David Shapiro

Journey to become less dumb everyday.

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4 SEO Predictions for 2015

January 11, 2015 by Dave Leave a Comment

  1. The glut of content created by the embrace of content marketing will make links and social signals more important than ever, creating an evolutionary arms race where the cost to compete is higher but competitors are no better off.
  2. Crowd-searching services which are meant to manipulate CTR will become popular. Won’t link to it, but you can Google ‘crowdsearch’ and find a provider. This will work exceptionally well in local search where there is less competition.
  3. Google will continue to displace the middle-men (website owners) and provide answers/content directly in SERPs, particularly within SERPs that they couldn’t previously monetize with ads, like lyrics.
  4. As more money goes into native advertising, Google will attempt to monetize in-depth articles or acquire a company to get in on the action.

Excited to look back on these in a year to see if they’re accurate at all.

Filed Under: Marketing

The Secret To A Successful Online Business

June 8, 2014 by Dave Leave a Comment

Want to learn how to start a successful business online?

1) Become absurdly good at something.

Spend an obsessive amount of time reading everything you can about this service/product you’re offering.

Read the top 5 books on Amazon about the topic, then read the next five.

Follow industry news and read industry sources.

Once you’re able to separate the signal from the noise in your industry, proceed to step 2.

2) Sell

No matter what type of business you’re starting you’re going to have to sell. And you’re probably not well known enough to generate a ton of inbound leads at this point, so you need to go out and get in front of people.

This is the first thing you should do before putting up a website and before you do any sort of marketing, although 99% of people do it the other way. They’ll spend time getting an LLC, having a logo made, putting up a website, creating marketing materials, only to find out that their offer is wrong, or people actually want a product and not a service.

You can’t have a business without sales, so stop everything else and start selling.

Filed Under: Marketing

Google Is Not A Reliable Source Of Traffic

December 16, 2013 by Dave Leave a Comment

If I were starting a website today, I would not consider Google traffic anything more than a bonus.

They are arbitrarily penalizing websites and asking webmasters to perform ‘good faith’ efforts to get rid of links they didn’t acquire in the first place. Other webmasters can destroy your sites ability to rank in Google and there is little you can do about it. There’s no way you can ever feel comfortable considering how much you don’t control over the future of your Google traffic.

Try doing a stress test for your site to determine what would happen if your organic traffic in Google declined between 50% to 90% overnight. Can you survive? If not, then it’s probably time to start coming up with some contingency plans.

What is your margin of safety?

Warren Buffett describes Margin of Safety in terms of tolerances:

When you build a bridge, you insist it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it.

The same concept should apply to your website.

How much traffic or how many orders do you need to keep the lights on or feel financially secure?

Whatever that number is, make sure you can attain those targets without accounting for Google traffic. This is certainly not easy, but it will make your website and business stronger over the long run.

Filed Under: Marketing

LONG LIVE LINKS! LONG LIVE SEO!

January 11, 2013 by Dave Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how Google is changing and the semantic web is coming and that links with anchor text are dying and that pretty soon you won’t need to get links and that you’ll just need to create content with a lot of words related to your topic in it and customers will come flocking.

I disagree.

Links are going nowhere, mainly because links are a fundamental building block of the web and quite frankly, a site that discusses a person, place, or thing without linking to it creates a poor user experience. So even if there is no ‘perceived’ SEO benefit, links will always exist on the web for usability, users will click them, search engines will find them, and therefore links will have SEO benefit.

Also, this whole concept of Google being able to judge the relevancy of a document simply based on the ‘co-occurence’ of other terms is a fantasy in my opinion. If that’s the case, then cue up the bulk LSI article creators on Fiverr! If Google doesn’t look at links, and just looks at co-occurence then there will be millions of LSI-optimized (lsioptimization.com is available …) horrible articles about everything under the sun and Google will have no way to tell which ones to rank.

I’m not ragging on co-occurence but writing using related terms isn’t new, and no matter how large a signal it is there will always be an even larger ‘popularity’ score involved based on how users can ‘vote’ for sites.

Before Facebook and Twitter the only way users could ‘vote’ on the web was by linking to an article from their website. Therefore, links were a proxy for popularity, and quantity/quality of links was a proxy for how popular something was.

Today Google has many other ways to tell how users ‘vote’:

1) What they click on in the search results
2) How long they stay on a site and what they do
3) How many Facebook likes, retweets, Google +’s, etc. a page has
4) How many links a site has
5) How many people search for a subject/person/brand/entity
6 – Infinity) Other stuff

They also have tons of other ways to judge links:

1) How long has it been on the web
2) What is the anchor text
3) How often is it clicked
4) Where is it on the page
5) You get the idea …

But keep in mind that users and search engines still arrive at pages via …. LINKS! Whether they click on it from Facebook, or Twitter, or from an email, people click links, and the quantity and quality of those links out there will always be a vital factor in how your page ranks in search engines. Sure over time certain attributes of the link will change in value (the authority of the page/site the link is on, the anchor text, the usage metrics of the URL the link is pointing to, a lot of stuff mentioned here) but links are here to stay.

For those that hate reading and want the 8 second summary I’m basically saying that as long as people use links to surf the web they’ll always be a very valuable signal for search engines to determine how to rank sites.

Filed Under: Marketing

Bing Piggy-Backing off Google’s work

February 1, 2011 by Dave Leave a Comment

Bing appears to have been piggybacking off Google’s results. Considering Bing historically sucked at serving long tail results, it’s no surprise to see them do whatever they can to return more relevant results. I can’t decide if this is simply a brilliant use of competitive intelligence or laziness, or both.

Other non-search perspectives from Nate Silver of the wonderful political blog 538 (notes how Bing’s “It’s one of 1,000+ signals  we use”, is bogus) and Barry Ritholtz from The Big Picture (says Microsoft has always stolen) are worth a read.

Filed Under: Marketing

Only Four Scottsdale Internet Marketing Service Providers?

October 26, 2010 by Dave Leave a Comment

At least that’s what Google would have you think by only displaying four listings in the serp for ‘internet marketing services scottsdale’.  I was obviously part of some experiment because when I clicked over to page two it showed me ten listings, and then when I went back over to page 1 there were ten listings.  The same top four that appeared in my initial search result were also the top four that appeared when I went back to page one and had ten results.

search result with four listings

If this was rolled out with any level of consistency it would make rank tracking pretty difficult.  I tend to agree with Patrick Altoft in that rankings as we know them are a thing of the past, and now it’s more about the range of rankings you’ll have for a keyword at any given time as pages are constantly being reranked by things such as localization and personalization.

Filed Under: Marketing

Learn How to Build Links in 90 Seconds!

February 17, 2010 by Dave Leave a Comment


It should take you no more than 90 seconds to read the last four paragraphs of this interview with Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link. If you want to learn how to build links read this, then read it again. (Copied below for your reading pleasure)

You have a new product and want to use it to build links. Before going public, you do a soft launch to your customers with an invitation to link and incentive (sales.) You then run a national contest (promotions) and announce it via press release (publicity). You also send a release announcing the winner.

While the first part s is going on, you instruct your copywriters to create a humorous piece of link bait which is launched on Digg and a handful of other social media sites (promotions). The linkbait has a tie-in to the contest. (promotions) A blogger outreach program begins and offers free samples of the new product and an invite to review or send rate cards with advertising opportunities (promotions). Once the reviews come in, bundle them, and send release showcasing the successful launch. (publicity).

Based on the success of the launch, have sales and copywriting staff write a case study/white paper referencing the process, reviews and customer feedback. Offer white paper to key journalists before going public, (publicity) and then add the paper to any content source that will take it (promotions).

And so on. By the time this link cycle is complete, you will have touched on almost every facet of marketing without having to purchase a single link or having any one of the tactics stand out. Balance is key.

Filed Under: Marketing

Why does Yahoo handle redirects differently than other engines?

June 26, 2009 by Dave Leave a Comment

I was always under the impression that a 301 redirect would tell all bots that a page has permanently moved and now resides on the destination page, so they should transfer all link/search equity over to that page and remove the old page from the index.  I also believed that a 302 redirect was the opposite, and told the engines that the destination page is only a temporary home and should not be indexed.  Apparently Yahoo does not agree:

yahoo

Have they always handled redirects in this manner?  Is this why their index is littered with pages that return 404’s, since webmasters who perform 301 redirects from top level pages down to deeper pages may remove those top level pages after awhile?  This article was updated by Yahoo fairly recently (in May 2009), so perhaps this is something new.

Filed Under: Marketing

4 Best FREE Sources to Learn SEO

June 23, 2009 by Dave 1 Comment

SEO is a very complex topic.  It takes many hours of reading, experimenting, and analyzing to become proficient.  The hardest part about learning online is figuring out who to trust.  If I had to pick four free resources from which to learn SEO I would choose the following:

1. Google Webmaster Guidelines – This is a pretty comprehensive document outlining how to do SEO the Google approved way.  If you were to stick with only following the rules in this guide your site would be well ahead of much of the competition.

2. Yahoo Search Topics – Particularly the section which discusses their search spider called Slurp and the section about ranking.  It also gives you some information about how to use Site Explorer to look up backlinks, something all SEO’s should learn how to do.

3.  Bing Webmaster Center – Again, pretty similar to the other two where it’s set up into different sections related to technical recommendations, content guidelines, and things to avoid.

Those three are very similar, but if you read through them you will spot similarities and come away with a good understanding of what the search engines deem important.

4.  Once you’ve conquered those three help centers, you’ll want to make your way over to Webmaster World’s Google  Hot Topics section.  This is far more advanced than the other three but provides great insight into the intricacies of creating a succesful site and ranking well in Google.  Definitely a little more advanced than the three listed above, but this resource is well worth the read.  Definitely a place to come to if you have questions about your site or how Google may be treating your site.

Bonus:

5.  Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 –  Digesting all of this content would take months or years.  It’s not important to know everything on here, but the more items from this list that you implement within your site the better off your site will be from a conversion aspect and an accessibility aspect.

Filed Under: Marketing

Search Engine Bot Activity from this weekend

June 15, 2009 by Dave Leave a Comment

Was checking into my server logs this weekend after I made a new post to see which spiders would crawl it first.  To probably nobody’s surprise, Googlebot was quick on the scene, followed by MSNBot, and Slurp didn’t roll through until a good 24 hours after it was posted.  Slurp is just not a fan of daveshap.com.

blog-post-bots

One thing I did find very interesting was that MSNBot always checks robots.txt before crawling any pages, whereas Googlebot only checked it once the whole weekend.  The grand totals were 37 crawls of robots.txt by MSNBot, 8 by Slurp, and 1 by Googlebot.  Seems like Googlebot is a much more efficient crawler than the other two.  For some reason I’m not surprised.

Filed Under: Marketing

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