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Just when I was getting the hang of digital assets along comes mobile. Good information.
This is a lead generation site disguised as a consumer site. The site has no credibility given the fact that it is being used to generate leads. Using other companies names and brands to generate leads then selling them to their competitors is not a good business practice. Its a business model that is proably not a smart move when your targets are search enigne marketers.
Story: We Do Need SEO Standards
Kalena, SEMPO and the SEMPO Institute are 'non profit". I was a founder of the SEMPO Institute and never at any time did I ever see setting standards as a way to sell courses, neither did any of the other founders or contributors and I was there right from the start. So please let's put that to bed. Paul Brummer was also one of the founders and Paul has been talking about standards since 1998 long before SEMPO existed. I gave hundreds of hours of volunteer time borne our of sheer frustration as a business in this industry unable to grow and develop because there was no training available that at that time that was not being offered by a competitor. I come from a training background and was horrified that we were in a multi billion dollar industry where it was was the norm to be self taught. Some of these individuals and pioneers of the industry were exceptional professionals Jill being one of them but there are many many more out there taking complete advantage of an uneducated pool of consumers and this is where I s see standards making a difference.
I don't care if Joe Blow SEO uses four keywords in his title tag, and Jane Doe SEO uses 10 but I do care about the consumers who are getting fleeced daily by unscrupulous SEO's taking advantage of the free for all and lack of consumer awareness. I also care about being lumped together with these unethical businesses because I happen to provide SEO. I do think its time for guidelines, but I see them as protecting the consumer more than how to do SEO types of standards. Now how do we do it that is the burning question.
I also agree with Jill that the search engines already have standards they are called guidelines and their algorithm. So for me its not about How to its about raising the bar for the industry and setting some practitioner standards which will help consumers establish who the good and bad are. How about we start with a consumer guide and take it from there. As long as the #1 rule is all consumers must first call Me I am good with it......................
Story: We Do Need SEO Standards
Jill, I agree and would take it one step further to say that SEMPO should manage the process but the actual setting of the standards for its members should be conducted by an independnt third party not in the field of SEM. This third party should be a reputable credible organization who has done the same work in other fields. SEMPO can provide the process management but the actual final standards should come from a third party. If SEMPO were to devise the standards using its own board or existing members there is alays going to be a credibility issue for other markerers that it may be biased or skewed by any one member or individual.
I commented on this on my blog http://www.fionndownhill.com/2008/02/12/online-reputation-management-ethical-or-not/. My advice is stick to solid business ethics and follow your gut. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck and so on.
Jessica,
Excellent article and oh so true. What we find is that Company's and individuals do not want to to pay the price. Its not generating measurable ROI and revenue and they just want it to "go away" often for a once off small fee. Reputation Mangement is an ongoing strategy esepcially when there are negative results on very strong sites and most of the people I talk to just do not want to pay the price. If they had a disastrous offline PR issue they would think nothing of paying a PR agency to work on the problem but baulk at the cost of managing their online reputation which can have a much more long terms damaging effect on their brand and ther business.
The longer they leave it the worse it gets and you can end up with with the equivalent of 6-10 SEO projects to take control of the space. That is expensive!!!
We dealt almost exclusively with small business in our first two years. They grew but we did'nt. We needed a lot of clients to pay the bills and a lot of clients meant a lot of work. As SEO became more complex and the cost of doing SEO got higher and higher it became very difficult to survive only handling small business. That was my experience. What seems a small amount of money can be a fortune to a small business and they expect a lot for it. We now deal with small (not start ups) and medium sized busienss and its a much more viable mix.
We tried the big clients Ihated it. I hated the red tape the corrpoate politics, 6 months to decide on their keywords. We never signed another fortune 500 works for me.
I totally agree. I am amazed at how little effort a big brand that costs millions of dollars to create are prepared to spend on this problem. I heard a comment once when I was talking about Rep Mgt from a tradtional PR agency which went something like this "what difference can one blogger make" The reality is that if the one blogger has a post in Google which is #2 for your brand or a malicious ex employee has filed a ripped off report the damage can be unmeasurable and I think thats the key, they cant measure it so they ignore it. These large companies have traditional PR agencies giving them advice about a discipline they do not understand and the budget is moved back to the tradtional PR as that is what they know.
I will would not hire a company who has bad google results and I know how it works and I know some of these results are fake but thats the way it is. If it affects my decsion to work wiht a company then what affect does it have on Joe Blow who only knows the basic internet. They do not get it.
There is one essential point not being made here and that is different learning styles. See Widipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles. I am a Kinesthetic and Tactile learner and I could never learn from a book. It would simply not work for me. If I cannot do it I cannot learn it. When I first started in the industry there were conferences and books. I learned some at the conferences and nothing from books. I have others on the team who learned from books, forums, blogs and Jill our chief strategist still visits your forum daily. As the industry expanded the pool of people who could learn from a book disappeared and I found it impossible to grow our business using books, blogs and forums. I became involved in the SEMPO Institute because of my keen interest in the whole training issue.
There are multiple resources out there as Bill pointed out and it is important to understand what works for each individual you are trying to bring up to speed including yourself. There are some great tests you can give your staff to ensure your put the correct training together for them and ensure that they do not fail. As the industry grows its important to remember that you need diversity in teams to create the synergy needed for success but beware of expecting to train them all the same way. My personal preference would be to have access to good quality classroom training for all staff. In a classroom you can gauge the learning styles and ensure you cater to each one to ensure learning points are understood. You have one person in the front of the room hanging on your every word and another at the back asleep. That is easy to solve face to face not so easy to solve if you give the auditory learner a book to read. We need multiple disciplines and resources and more importantly if we are involed in training that we we are raising the bar for the industry and providing the quality of training that will ensure the next generation of search marketers do not scam Aaron's wife :)
I think 2008 is going to be the year when we finally have to concede that Google owns the world and we either put up with it or move to another universe. I think it would be foolish of Google to keep Performics as an SEO Compnay and they are not known for their foolishness. The Company would be under such scrutiny and subject to such intense criticism that it woulld be hard for them to function.
This is no surprise. I have sat in the "paid links are evil" at SES and cringed as search engine marketers (in my words not theirs as I cannot recall their exact words) told Matt Cutts to get over it paid links were here to stay and move on to something else. Matt Cutts with his usual grace and style calmly told them and the audience again and again that this was coming. I never agreed with this session running in the first place it was sheer defiance and one person even suggested if they were serious to ban the biggest seller of links. They did. Its hard for people to accept that Google can exert this much power and affect their livelihood but reality is they can and they do.
The biggest issue for me now is that Matt and his spam team needs to talk to the Adwords team and create a consistent approach to this issue. Its sheer hypocrisy to allow the site they banned for selling text link ads to pay to sell the service on Adwords, plus the dozens of other sites doing the same thing. This in my opinion is just wrong and there is now a huge credibility gap in Google's approach. For the sake of the adverse PR this is going to create they need to formulate a cohesive approach and back Matt up or they are going to have to take the fall out.
Google devalued directories over a year ago. We have not done any directory submissions other than Yahoo and DMOZ since then unless of course the directory is on topic and worth the traffic. The majority are not and the only reason we were submitting to other directories was for links when that became useless we stopped. Many of the directories which sprung up in the previous years were just link farms.
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Story: FindLaw Hit By Long Arm Of The Google Law Over Paid Links