All About Content

… for themselves.

It seems there’s an inordinate number of search marketing firms using paid blogging services like PayPerPost and Blogsvertise to build links to their own sites. Apogee Search, for example, is using PPP to advertise its services for helping small businesses get Top Google Rankings (what seems like it would be a very competitive phrase, but the results for that search don’t seem very authoritative). I don’t know why exactly, but this strikes me very much like when personal injury attorneys advertise on late night TV — I guess it’s kosher, but it strikes me as dĆ©classĆ©.

Here’s an interesting quote from Apogee’s site: “Remember there is only 5% of the SEM industry that is worth trusting” (which I’d rewrite: Remember, only 5% of the SEM industry is worth trusting… except I think that’s awfully pessimistic.) And another one: “Starting with SEO instead of PPC is a red-flag of common industry malpractice.” Say what?

I really don’t think fostering mistrust in search engine optimization firms is a great strategy for promoting your own search marketing firm, but there seems to be an awful lot of that going around.

This has been a paid post (filed under Blatant Advertising) via PayPerPost.

Overture’s keyword suggestion tool, apparently, has been acting up, but now Wordtracker is giving webmasters another option. Check out Wordtracker’s tool to estimate the daily search volume for particular keywords and suggestions for alternate phrases to target.

I’ve blogged in the recent past about doing sponsored postings for Blogsvertise and ReviewMe, but I’d never done a paid posting for PayPerPost, the first company to gain any traction in this advertising niche.

(And too bad I hadn’t because I could have earned some pocket money just for talking about it — right now PayPerPost is paying out for participants to recap how much they’d earned so far — talk about self-referential.)

Just to keep on this week’s topic of text link ads, I’d chosen to do my inaugural PPP post about a site called encyclocentral.com and one of their encyclopedia entries* in particular: Text Link Ads.

I think I get what this site is trying to do: get great rankings for all sorts of different search terms — like Wikipedia has managed to do — but to monetize all that traffic with AdSense. Relatively speaking, there are a lot of Google ads on each page. But also quite a bit of copy. Okay, great, so let’s talk about the copy. What does this reference site have to say about text link ads…:

“Text Link is a way of organizing material that attempts to come across the inherent limitations of traditional text and in particular its linearity.”

Huh? Never mind the typos in the rest of the entry, but just… huh? No one is going to link to this as authoritative information.

Was this written by a random text generation algorithm? (tangent: my favorite random text generator is the Postmodern Essay Generator at elsewhere.org. Just reload for fresh pomo nonsense.)

I really don’t intend to make every paid posting an exercise in ridiculing the advertiser, but that entry was just outright strange. The idea behind the site was sound I think, and I don’t think it would have taken that much more effort to make the entries readable, so why start spending money on advertising when even just a little lipstick would have made the pig look presentable at first glance? And also, why isn’t there any real navigational element on the site? That’s the weirdest thing. I guess they are really intent on not letting you click on anything besides the ads.

Verdict: Good idea, terrible execution.

* They give Pharmacy as an example page, but I still need to include a link to that article in here to pass the PPP check.

… that’s been how I’ve described my job as SEO. Now add to that 50% management. (Nothing less than 200% will do!) I resolved late last month that for the next 2 quarters at least, I’m going to commit half my time to management. This includes recruiting and hiring, professional development, and raising the profile of my team and our projects. That sort of stuff.

One of the biggest priorities for 2007 for me, according to a recent discussion with my manager, is building up my team. That’s a big change — up until now I’ve been very hands-on with all of our projects, ensconced in the minutae of optimizing individual pages, just because I’ve had a hard time trusting anyone else to sweat the details.

That clearly needs to stop, since there’s just not enough time and way too many projects that are in need of some strategic leadership.

The good news is that I’ve filled one of my openings (the online marketing assistant position), which solves 2 issues: a) less energy needed to fill the remainining position(s) and b) more hands and brainpower to actually execute on the zillion ideas on our to-do list.

Building an SEO team from the ground up is proving to be an interesting challenge, and it will continue to be one as I continue to hire people without a background in search engine optimization, per se.

Any tips from someone who’s been in my shoes? Do you think it’s foolish of me to hire people with no SEO experience and rely on them to learn on the job?

Title pretty much says it all. According to Text Link Ads you need to be upgraded to the new version of Blogger for the script to work, but that’s actually not quite true — you need to use the new version of Blogger and use one of their standard templates. If you have an older custom template that you migrated to the new (then-beta) Blogger, you don’t have the option of adding widgets. And the way the script is set up to display the text link ads, you need to add an XML feed to your template via a widget.

I’ve tried creating a separate blog, setting up the ads, and then copying the code into the template for this one; but that doesn’t work because when a widget is created it’s specific to a particular blog id… and I haven’t even been able to find out what the blog id for All About Content is (did old Blogger sites get blog ids?).

It’s probably not that hard, but as a non-programmer, non-coder I’ve hacked this about as much as I can without having to actually rebuild this blog with a new template (and I don’t want to do that!). A reply to my emailed question to the company basically says, “it doesn’t work” (or rather: we don’t support that).

Okay, so I’m done for now. Never mind that idea.

Update: Just discovered some Blogger help pages that might help me hack this thing some more. It’s probable that the old template won’t let me use the widget builder (which is a bit like a WYSIWIG) but that I could somehow write the necessary code snippet by hand. That reminds me of some other adjustments I’ve been wanting to make. Will report back later.