What they say:

• Search engine volume declining.
• Google dying out.
• Facebook and other social media sites are now the most valuable sites for marketing, including Viral and word of mouth marketing.
• No point of doing SEO
• No point of affiliate marketing via SEO

My answer to them:

Search engine volume declining:

Are you nuts? You are assuming here the search growth volume decline, but do you even know that almost every single person on the internet will use ‘search engine’ to search for something? Do you expect someone to go on facebook and search for ‘how to loose weight?’.  If you think SEO is dead, then you are just too much negative.

Google dying out?:

Do you know which sites get the most visitors per month? Yes its facebook, but do you know which sites make the most money per month? Oh wait you don’t . But they are not social media they are amazon, google, ebay, etc etc. Do you find facebook or twitter on those top earners list? Nope. So in simple words, most visited doesn’t make them most worth or most earning sites.

Facebook and other social media sites are now the most valuable sites for marketing, including Viral and word of mouth marketing:

We internet marketers don’t give a damn for ‘what site’ a user visits. We do SEO to rank on search engines, do you know the purpose of search engines? It is to ‘search’ for what the people are looking for on the world wide web. So if SEO is dead then all the websites on the internet are dead!

No point of doing SEO:

It is funny that some people assume, SEO IS DEAD and yet they say that ‘Facebook’ is the most searched keyword on any search engine. Now isn’t that contradicting. If google wasn’t there or any search engine for the matter of fact, will your average user be able to find anything??? ANYTHING AT ALL?? It is already shocking enough that they can’t find facebook without searching Google or yahoo. Does that mean SEO is dead? I don’t think so.

No point of affiliate marketing via SEO:

Another well known fact is that, 90% of searches on social media sites are of no monetary value. Social media sites are only for socializing or marketing a product which is ‘common’ like movies, etc. YOU CANNOT SELL medical products, or even anything that doesn’t make it ‘social enough’. If that was the case then why would millions[assuming] of internet marketers spend time on SEO and not just make friends on Facebook and social media sites & sell to them like ordinary sales men in real life? Well why should we, when we have Search engines. In fact search engines are killing the ‘real world’ market because more and more people go online and search for products, its reviews and information before buying them from markets or shopping malls. Why is that? Why can’t they  go and use facebook for such a purpose. Because Facebook or Social media isn’t for that purpose.

What they still keep saying:

• Facebook is most searched term on all major search engines
• Facebook and social media sites can over take Google and other search engines
• Facebook is democracy based, Google is authority based.
• Social media sites get more search volume then search engines.
• Viral marketing is the game changer.

What i think about that:

Facebook is most searched term on all major search engines:

If you think as mentioned above, then your common senses have failed you. An average user can’t find a single site without searching it on google and yahoo. And we expect social media to help us make money? yea right keep dreaming. The only way that i have seen people making money via facebook is by those stupid fan pages and cpa offers. FOOLING the avg user. Did you realize that the avg user searches for ‘facebook’ on the ‘search engines’? So facebook is perhaps alive because of search engines, but still it earns nothing compared to what google and yahoo earns. Why is that? Because facebook needs lots of resources to accommodate its ‘users’. It is not for business it is for socializing. So for us merchants we need to sell stuff, not meet people and talk to them for 8hrs and convince them to buy some products which they never wanted to even try. BUT via SEO we get those people directly to our sites and get them buying what they are looking for.

Facebook and social media sites can over take Google and other search engines:

If facebook and social media could have overtaken Google and other Search engine giants then it would have happened by now, but instead we get reports of these Search engine Giants offering to ‘buy’ sites like facebook and twitter. Who is making more money here now?

Facebook is democracy based, Google is authority based:

Regarding facebook being democracy based and Google being authority is pure rumors and utter BS. It is the users who search on google and it is us the ‘webmasters’ who make our sites capable and competitive to rank on google. So in my dictionary it is the other way around. If you provide good content and do hard work you will rank on google and be the authority, but elected by democracy of the searchers. But on facebook – do we ever search there?

Viral marketing is the game changer:

In some cases yes, but assuming only viral marketing can change the game then you are wrong, Viral marketing +SEO are the top game changers. They go hand in hand and the faster we realize this the better and easier Internet marketing is.  So no you can’t rely on viral marketing only. In fact some social media sites can just ban you for spamming.

Social media sites get more search volume then search engines:

Facebook is visited by the same people over and over again for socializing. TELL ME SOMETHING, can facebook send ‘ITS OWN USERS’ to your site? No it can’t, even if you try it might be considered spamming, unless you want to spend money there you got nothing. So in terms of value, google and search engines get more ‘worthy’ visitors. Why isn’t facebook earning as much as google if it has more users then it?

They still don’t stop:

• We can make more money via Social traffic then SEO traffic.
• Viral marketing without SEO yields better result in shorter time.
• SEO is not stable and will die and we will be better off with social media.
• Yahoo is closing its Publisher program because  SEO is dead.
• SEO doesn’t benefit the ordinary ‘webmaster’.

Neither do i:

We can make more money via Social traffic then SEO traffic:

So is SEO dead? Well let me tell you something about viral marketing. Viral marketing don’t last forever. Here you are for a month, next month someone better then you comes, down the dumpster you go. But with SEO you can maintain your positions on certain keywords. This gets you – TARGETED TRAFFIC, .ie organic traffic. Is that worth more then the UN-TARGETED traffic those merchants get from social media sites? YES.

Viral marketing without SEO yields better result in shorter time:

Here’s the thing -

Time spent on social media sites = time wasted [1]

Time needed for viral marketing = time spent on social media sites [2]

then from [1] and [2],

Time needed for viral marketing = time wasted

How is that? Let me put it this way, facebook has people who are addicted, they visit the site to chat with friends, they send mails , they log off. Spending huge time on facebook, But is that of any value to us the sellers? No.

Now on search engines – user searches something = he wants or is looking for something = he finds our sites = he gets what he is looking for = we earn $$. Can that happen on facebook?
NO!  Unless you pay for advertising.

SEO is not stable and will die and we will be better off with social media:

Now imagine, everyone stopped SEO, Google and all search engines died. What next? who will visit our sites? Will anyone ever know our sites exists? Won’t facebook ban us for posting links? Even if we did just to our friends – it will be un-targeted traffic = no value. Which makes Our sites = useless, we make no money. No money means  no income for facebook. No income for facebook and so much users with high maintenance means  facebook is dead. SEO is the backbone of the internet marketing scenario . IT WILL NEVER DIE.

Yahoo is closing its Publisher program because  SEO is dead:

Last but not the least, i believe yahoo died the time it sold itself to Microsoft, i.e Bing.
You might not know but people on facebook are ‘humans’ and so are they on all social media sites. They don’t know anything unless someone spams them, they ask questions and doubts to their friends via status – why can’t they just search facebook to find answers? because its not possible. And when someone asks such questions. Do you know what reply people give on social media sites = just ****ing google it. Oh and that reply is common everywhere, facebook, twitter, yahoo answers, etc etc. Its true there is immense power in social media but SEO is not dead. period.

YPN died out because they can’t compete with Google and have bad policies? and perhaps they don’t have enough publishers because they are not worldwide?

SEO doesn’t benefit the ordinary ‘webmaster’:

If that is the case and if SEO dies, then so does any other website on the internet that isn’t ‘advertised’ offline. Which means a total of estimated 10-50 million ‘ordinary’ merchants, webmasters, freelancers, sellers etc will run out of business and it also means the economy would fall to ‘WORST’ conditions ever.

Q. Can word of mouth i.e viral marketing alone save us without the use of SEO?

A:Not always. It will take a 100 years for you to sell a common product to every user on the internet. Because not everyone has same tastes, or is rich, or is located in a place where they can avail those items. But if you were to make a website, target a keyword and rank top on the keyword on any major search engine, you will sell your product to every single person who visits your site.

So does that mean Social Media and viral marketing is Dead?

Let me put it this way, if i wanted to rely on viral marketing to sell a product to 10 million people. Let that be the basic goal. Then, that would mean 10 million people should just buy my product by word of mouth. This is very unlikely. BUT if i were to do the same via SEO, Viral marketing together by Ranking with certain keywords. And then get 100% organic traffic and say get an average of 1 million people monthly.[which is possible on high traffic niches] then i can reach my goals in less then a year. How? because i will have ‘targeted’ customers. More over, even if i don’t sell on first try i can always build leads, follow up. Spread my product all around the internet. Using ‘Search engines’ we can get many affiliates interested in promoting us, and these affiliates will still in turn promote our product using ‘search engines’. Can you do all this via facebook or twitter? You might be able to, but it will take lots of spamming and hard work. And it might not be automated as well along with the fact that you will have to do it all alone and by yourself without help of any affiliates etc.

What did you learn? SEO is not dead, don’t give up if you don’t rank well on search engines. Because in the end search engines were still alive when myspace was popular, is still alive when facebook and twitter is and will still be when other social media sites evolve.

Google Page rank has been a topic of discussion for a long time. It is believed that page rank directly or indirectly affects your search engine rankings. A few years back Google told most webmasters that page rank is in fact 1 of the 200 different elements of a site that they use to calculate the search engine rankings.

But unlike Google’s statement, most SEO experts and companies considers Google Page rank a important element of SEO. Almost every webmaster, big or small keeps an eye on their page ranks. In some cases page rank can be a deciding factor while selling advertisements or getting advertisers for the website.

Google to remove Page rank?

A few years ago back in 2007 google requested feedback from webmasters weather or not to remove pagerank from the webmaster tools. But at that time it was rejected by most webmasters. However recently Google with the introduction of Google Labs for webmaster tools and other changes, also removed the Pagerank Data from webmaster Tools. This change however went unnoticed by most of us, however it has surely started a endless discussion and line of questions. With the first one being, is Google going to remove pagerank?

Susan Moskwa from Google explained it like this:

"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus
on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most
important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed
it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it,
but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

There is no doubt Google has been trying to tell webmasters for so long to improve the content and quality of their websites and not just concentrate on building their pagerank. We all know how most webmasters try to gain pagerank, which is by link building.

Does this means an end to link building?

Trying to gain pagerank not only encourages link farms or spam but loads of different problems. Perhaps which is why Google is having a hard time due to the ‘pagerank addicted webmasters’.

But  it does not end just here, Google’s move has left many of us startled. What should we do now? Just completely forget about pagerank? But how is that going to help many of us who depend on pagerank for selling advertising banners on our pages, seo services, link building services??

Is Google changing its algorithm for ‘serps’? Maybe or maybe not, but it surely gets you thinking. The google toolbar still shows pagerank. But its been removed from the webmaster tools. So pagerank is just for show, now? It kinda takes out the whole point of having pagerank in the first place.

Will it affect online business?

Lets not start speculating that Google is going to remove pagerank completely without any official announcements. [since they didn't announce removing them from webmaster tools we can't be sure] But telling webmasters not to concentrate on pagerank building is definitely going to affect business. Specially for those people who own directories, article directories, link sales, seo services, link building services, etc. The list is endless, i mean if Google tells you to forget about pagerank, why would you and thousands of other webmaster spend precious time and money trying to build links for a good PR?

It is going to have some minor effects on blogging community as well. Its going to kill the purpose of ‘dofollow’ blogs. For some blogs there will be loss of comments aswell, maybe link exchanges will also decline.

Are their any advantages?

There are many advantages, firstly there will be less spam. No more link farms and it will be a boost to some ‘real’ sites and blogs with unique content. Why?

Because if Google removes PR, it would mean all high PR sites and link spammers might drop and other sites will rank better depending on the quality of content, this is good news form a searchers point of view.

But will Google remove PR?

That is the question which everyone seems to be asking right now. Is google thinking to remove PR from its serp algorithm? If it does how is it going to affect us all?

The answer is not yet clear but from recent changes, we can see where Google seems to be heading. Keeping all assumptions on one side, it could simply mean Google is trying to deviate the attention of webmasters from the PR craze and wants them to start building content and quality? I think that would be the most safest way to understand Googles Intentions, but no one is sure what lays ahead in store for us.

What should i do?

There is nothing you need to worry much right now, but if you are thinking into starting directories or getting involved in link building business, directly or indirectly then i would recommend you to start finding a new path. Because many webmasters are now not worried about pagerank, this would mean less business for such services.

If  you are a pagerank addict, continuously trying to get a good PR. Specially by spending lots of money on link building services and good SEO services then its time to stop and just concentrate on your content quality along with ‘on page’ SEO. I also found many bloggers using blog & forum commenting as a method to build quality links, this will not work anymore so instead try providing quality to your readers and build a network. At Least your likely to save some time.

And if Google ever removes pagerank completely then it will have different affects on different businesses, try to avoid indulging in such business or services in which having a good PR is necessary.

*****

Until next time, have a good day and a great week ahead, let me know what you think of this move from Google?

SJ

well yes you read it correct. Till now people keep talking about alexa ranking, alexa traffic ranks, etc etc but no one ever told you that there is actually a way to get traffic from alexa.

But before i come to that let me tell you a bit about alexa. Alexa is a ‘site monitoring’ service that monitors your site statistics, such as traffic, geo-analysis, page views, age group of traffic and many more things. It then ranks your website among all others based on your traffic in a particular month. This is called a alexa rank.

What is the use of traffic rank?

Alexa traffic rank is of no direct use to you. Unless you are a web analytic of course. However it does effect your sites popularity and income indirectly. When advertisers look for websites to advertise on then they consider few factors, alexa traffic rank is one of those factors.

Alexa is very popular among all webmasters, there is absolutely no webmaster that don’t use alexa to monitor his site and improve his rankings.

Tell the secret already!

ok alright, there is no big secret. Its a very simple thing which the smart savvy people have noticed and are taking extensive advantage of it. While others might not even know of such a feature.

You must be wondering what this feature is which you can use to get traffic ‘from’ alexa? Well let me explain you in easy words. Alexa has a feature called ‘reviewing’. Everyday thousands if not millions of people look up on sites such as google, yahoo, msn, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon….. the list is too big. But you know what i am talking about, the big guys with the traffic rank 1-100 get lots of views on there profile pages.

Won’t alexa care?

That is the sad part unfortunately. Alexa as a big reputed company should be more considerate about its own site. I find many people writing ‘useless’ reviews on sites with good traffic rank. Sites such as google, yahoo, etc. Not only does they write useless reviews, they actually SPAM the hell out of them.

Take a look at the screen shot below on reviews for yahoo.com or go directly to this link. Make sure you go to the ‘review’ section though.

You see how people simply just spam like that? But worse off, there are others who actually pay a visit to those links. This has been tested in fact, if you go and write a review with a reference to your product then you get lots of targeted visitors. But your product must be relevant to the site you write a review for. That works even better.

Now wait! I am NOT asking you guys to spam there. Now that you know of a way to do so. But i told about this basically for everyone to know more about the services they use. Informational purposes only. I didn’t try yet but i wonder what effect it will have on my site in terms of traffic.

I also noticed some people write reviews multiple times and some do this on daily basis to try and keep their reviews on first page. This is hilarious and am rather disappointed in alexa. I mean don’t they have any maintenance? How can they allow so much spam on their reputed site? If that wasn’t enough, but these reviews also hurt the image and reputation of the sites about which they are written. For someone who is new to facebook and if he reads such Spam reviews about it on alexa, do you think that person is going to join facebook? I highly doubt that.

Is there another way?

In fact there is. There are 2 ways you can get traffic ‘from’ alexa, legally and spam free traffic. But how?

1. You can use the above method ‘without’ spamming, meaning giving your honest reviews with a link to your blog or site under your name. Such reviews won’t be considered spam and would actually get you traffic and people won’t even call you a spammer. So review writing on alexa is a new traffic generation method on my list.

2. You could do it like how the others do. Make your site popular, gain higher rankings. No don’t worry, rankings in top 100 or even top 100k is very hard. But you can aim for higher traffic ranking in a particular country or on a particular topic. I mean there are 190+ countries in the world [not sure how many total, damn i am not good at geography] and each country has its own ranking sites.

Once again please don’t spam and i do HOPE someone from alexa reads this message and actually employees someone to remove off those Spam comments and reviews. I had the notion that they do have staff who does that, but i guess they get too much spam reviews daily. In that case how about ‘moderating’ the reviews before publishing them?  That won’t be hard to implement i guess. Folks at wordpress might be helpful too. It will certainly reduce the spam.

And sorry for the late post guys, i was busy with lots of work. Take care and don’t spam. good luck in this new adventure, do it legally though.

Till then have a great day,

SJ

First let me tell something about ‘people search’, do you know that your name is very important? not just in the real world but on the online world your name is a very important tool, thousands of people could be searching you on google to find more about you! your friends, your networking friends, your family members and many others, that’s why having a presence online is necessary.

Well the fact still remains that almost 80% of people who will search you will search via some search engine, basically google, yahoo, bing or aol, and that’s where the google profile comes in.

Google  lets you create your own public profile something that could be very useful and handy, how?

1. When ever someone does a search on your name, your Google profile will be the first to show up, specially if they search via Google, other search engines will also detect the strong presence of your Google profile.

2. Google lets you add external links in your profile, so you could add links to your twitter account, face book, your website or anything you think that needs mentioning, thus making a better public appearance and spreading information about yourself and your site, services, products, etc etc

3. A link on Google to any site is very powerful! specially a backlink to your site or blog from google.com could boost your search engine rankings, that is the easiest SEO trick you could imagine, even if the backlink is a nofollow.

That’s all i could tell you, it will take like 15 Min’s to create a Google profile which could be very helpful for you later on, so go ahead and get yourself the free Google SEO bonus if you don’t have one yet!

you can check out my profile here – Sameer Joad

Go here to make your own – Google Profiles.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, which means improving the quality of your site and everything affiliated with it to make it more search bot friendly in order to rank high in the search engines.

Before we start on the basics of SEO, i would like to tell you something about SEO and things associated with it, first-most is why is SEO so important? because SEO helps in making your site Search engine friendly and thus giving you more organic, targeted and valuable traffic. But first lets get used to what search engines are and what they like,search engines are smart bots that crawls your sites content and gives it a rank among search result with certain keyword among all the other sites that has the same keyword, examples of search engines are google, yahoo, bing, aol,etc etc.

Now that you know what i am talking about, lets get serious, traffic is everything. Without traffic no business or site on the net can flourish, now that there are many sources of traffic, the top most and free of cost source is search engine traffic which also known as organic traffic. In fact there are many people on the net that claims themselves to be SEO experts and takes huge amount of money for doing something which anyone with simple SEO knowledge can do, that’s why i want to teach you SEO [Although i am not a expert but i know what am doing] and possibly save you some cash.

Keyword Research

First and foremost, before you build that site or write that article, ask yourself this question: What are you trying to rank for on the search engines? You should always have a ‘keyword’ that you wish to rank for, keywords are basically the ‘search terms’ that people type on the search engines to look for ‘something’. Ranking in top 3 for a keyword will give you lots of visitors. But this also means that not every term is actually a ‘keyword’, some terms don’t even get a single visit. For proper keyword research i suggest you to use the google keyword research tool, which shows you how much the keyword gets search volume every month, the cost per click for that keyword in case you plan to make money with adsense, etc. Keyword research is important, once you like a keyword that you want to rank for, you can proceed.

Getting your site indexed

Before you can actually expect some organic traffic, you must make sure your site is known to the search bots, how can they do this? Its by indexing your site to their database, if your site has any incoming or outgoing links from other sites, then your site might already be indexed, but if not, then you need to get them indexed, top search engines like google, yahoo and aol gets many pages and sites indexed daily so its not a big issue, but you might have to manually submit them to other search engines that you may wish to be a part of. Just search on each one of them in order to submit your site, ‘Search Engine Submission’ should do.

But do remember that not every page of your site is indexed, many a times most pages are left out and in order to assure that all your pages are found and indexed by the search engines you can create a XML site map and submit them, i recommend using google webmasters tools for doing that and do read their guides and instruction. If you are want to make money blogging then you need to get your content indexed & ranked, if you have a wordpress blog then you can use wordpress blogs to easily create XML site maps for your site.

On Page SEO and Off Page SEO

There are 2 important aspects of SEO, one is called the On Page SEO which involves ‘instant’ SEO tasks that you could do on your website or blog in order to make it more search engine friendly. These factors usually involve Meta tags, keywords in Title, post/page/domain urls, keywords in the body, description, etc. There are many small tiny factors that influence your websites on page SEO. Factors such as incoming links, outgoing links, blog title, keywords, tags, etc. Some keywords have a very low competition that on page SEO is more then enough to rank for them.

On the other hand there is off page SEO. This is the most tedious part of SEO & involves ‘Link Building’. Yes, google & all other search engines WILL rank you higher if you have links pointing back at your site. Building back links should also have your keyword in anchored format. For example, ‘Make Money Online‘ is an anchored keyword linking to my site sameerjoad.com & every time a site points this link with that ‘keyword’ as its anchor text, google will rank me higher for it. Building too many links really fast can also be bad & building links from link farms or via spamming can even get your site banned & Deindexed from Google & other search engines. Back links can be in many forms, such as social bookmarks, forum signatures, blog comments, directory links, links from articles, direct links (blogroll) etc. Off page is hard but it amounts to for almost 80% of your SEO efforts. At the end the hard work really pays off.

The White Hat SEO vs The Black Hat SEO

SEO is classified into 2 types, that is the white hat and the black hat, white hate tricks are those that are legally accepted by a search engine while black hat are those which are not accepted and usually done by methods of creating link farms, spamdexing, etc

Its always advisable to follow white hat SEO and avoid contacts with companies or groups that promote Black hat methods, always remember that no one can guarantee you a #1 space in any search engine for any keywords, so don’t have high hopes if someone promises you.

While white hat SEO is based on the guide lines given by the search engines (to most publishers), black hat SEO involves deception. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. Having too many keywords in an article or text page also accounts as black hat, commonly known as ‘keyword stuffing’.

Building the search engine friendly site

Site structure is not the only thing that needs to be taken care of but also the site content, as they say content is king and search engines obey that rule, your content should be original, keywords rich and well written. On top of all that your content must be helpful & informative to the person searching for that content. That’s what search engines are for after all, right?

I won’t go into details or else this post will be ten thousand words long, so i decided to do the SEO in parts, this is basically the guide on SEO for beginners, after you know your content always make sure that your site follows all the guidelines given out by the search engines like google, bing and yahoo.

Your sites themes should also be search engine friendly, avoid using too much flash work since flash sites don’t get indexed or recognized by the crawler bots as much as simple static html or dynamic blogs, Speaking of themes if you are into blogging then i recommend Elegant Themes as they have some pretty amazing themes at very affordable prices.. This may result in loss of organic traffic, you can always post links of your site on other sites thus giving you a back link and improving your search engine rank, but please avoid spamming and generating too much links in a short period of time.

Having a domain with your keyword in it is also very valuable for SEO. For example, a site makemoneyonline.TLD will rank higher in search engines for the keyword ‘make money online’ then a site like sameerjoad.com. (Yes i know i don’t practice what i preach, but for me branding is more important then rankings and those domains where already taken when i wanted to register!) Make sure you get your domain before its gone, domains are cheap to register & sometimes registering multiple domains and redirecting them to the same site also brings more traffic & eliminates competition. I recommend Godaddy or namecheap for registering domains, these are the services i use myself personally. Oh in case you are wondering what TLD means, then it stands for Top Level Domains like .com, .net, .org which rank quite easily. There are also country level cTLDs that rank well on the local search engines, these are lie .co.uk, .in, .us, etc.

Avoid joining sites that does link exchanges, since that basically results in your site being effected for participating in link farms. If you break rules and guidelines your site might get penalised by the search engine, i.e your site is no longer displayed on search results and that’s the end of your organic traffic from those search engines, so please avoid that.

For now i think this much SEO information is enough, i don’t want you to have a information overload and this basically explains you basics of SEO, i will keep posting from time to time and help you and myself learn newer things about SEO and the journey to dominate a keyword in rankings.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ