Richard Keith Latman - The Blog

The Changing Character of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be simple. You figured out what keywords you wanted to rank on, you put them in your title, you stuffed them in the keyword metatags, and you loaded them on the page, and you were done. Better still, if you were a spammer, it did not really matter if the keywords you loaded on your page related to what you were trying to sell.

Then the search engines took this form of spamming away. They began to use incoming links to your site to measure the importance of the site as a major factor in deciding how you could rank for terms.

Some of this was driven to the emergence of Google with their dependence on the Page Rank Algorithm. Once the number one concern of every SEO, Page Rank has become a minor factor in Google's ranking algorithm.

With the advent of page rank, and the focus on incoming links. a new form of spamming took hold. People began buying links from other sites, or swapping links in huge quantities. If you are a webmaster, you have gotten the emails - "Link popularity is key to your search engine rankings, let's swap links ".

Trouble is that the search engines wanted links to represent a legitimate endorsement of your site. Buying links clearly did not qualify, and reciprocal links were simply barter. So the search engines moved on and put more and more restrictions on the nature of the links.

Search engines began to evaluate the relevance of the links. Did you receive a link from a site about the same topic as yours? If so, good. Otherwise, not as good. In fact, a link swap with an irrelevant site - no value at all, perhaps even harmful.

Was the link you purchased something an algorithm could detect? Or even a human reviewer? Or even one that a competitor could report? Any of these will make a purchased link have no value. Worse still, if you buy many links you can get banned by the search engine.

The Big Daddy update by Google was a major advance in making this all reality. Sites that relied heavily on swapped links were hammered. As for purchased links, Google is investing more and more in methods to detect these and discount them entirely, or punish those who do it excessively.

Now Google is investing in more and more algorithms to better assess what your site (and page) is about. Relevance is king. The perfect link is from a highly respected (authority) site on your topic, from a page on your topic, using anchor text that related to an important keyword, to a directly related page on your site.

In addition, it helps if all of your site is about related topics, and the page is laser focused on the topic. In fact, Google will soon be increasing or decreasing your rankings based on how you rank on related keywords.

It's all about relevance. If your site is about 20 different unrelated topics, this will hurt its rankings on all topics. If your site is about 20 different highly related topics, this will improve your rankings on all topics.

So what do search engines want you to do? The answer can be expressed in two bullet points:

1. Design your site as if search engines did not exist
2. Market your site as if search engines did not exist

OK, so this is a little bit extreme. You do need to be search engine smart. There are a few things you need to do:

1. Don't build a site with Flash or Javascript as the primary tools, as search engines can't crawl them.
2. Understand what terms your users are searching on, and use them richly (but not overly so) in the text on your pages (but wouldn't you do that if search engines did not exist?)
3. Build simple hierarchical sites that are easy to navigate (but wouldn't you do that if search engines did not exist?)
4. Market your site to highly related sites where you are likely to get the best incoming traffic (but wouldn't you do that if search engines did not exist?) 

More and more, smart SEO is about smart marketing. Instead of treating SEO as a separate science that is at war with marketing departments and web designers, start thinking about "SEO Enabled Internet Marketing".

SEO is evolving into a business where the winners understand how to be search engine smart, and how to effectively market web sites. How can a blog help my web site promotion? RSS? Should I publish articles in ezines or in Digg and Reddit? Should I make use of del.icio.us and furl? Is Google Co-op key for promoting my site? Are there other social web (Web 2.0) things happening that I need to care about?

The rules of the game are changing faster than ever, and this will remain true for many years to come. So now, we can re-define our rules of what to do to succeed in web marketing:

1. Design your site as if search engines did not exist
2. Be search engine smart in your design
3. Market your site as if search engines did not exist
4. Be search engine smart in your marketing efforts

What's the point? Yes search engines matter. They matter a lot. Stop trying to trick them. Do what they want you to do. And, do it very well. Decide what your users need first. Then make sure you have been search engine smart.

if you know what you are doing in your site design and web marketing strategy, you will be doing the things that will cause you to win in search engines.

Without the risk inherent in trying to trick them. As the old margarine commercial used to say "It's not nice to fool mother nature" (or the search engines).

The bottom line is that if you design your site and marketing strategy to trick the search engines into giving you traffic that you have not earned, your revenue stream is at risk. You can win by building good content, and by marketing to other sites that are in business directly related to yours. In fact, it's the only way to win for the long term.

iMagicLab or iCarMagic? What's in a Name?

Many of you have asked about why we changed the name of iCarMagic to iMagicLab so i thought I'd take a moment to tell you about it. OK, well, maybe I will take longer but by now you all know how I like to talk...

In late 2004 we received an email from a company named I-CAR who, according to their website, develops and delivers technical training programs to professionals in all areas of the automobile collision industry. They threatened trademark infringement and a host of other legal problems if we didn't change the name immediately. At the time we felt that iCarMagic was sufficiently different that we had nothing to worry about so we ignored the letter.

Late in 2006 the issue reared it's ugly head once again when we were served a lawsuit for the alleged infringement. After consultations with our counsel and an estimate that the cost of fighting a consortium of public car insurance companies could cost millions we reluctantly changed the name. The truth is that I understood their point; most dealers had been calling us "icar" by then anyway and the confusion was natural.

So there it is, the reason the name was changed was because we had to in order to avoid sharp legal costs. For those of you that know me you can imagine how hard it was to not tell them to pound sand :)

http://www.i-car.com/index_us.shtml

KL

P.S. And NO, the rumor on DR is not correct, we have not been bought by Google. It seems every week we're selling to someone (which is funny because we are not for sale)

Open Letter to Steve Jobs: Be Careful

Dear Steve,

As you further embark on your quest to sell a "low-cost reoccurring revenue device that surfs the web and makes money from directing people to Google" (intentional run-on) I suggest you remember the iToaster. Yes, you are bigger than we were, and yes you have vastly more experience in the consumer sector than we did, but the truth is that this model is more than difficult. Just to highlight the similarity in your business plan, especially since we spoke many times about the iToaster, I thought I'd outline some trouble spots for you:

1. Your partner can make or break you. I selected Earthlink to by my conduit to the web and then when they mistreated our customers I moved to AT&T who did even worse. You started with AT&T and, based on my iPhone, it was the worst decision you could have made. Their coverage is spotty, the network is slow and *gasp* the sound of calls is awful. In short, they are making you look bad just like they did us.
2. It's remarkable that your opening screen looks as similar as the one I showed you late in 1999. Forget? Ok take a look below for yourself just in case you forgot the business plan I presented. Do you remember what we discussed about the limits on the model? Needs to be extensible, too limiting in space etc? Guess not, yours is even more limiting that ours and with your history we know how tightly you will control everything.
3. The product needs to be designed for the user intended and the user will not adapt. See this is where the iPod really nailed it and why this device will need to be retooled. It's simple but incomplete and although portions are magically intuitive most of it is just not connected to common sense. Your support calls will go through the roof, eroding profits because you rushed it to market without connecting the dots. It's the same mistake we made with the iToaster but I guess your deep pockets will allow updates: The question is will you poison the goodwill earned from being first to market?
4. 4. Profitability at the expense of usability will hurt. Charging 99 cents for ringtone conversions, not including Exchange support because you want to promote email servers that are paying you and eliminating the GPS and 3G support are all things that move the product into the "great idea" space and out of the "breakthrough product" category. Again, a little common sense on knowing your user base would have helped because this isn't just a click wheel anymore Steve.
5. Premature release (PUN intended) before the sales channel was built was not smart. We announced the iToaster at Microworkz before we had finished the retail sales channel (which was going to be EBGames and AOL) and the attention swamped us. We lost the opportunity to sell full high-priced machines to all those budget customers. What's that Steve? Mac's are only available in a handful of Best Buy and 185 Apple stores? Say you didn't release the iPhone only at AT&T stores and at Apple.com where folks could not touch and feel a real expensive Apple Mac? Say it ain't so...

In any event Steve I wish you the best of luck but I encourage you to study the past while you help engineer the future. Many of the mistakes you have made with the iPhone are fixable but all of us would have expected much more, especially since you and I discussed it 7 years ago. Did watching us fail not help at all? :)

Best,

Keith