This is post two in my series of Unofficial Think Vis Tips

SEO Mess - Photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/atibens/4578260998/

This came about with my chat with Dave Naylor, SEO Specialist and industry legend. I am one of the few fortunate people that feel that they can go up to Dave and have a sneaky chat on any subject – and the man is highly approachable, and extremely intelligent. Dave, having had many years head start and much better skills than I, has worked with a number of big brands. As most people know, I love working for large Brands, working on their strategies and giving advice as part of what I do. Dave came up with an analogy that will probably stick with me for a very long time:

“It’s like your doctor being blamed for you getting Lung cancer by the friends and family.

As much as he shouts and screams that he told you not to smoke, you wouldn’t listen. Then when if you were to get the dreaded disease,  would it be your fault for not heeding the advice of your Medical Specialist, or would it be the Doctors fault? Obviously yours.

But in SEO, when you client refuses to listen to your careful advice, and doesn’t do things right, and when things get messed up, it’s instantly your fault. No one apart from you and the client know this, and everyone outside that deal starts pointing fingers. ”

I hope you followed the gist of the conversation. Why do we as SEO’s get blamed when our clients don’t follow our advice? We can’t actually come out in the open and say “We told them not to do it, but they did it anyway.”  In fact I have partially tweeted  / ranted about this fact, that sometimes you misjudge an SEO’s work based on what you see on the surface, not under the corporate hood, and Jaamit kindly gave life to those tweets.  

The take away?

Don’t let people outside the deal between you and your clients annoy you. Don’t respond, keep your professional cool. Secondly, make sure that your client is aware at every given point of the possible issues in any decisions that they make against your advice. Document them.

Keep a log – and maybe even put together a disaster recovery plan. Even if they don’t pay you to think about that – 9/10 times you may not need it, but the 10% time that you do, you will win the favour of your clients even more.

 Fact is this is and will remain the bane of any SEOs life as long as non SEO people are making decisions for the business. Keep trying to maintain them on the right track, but dont make it personal if they dont always follow your advice. They have other priorities. I have covered most of this in a presentation for Brighton SEO before (see below).

Actually Making SEO Happen

This is the Slideshare version of my presentation:

Alea Casino Leeds ThinkVis Venue

I love attending Think Vis. In my opinion it’s not only the best value conference, but has a brilliant speaker and attendee crowd.  However, although the talks are great, and there are usually some excellent takaways, I prefer what I refer to as the “Unofficial Think Vis Tips”. These are the water cooler conversations you have around a round of drinks, at the lunch breaks, over the coffee stand, or while having a quick and sneaky smoke.

There are many notes I have jotted mentally, and hopefully I will get these out in the next day or so. But here is a tip that will give you so that you too can get hold of these at your next conference:

ThinkVis Tip 1: Making The Most of All Speakers and Attendees!

1. Try and do some research before hand

• Who is attending?
• Who is speaking?
• What are your relationships with these people? Do you follow their blog? Comment on them? Talk to them on twitter? Elsewhere? Have friends in common?
• What do they like to speak about?

2. Decide the questions you really want answered, or discussions you really want to hear
3. Prime the people you want to speak to

• Tweet them – “hi I am so an so and am attending – would love to meet you in real life”
• Contact them via their site
• Let your mutual contacts arrange an introduction
• Offer to buy / drink coffee as a promise

4. Make it clear who you are and why you want to speak to them, when you get to the conference!
5. Approach the topic honestly – these people aren’t idiots – don’t try and make it sound as if the problem you want discussed is someone else’s!

The next tips are for people that you didn’t realize you would like to approach until you heard them speak.

Approaching New Interesting People

1. Don’t crowd them right after a talk – let them get a drink – speaking isn’t easy for everyone and they may be mentally exhausted!
2. Make sure you identify what you enjoyed about their talk – positive feedback is always an excellent starting point.
3. If time is limited (maybe there are only 10 mins to next talk etc) don’t hog their time – they may have their own catching up to do and will talk to you out of politeness, but may not be fully immersed in the conversation. Arrange to meet at THEIR convenience, or simply ask for contact details like a card or email address.
4. Finally – don’t make a nuisance of yourself. If they are speaking to someone, dont interupt, don’t butt in, and don’t assume that they have to answer every question you have!

The above are my personal brand of conference contact etiquette; however others may have better strategies…

Search Engine Submission Company - dont do it!

Dear Small Business Owner,

Ref: Paying for Search Engine Submission Service

I do not insist I am the worlds greatest SEO. However I do know a few things about helping small businesses. Note, I dont want your money, I want to save you some.

So lets get something right – you do NOT have to pay for Search Engine Submission Services. You heard me right the first time, you do NOT have to pay for Search Engine Submission Service. See the below? I have taken off the bullshit, and left you with options that will give you an idea:

Paying for Search Engine Submission is a Scam. Using software to do it is equally dumb.

If you follow even the basics of search engine optimisation tips on the Google Approved SEO Guide found on this page, you should be OK to Rock and Roll. Dont worry about 100’s of search engines. There are only THREE you need to worry about (unless you are in Russia or China).

However if submitting your site does make you feel better, then I include the below resources you can use yourself for FREE. One set, solid, discount price of $0 (or £0 in UK equivalent).:

• Submit your site and your content to Google
• Submit your site and / or feed to Yahoo!
• Submit your site to Bing

I hope you found this letter in good health.

Warmest Regards

Rishi Lakhani

p.s I am asking my SEO buddies to add in the comments below whether this is good advice. That way you get a FREE second, third and etc opinion.

p.p.s I am hereby licensing this letter Copyleft

p.p.p.s This post was inspired by Mike Tek via Is your SEO Agency Spinning Wheels?

I am not the only one who  says this by the way:

• Blogstorm post on SE Submission scam
• Search engine guide on SE Submission Scam
• SEOmoz Questions SE Submission
• A Webmasterworld post on the topic
• SEOAly (who writes for Small Businesses)

I often get questions regarding small businesses and how they can get the much needed edge in increasing their web presence. It’s not always easy to answer such a question without much thought. After all, small businesses, by their very definitions have limited budgets and resources available to market. Every penny counts and they have to stretch the cash flow they already have. As a result, they take a risk and venture into spending some of their funds on an online presence and if they are unlucky, get burnt, either by not knowing the right thing to do, or choosing service providers that can’t do much for them.

On the other hand there are those moms and pops that carefully research their market, their suppliers, devouring tonnes of freely available advice online, and then make informed choices on how to spend their budgets. Take for example Local Search Ranking Factors – much of this work can be carried out in house without having to pay for it. These guys sometimes come up with creative uses of freely available resources such as Facebook or Twitter, or creative campaigns that sometimes even surprise seasoned marketers. And that would be my advice to Small Businesses. Let the creative thought processes flow. Discuss various options available, and get a bit crazy.

Stages Of Brainstorming Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rvdwal/3265655143/

I know it isn’t an easy process to get small businesses thinking creatively, especially if they are your clients – after all aren’t they paying YOU for this stuff? My own strategy is to emphasise that they would do much better and to use a cliché, get “more bang for their buck” if they use me as an advisor rather than a full blown service, something that would end up costing  them a lot more. Part of this process is geared around thinking games and random brainstorms that sometimes end up in really good ideas, or at the least, get the creative juices flowing.  I have often left a meeting without a resolution or workable idea, only to get an email or a call from the clients weeks later starting with “I have been thinking about what we discussed, and suddenly I thought XYZ would be a pretty cool idea…”.

I use various tools and techniques to get people thinking, and some of the more common ones are listed below:

-          Word association

Word Association is a pretty good warm up for a creative session. I normally ask participants what the least and most probable words people would use to describe their service or product. This leads to quite a few lively discussions!

-          Customer role play

This is a situation game. Ask participants to think of themselves as a potential customer for a service / good and then outline your consideration to purchase cycle. This really helps in getting businesses in the mind set of a customer, and stop trying to think like sales people. It’s amazing how many people get the light bulb moment when exposed to this sort of an activity.

-          Hobby Listing

Small Businesses (well all businesses!) are made up of individuals. They all have skills and hobbies along with quirks that are often not brought to their work environment. Getting them to discuss these in a forum usually helps identify members that may have skills that can be used to market the business.  Take for example a recent discovery by one of my friends – one of his employees was a DJ and pretty popular on Facebook and was well known in the local area. Leveraging his popularity to promote my friends restaurant in the area worked wonders. Not to mention gained the businesses Facebook Fan Page plenty of free and invested members.

-          Research and Bring

This is a situation when team members have too many ideas prior to the decision making cycle. I typically ask them to spend some time researching other businesses that may have tried these ideas, and during the session we evaluate the potential benefits or possibilities of benchmarking.

You would be surprised how often these techniques work at generating executable ideas that are often within the businesses budget. Everyone has an imagination, you just need to learn to leverage that to be a creative marketer.

I recall one pharmacy that I worked with that wanted to generate links to their site. The idea? Research all the local BnB’s in the area that have their own websites, and ask they could supply some local health information for their sites, along with discounts for their customers. This information is freely available on the web – all the pharmacy had to do is collate its and put it together in a user friendly form (whilst adding relevant anchor text links like “For further Vaccination Advice contact The XYZ Pharmacy” . This turned out to be free hosted content on relevant  local sites with customised anchor links, whilst at the same time gaining confidence of the BnB owners who in turn also referred business occasionally.

I hope that this technique for working with small businesses proved useful to some of you! Please feel free to add to the discussion in the comments below, and let me know if you have any coll techniques you use yourselves!

I have written a number of Small Business SEO and SEM articles discussing techniques and thought processes, please feel free to use as you wish!

Resources:

• Lisa Barone recently wrote  What Experience Are You Creating? I suggest you check it out.

Rockstars (not the SEO kind) Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/

NOTE: For those poor unfortunates that follow me on twitter, you ought to know by now that I recently visited Kenya August 2009.  I wrote the post below on the plane on my journey there and partly at Doha International Airport where I had a two hour stopover.  I forgot about it until  I realised in was officially recognised one of the contributors to SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors survey.  : NOTE END

So I am 33000 feet up in the air, travelling at a speed of 790 km/hr and about 8 hours from my first stop, which thankfully is a short one. I have watched a film, a pretty good one, which unfortunately I didn’t catch the name of, (*edit it’s called The Rocker – googled it) but it was about this has-been “rock star” that used to be with a band “Vesuvius”  and three teens who formed a band to include him in it 20 years after his fall from grace. As feel good movies go, this is pretty standard, in that it delivers the promised happy ending along with the usual sub plot melodrama that makes it interesting light hearted entertainment.

What does that have to do with SEO?

I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

There are those of us who are always high flying, living the good life, playing the SERPs at every shot, the SEO rock stars. Recognised everywhere the word SEO means Search Engine Optimisation, hated, adored and envied in varying proportions throughout the world.

Then there are those of us, who life passed by, but we are still trying, still “rocking on” still wanting to be the “in” crowd. We used to do something or the other until we got into “internet marketing” and eventually into SEO. Those of us in that category aren’t  failures, but just haven’t discovered our strengths.

Then there are those of us who are new, young, fresh, with some seriously mad ideas, rising stars and recognised as such by the Rock Stars and the rest of the community.

And then we have melodrama. Boy we have melodrama. But then, that’s a whole story in its own right and not one I dare venture tell.  I have friends and people I respect on most sides of the arguments.

What I would like to offer to you today, in return for you taking a few precious minutes out to read this, is some simple advice.  But fist allow me tell you a little about me.

I moved to London 8 years ago from East Africa. I chose my university by picking the furthest distance from London so I wouldn’t have to stay with family. I had a computer back home, it was an Amstrad which I used to load games on from radio cassettes. That was the limit to my exposure to computers. When I submitted my first ever university assignment, I received a £20 bill from the administration office. I had delivered the assignment handwritten and they had to pay someone to type it up.

For the first 2 years I paid people to word process my assignments. You know when I regularly started using computers? When I found out there are websites where I could read free science fiction online. That’s where my flirtation with the internet began. Trying to find stupid geeky shit that I loved to read but couldn’t get most of the times.

In the interim I have done a lot to earn a living, DJ’ed, ran a club, promoted events, marketed a hospital, and marketed doctors. But you know what? Nothing EVER gave me the satisfaction that working with SEO does. Nothing.

But I am not the world’s greatest SEO. I am not even a mediocre link builder. I do not understand web servers or how certain analytics work. I hate spreadsheets and do not like making charts.   I do not understand PHP, ASP, or any other programming language for building websites, except for HTML and CSS, which I have a rudimentary knowledge of. Self taught. Thanks to Open Source  Design networks.

You know what I am good at? Strategy, creativity and assimilation. Most of all assimilation, as this leads to successes in the former two. I read information. I absorb it. I process it, and I come up with solutions, or potential solutions. And I do that pretty well. And I am good at teaching people. Making them understand what I mean without getting too technical. And I am pretty OK with relationships, which really helps.

Why am I telling you this? Because I am making a point. I am not a rock star. But I know that I am pretty good in a couple of areas. That’s where I excel, and that’s where I stick. For everything else regarding SEO, I know where to find people to help. And as much as I hate the word synergy, it’s the word most apt when two SEOs or a team of SEOs meet who all have complementary skills. Case and point?   The guys at SEOmoz.  The amazing Distilled team.  And all the other successful agencies that have teams for SEO’s in different fields.

My point is, find what you are good at. Stop reading 100 posts on link building in the hope of becoming a link ninja. Don’t try and become an affiliate guru if you don’t really understand the intricacies of affiliate marketing. Dont try and be an SEO writer if your normal writing skills are below par.  Know your strength and specialise in it. Practise it even more. SEO is still an infant industry. There are sub disciplines in it, even though the boundaries are murky. SEO is not just onsite vs offsite SEO. It has plenty to offer people specialising in micro parts of it. Find your skill, hone it and work it. Help those who are weak with that skill.

Everybody can’t be a rock star. But everybody can be special.

Self Employed SEO? Not as easy as you think. Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/john/296495598/

As many people who followed me from SEOmoz are aware, I have done a lot of Small Business SEO/M, and have written a range of posts on the subject. However, of late I am getting myself immersed and tangled with larger projects and at the same time using any spare moments to get involved in learning Affiliate Marketing. This doesn’t mean that I am averse to discussing or writing about Small Business Marketing anymore, but it does mean that I have less time to.

The reason for this post is over the years plenty of people have asked me for help developing their own small business consulting projects, and I have been pretty glad to help as many as I could. What I realised was that often the questions that roll in are pretty much along the lines of “how to get more clients” and ”is it better to freelance”, and of late more and more inhouse SEO’s are tempted to start their own businesses.

What I felt may be useful to these folks would be a few tips on starting that new business, from my own experience. This will be a Series of Posts, with this being the first.

Should I or Shouldn’t I?

In my usual “teaching mode” fashion, I want to get you to think of a few questions to ask yourselves first: (note the bolded characters – these are my formula indicators used later in the post)

1. What are your key specialities? (stop assuming you can do everything!) YS
2. What connections / relationships do you have to YC
3. What part of your business will you need to outsource? OS
4. How good are your people skills? PS
5. How good are your business skills? BS
6. How realistic is your view of your worth? (e.g per hour) £PH
7. What MINIMUM possible revenue do you need to generate to survive at your current standard of living? MPRFS
8. How many man hours can you dedicate to your own business? MPHFW

Now is that done? Were you honest to yourself? Promise? Ok. Read on.

A .Map your resources

Your Specialities vs those of your connections:

Me + Timmy + Tommy + Tina + Tanya

B. Map your Offerings (services)

Me + Timmy + Tommy + Tina + Tanya

C. Map your Revenue

What does 100% use of your time = in terms of (your value per hour x Max Hours you have to spend) – Is this > or < than MPRFS ?

D. Your Business Skills + People Skills

In Months 1-3 can you sell 90% of your time using PS+BS?

OK – so by now you have pretty much done your self discovery process. If it scares you, are you ready? If it seems simple, are you over confident?

I am not trying to discourage you. But the grass is usually greener on the other side. before taking a serious step into freelancing or starting your own business, this sort of thinking is extremely necessary. Remember, I havent even mentioned accountants, legal support, banking, taxation etc etc. Taking a step out in the open means you need to make sure you are prepared for all sorts of weather. Rain or shine, make sure you are covered.

Saying that, if you do decide to take the plunge, fear not, I will write a few posts on getting the clients, and keeping them happy .

A Clever Tactic for Agencies

Recently I wrote a post aimed specifically at SEOs who want to start their own businesses. It wasn’t meant to be an encouragement, rather, a self reflection enticement, encouraging people to take stock of their own situations and capabilities before making that BIG move. In reality, I feel SEOs would do better to stick with their agencies if they work in one, rather than branching out themselves, simply because the resources available to them as part of a larger search team than as individuals. In the recession, search is doing well and many agencies are recruiting talent heavily.  This post is aimed more towards agencies that are either losing SEOs constantly, or trying to recruit more talent.

James Caan at freshegg Conference

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Fresh Egg workshop recently, and despite the fact I couldn’t stick around for the whole day, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Apart from the unique venue, great speakers and astounding turnout, the presence of James Caan added some serious kudos to the event. I must admit, he totally disarmed me when I was being introduced (apparently he has had some of my posts printed out by his office to read when he gets a chance – gulp). Meeting the gentleman and hearing what he had to say was an experience in itself. And this post was inspired (actually the idea behind it was ahem, “borrowed”) by his talk.

Basically James started the company “Alexander Mann Solutions” (AMS), which was in the recruitment industry. However, he had a unique approach to retaining key staff – when a staff member had a good idea, instead of being discouraged, which would in turn encourage them to leave and start their own business, (which happens more often than you think) they are allowed to use the Alexander Mann name to launch a subsidiary of the company, supported by AMS, with a share in the new business. Infact, one of the most successful offshoots of this strategy was the outsourcing arm of Alexander Mann, now with a £140M annual turnover.

This idea struck a chord with me because this is what successful SEO/M agencies should be doing. Growing and developing their key staff. I have often mentioned that SEM as a whole is an industry in its infancy, there are no defined rules, no degrees, no real industry wide qualifications, nor are there set regulations. This means its still pretty much the wild wild west when it comes to possibilities. Yet it’s one that is growing day by day, and the opportunities are seemingly endless.

So how should agencies retain their strong players such that they don’t wander off and start their own businesses in hopes of grabbing a bigger piece of the action? Invest in them of course. How? Use a leaf out of Jame’s book and develop different profit centres – based on ideas that these individuals come up with.

If a key member of staff wants to go back to their home town to start a small business SEO business – instead of letting them leave the company completely, why not set them up in their own town as a satellite with a share of that business?

If a member decides that a particular niche is what they want to work in (e.g I used to specialise in SEO for Doctors) then instead of letting them escape, why not create a specific arm of the business that helps target that niche – with profit share for the team member that came up with the idea?

In essence if carried out well, this is a WIN situation for Search Agencies – not only do you retain key staff members, but diversify and develop your product offerings over time. Infact, why wait for the team members to decide to move? Why not run monthly non-direct business related brainstorms? Questions for discussion could include:

1. Where should we diversify?
2. What products / Services can we develop?
3. Where are there gaps in the market?

These sessions may prove invaluable to businesses – and keeping motivated individuals at the spearhead of these projects is a recipe for success (IMHO).

Sometimes the simplest ideas pave the way to success – don’t let them slip through your hands.