See that small note right at the bottom of ESPN ads? What does it say? Talk about playing with fire

Text link ads have been around forever it seems. I am not really talking about the company as it you probably can’t even find them on Google anymore. But selling links to others on the Internet is nothing new. Now, Google started to go crazy on us a while back and penalize sites that were selling (and sometimes buying) ads. Text-Link-Ads got the worst of the situation as they completely disappeared from the face of the SERPs, and it seems anyone who so much dares to link to these guys disappears too (Which is why I am not linking to them).

Text-Link-Ads has been the most innovative text link marketplace, and they have continued innovative with odds stacked against them. They have now created inLinks (links inside posts), and adding to the fact that they allow you to buy post level links, you can get a serious bang for your buck.

I had hope Google would get tougher with this whole link policy. I always thought that the organic search allowed us who didn’t have that big of a budget to achieve great things in the organic search channel. But text links take away the somewhat level playing field and put the advantage back on the side of the rich. A financial company can buy 1000s of links due to their big budget and don’t even realize they have spent that kind of money. A small business simply can’t afford to pay thousands per month to maintain these links.

I love what Text Link Ads and LinkWorth are doing. Am I glad they have been penalized? Somewhat. But Google has been going about it the wrong way really. Google needs to focus on finding a way to hone its system to avoid getting gamed by link masters. At the end of the day, buying links is not the only way you can amass links and get brownie points on search engines. Google needs to stop looking the other way and address the issues head on.

Google may have made it hard for folks to buy links and taken away TLAs exposure, but I believe Text Link Ads deserves to show up on the SERPs. I have talked about the right to be found on this blog, and I believe any site has the right to be found, and it’s shameful that you can’t find TLA anywhere for their own brand name. I am not an advocate of Google’s bullying practices at all. Google has to find a way to get its act right. Sites such as TLA are not to blame for the holes in Google’s algorithm.

Should folks be able to buy text links? Absolutely. Should they get any benefit from bought text links? Not really. That’s partly due to the fact that the link-based ranking system is flawed, and the geniuses at Google know that as well. I have heard the argument that giving a lot of weight to links is the only way Google can rank sites appropriately. Well, I am shocked this sophisticated system provides so much low quality results. Parked sites and squeeze pages getting ranked high in the organic results is just distasteful and a testament to the incompetence that has been shown by Google in fixing their algorithm (I would put the level of incompetence as high as that shown by our Auto companies).

Google cannot stop folks from buying ads, and it seems they don’t intend to stop the practice with a real solution. Unfortunately, they have monopolized the search industry, and the consumers are worse of for Google’s hypocrisy. Can Google stop folks from buying text links one way or another? I don’t believe so. Will Google fix their algorithm to address this issue? Not likely.

Many folks spends hours a day to optimize their campaigns for Google and Yahoo by improving their title tags, and writing better content, but unless you know about the top negative organic search factors, you are not going to be able to avoid the pitfalls in the way.

Here are the top 5 negative search engine ranking factors:

1. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags: many folks use content manage systems that do not create optimized title and meta tags for each page. You should always try to keep you tags unique per page. Duplicate tags are the best way to end up in the supplementary index (the one people usually don’t see).
2. Duplicate Content: using duplicate content on your web page tells search engines that you have really no new value to add for your audience. So you shouldn’t be surprised if search-engines try to penalize you for using other people’s content on your site.
3. Linking to Banner Farms: linking to a site is similar to giving it a vote of confidence. If you link to a spam or link farm, you are going to lose your credibility with search engines. Always try to avoid linking to any site you don’t know or trust.
4. Selling Links: Google, specifically, hates folks who try to get unfair competitive advantage over their rivals and manipulate search results. Buying and selling links used to work for a while, but selling can get you penalized these days. Buyers are less likely to be penalized, but there have been cases that serial buyers have had their paid links discounted by engines.
5. Server errors: you should always try to adopt a hosting plan that is reliable and comes with 99.9% up-time. You simply can’t afford to have your site being down when Google agents come to go through your pages. That simply gets you penalized, and it may take a long time to get your ranking back.
Google and other engines are all about providing quality search results to searchers. You simply make them look bad by making the above mistakes. Focus on quality and value for your audience, and your organic results will come.

A lot of people come to believe that you can compete with any site on the Internet for that top stop on Google no matter when you have started your website as long as you pay a good SEO professional to get the job done. The truth of the matter is even the best SEOs may not be able to get your site to the top of search engines if you have just started today and you are in a superhyper competitive market.

These days more than anything SEO is all about picking your battles. You may choose to choose a very broad term and use that as your main target keyword for your SEO campaign, but I promise you there is more disappointment in the horizon with that strategy than going after the long tail of search. Now if you are a huge company who have had a site for 10 or 12 years and have over a million customers, then you should probably be competing for those high positions.

The strategy is simply different when you are working with a very small business. For small businesses, it’s often better to go after niche searches and avoid getting into a war with the top guys unless you are an ambitious startup and are the hottest thing in the market. So here is my approach to helping small business get ranked high on search engines:

• Pick the right keywords: Pick keywords that are not too broad or too general. The phrase “small business credit card” or “cash back rewards credit card” gives you a better chance of getting ranked on Google than the word “credit card.” Even the two mentioned phrases are extremely competitive, but that’s due to the landscape of the financial industry where there are millions of affilites with valuable and sometimes useless sites who are trying to get ranked for every combination of keywords possible.
• Get the basics right: I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to SEO professionals who want to take shortcuts and do Web 2.0 marketing. Social media should absolutely be in your plans. You should have a content strategy for Digg, YouTube, Reddit, and Delicious. But you can’t not optimize your title tag and expect things to work out because you are doing Web 2.0 marketing. Web 2.0 is cute and can be very powerful but sometimes it’s just too cute.
• Don’t forget linking: Having the right linking strategy can be the difference between being on the first page and first on the second page. The difference may not look huge to you, but believe me it is. Once you are on the first page, you are going to be seen by a lot of people even if you are on position #9 or #10. But the 2nd page requires an extra click and people are very frugal when it comes to spending clicks. Get the right anchor texts from the right relevant sites, and you are on your way.
• Don’t forget automation: I love the old school method of doing everything by hands. Finding out how many backlinks you have by hands, and finding the number of indexed pages manually. It’s great. It reminds you how hard things used to be done before we got SEO tools such as Web Position, WordTracker, and … I am sure a few of you think of people who lived years ago and didn’t have cars. But I doubt you actually go to work with a horse to see how things used to be (actually you might want to do it with the gas prices skyrocketing). Use the tools. Time is indeed money.
• Don’t forget analytics: a few years ago, you could have argued that analytics is expensive, useless, or both to your business. Not anymore. If you want to have any chance of converting better and competing with the big boys, you can’t afford to do marketing the blind way. You can’t guess things or go with things that feel good. You need to track and test, and I am not just talking about pay per click marketing. You should test your SEO pages all the time. Change the way the copy is written. Move things around. Pick the keywords that actually do convert. What’s the benefit of ranking for the term “credit cards” if its conversion rate is 0.00001%. Basically out of each 100,000 people, you get one person who applies for your card. That’s terrible. Now, it could be that your site is so scary it drives people away. But you wouldn’t know it unless you have a good SEO analytics package in place. Google Analytics is for free. Go get it. No excuses!

In a shocking turn of events, Microsoft bought Google today with a tempting $500 per share offer which left the search world staggered to say the least. Microsoft was involved in a messy back and forth fight with Yahoo! over the acquisition of the company, but they finally got it right by buying what matters. Microsoft gave Google executives a portable Zune 2.0 device to help them listen to Steve Ballmer’s Geeks gone wild podcast, everyday.

This event will mark the day Microsoft finally got it right and grabbed the sole majority of the search market. Congress will not block this deal as No. 3 taking over No. 1 certainly does not raise any anti-trust issues.

In other news, today’s April 1st.

I did this experiment the other day to figure out how long it would take for a site to get indexed on Google. I basically went to 1&1.com and registered a brand new domain. Then I put a blog on it, and wrote an article about Amazon Kindle. Then I submitted it to Digg. Once it got a few votes, I was sure that I would be indexed rather quickly, but how quickly you might ask: 2 days. Actually the whole process took two days, from domain registration to getting indexed on Google. I wonder if anyone has managed this in a shorter period of time. What does the guinness book of records say?

I remember when I started my journey into the world of search engine optimization. I was a few years younger (not giving up my age that easilyJ) and probably naïve a little bit. I had read a few SEO books, and I felt quite confident about my ability to concoct and implement SEO strategies for my clients. My background was in computer science, and I used to be hardcore programmer before moving to the business side of things. So I felt confident coding and recoding pages in order to optimize them for search engines. Let’s say things were “simple” then.

One I got my first opportunity in the corporate world, I was excited and willing to make something happen as soon as possible. But that’s when things started to look not so “simple” after all. There were many issues that I had to face in order to implement the simplest SEO strategy. It wasn’t the matter of writing the code and putting it on our corporate page any more. That’s what you learn from the books. But the real world experience is much different. Not only you need to know your SEO stuff, you need to find a way to get others units within your organization involved in your SEO “movement.” You are more than likely to face some resistance at first. Your IT team might not necessarily be willing to put time into something that doesn’t show some tangible results immediately. In addition, the IT team is often bombarded with a bunch of projects, and they may not like you to have more work for them to do. Besides, with all the work on their plate, your IT professionals may not be willing to give your SEO plan a high priority. That’s when you get into a FIFO or LILO situation (first in first out).   But having said all that, you can get your IT on board pretty quickly once you educate them on why SEO matters. IT professionals are smart people and would like to have some input in what you do, but they will not resist your plan once they know why you are doing what you are doing. Of course having a “process” would be helpful.

The most challenging part of corporate SEO is dealing with executives who know next to nothing about search engines and talk only in numbers and future strategies. If your company is on the acquisitions side of things, then the only thing that would matter is how you can get more customers and generate more sales. The fact that your SEO plan takes a few weeks or months to show full results would not make executives happy. At the same time, executives would be interested to know how much budget they need to allocate for your SEO plan, and who needs to do what. In essence, you should be able to come out and say that your SEO plan takes this many hours, this many people will be involved, and this will be our ROI if things go according to plan. Of course, with SEO, it’s hard to quantify your ROI upfront, but that’s part of the game when you are a corporate SEO. You probably will face the same questions as an SEO consultant, but being a consultant is much different than being a full time employee and having executives micromanaging what you do and breathing down your neck. So it turns out, search engine optimization is not all that rosy in the real world. But who said you should believe what you read in books.