of
creative marketing ideas. Some of the ideas in this e-book are here to spark
your creativity and to help you think of ways to gain strong advantages over
your competition.
Any
Internet marketing method that is only formula-based misses the social aspects
of the web and, therefore, can fall into any one of the following pitfalls:
•
Leaving footprints that are easy to detect and discount
(and thus has a high risk to reward ratio, and/or may be a complete waste of
time).
•
Leaving footprints that are easy for competitors to
duplicate (and thus builds no competitive advantage).
•
Ignoring your strengths and weaknesses, thereby wasting
your time with being focused on a formula, instead of taking advantage of your
strengths and minimizing your weaknesses.
•
Being beaten in the search results when an open-minded,
creative competitor leverages the social aspects of the web.
The
goal of this book is to help you think up unique ideas that help you build real
value, social/business relationships, and competitive advantages that are hard
to duplicate.
I
have worked with Fortune 500 companies worth tens and even hundreds of billions
of dollars, and I have also built five-page websites. Don’t think everything in
this book has to apply to you or your website. Take the pieces that make sense
and use them to build and leverage your reach and brand value.
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