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About a month ago, at the subway transfer station of Yeon-san-dong here in Busan, South Korea, I noticed an area in between the two paths going East and West that they were doing a bit of construction work. I wasn’t sure if it was a temporary fixture or a more permanent one. Eventually, after a week or so of working on the little area (they move fast in Korea!), I saw some Faceshop products and a sign which made me think “Good idea! Great place for almost any store! Lots of traffic to take advantage!” (Faceshop is a Korean version of “The Body Shop” basically).

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Every day as it was being built, I kept on thinking to myself — “smart, very smart…whoever decided on building this here will be getting accolades from Faceshop management. There’s tons of traffic daily here!” However, after it finally opened a couple weeks ago, I noticed that it was empty on a daily basis. Day after day, the store looked beautiful, but no customers. The location was amazing with lots of traffic, but the space was never being taken advantage of.

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Why no customers? Why no business? Why no Sales? The one thing that perhaps the Business Development Managers or whomever was in charge of the new stores here in Busan thought of is that people are “transferring from one station to the next.” Many times more than not, the commuters are in a hurry to get to the next subway car. There are many times in the past where I was running from one car to the next because I heard the warning that the train had just arrived. People are typically in a hurry at that junction. I don’t think the people behind the Faceshop store thought more beyond the traffic.

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So, the morale of the story is to figure out “why there is a bit of traffic” at any location. If you don’t know the “why”, you may not be able to take advantage of it. In essence, you can create traffic for a reason through viral marketing or via another controversial topic, but when it comes down to it, are those visitors going to be “repeat visitors?” Will the folks who come to a site via some ploy or traffic generating cause be people who “convert?” Don’t forget to understand the why and simply focus on the traffic. If you do, over the long term, that traffic will simply dwindle down to a trickle while your hosting fees, your annual escalating domain registration fees and all the other fees going in keeping up your website will outrun your “great idea.”

1. Reporting Remarkable News
2. Blogging & Blog Comments
3. Leveraging Social Networks
4. Graphic & Web Design
5. Online Tools
6. Top Ten Lists
7. Event Coverage
8. Maps & Mashups
9. Creating Controversy
10. Targeting Unmonetized Searches

Fishkin gives us one more bonus as Offering Something Incredible

As you can see, this post takes principles #6 and the bonus SEO strategy and drives a bit more traffic here. Very smart Rand..very, very smart…

**We have one very small problem with the 2 the point series? We may have to adjust the description of what “2 the point” posts can be. Originally, we intended them to be 2 sentences or less, but now they may just be good summaries of great posts or advice or bullet points of them as well.

3 presenters: Roger Montti, Jay Young and Stephan Spencer. Montti has about 27k in monthly visitors to his site, Young about 2k and Spencer gets about 40k+ if there’s any indication about how effective they are (Compete.com numbers). I’m going to order the technique(s) presenters by site traffic placing Spencer here at the top in contrast to the post where he was last.

Spencer’s suggestions for effective link building techniques to better your SEO:

• building a link building spider
• look for sites that are one-click away from Google as well as sites with very high PageRank
• Don’t forget to link build your existing links, as well. Mine your existing backlinks for opportunities to revise the anchor text
• Comment on blogs that allow follow of comment links, like Blogmaveric.com
• Submit to blog carnivals, host one or start a new one. (That sounds fun!) Contribute to a group blog or be a guest blogger
• Look for bloggers desperate for cash, and buy a link on their site
• Along with networking online with bloggers, register and attend conferences so you can network in person, too. Contribute to conference wikis of conferences you’ve attended. Give free talks at libraries and campuses or get involved with local meetups and get a profile page on that site. Invite the W3C to speak at your event and get a link from them to your event
• Contribute to Wikipedia and other wikis. Contributing top or creating a prominent entry will give you credibility. You can also create your own wiki
• Viral videos are another good way to build links
• try quizzes, personality tests, and again, widgets
• for the more technical or the coders out there:
  • Write a WordPress plugin
  • Write a Firefox extension
  • Release software as Open Source

…when reviewing Spencer’s tips, I find that a lot of this is relatively wise and may make sense why he has the highest traffic according to Compete.com of these 3. His wise techniques and tricks packed presentation is located here.

Montti’s effective link building technique(s) to better a web site’s SEO:

• focusing on .edu links because they’re typically in good neighborhoods and they’re free
• to find where to get the links, do searches on your competitors
  • do Google searches & see who’s buying adwords; check out their backlinks
  • use the following Yahoo.com commands to find some other .edu sites:
    • linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
    • linkdomain:example.com site:edu “links”
    • linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “favorite sites”
    • linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “your product or services”

Young’s basic tips or techniques on building links to enhance a site’s search engine optimization:

• grow some balls — ha!
• use directories despite the negative flack about them
  • Best of the web
  • Yahoo
  • DMOZ
  • Joe Ant
  • Blog Catalogue
• get links from non-profit specialists
• “SEOcialists” are another place to look, like Digg, Reditt and Stumble
• “…buying links is essential to the success of a competitive campaign, but be relevant & natural as possible. Vary your anchor text and use co-citation. “
• he suggests some “darker methods (techniques)” that supposedly are still effective.
  • comment spam
  • trackback spam
  • reciprocal links
  • three ways
  • link farms
• “good techniques out of the box”:
  • template sponsorship (find the most popular WordPress templates, contact the creator, and pay him to put your link on the bottom of the template)
  • contests (give away an iPhone!)
• bonus tips for us. Hire bartenders. They’re hard workers, technically inclined, and can make you a drink…
• some techniques Young tells you to avoid:
  • avoid buying links from forums
  • avoid any site with hidden links by scanning the source code
  • if the competition is too clean, mess it up by pointing dirty links to them (??? Maybe this is why Young has less traffic than the other two presenters ???)

Lastly, “a major thing to remember about getting links is that you don’t want to stand out in your market/vertical. You just want to be a little bit better.”

**note: The original and more detail list of the following suggestions are located here on Bruce Clay’s site summarized by Virginia Nussey, but I’ve summarized the somewhat long post into this bullet point post — even though I couldn’t minimize it significantly. The various tips that were given were already truncated a bit & so this won’t be exactly “2 the point,” but qualifies since it did reduce the points to bullet points.

2 Points: 1) using sex & money in your articles can definitely drive website traffic if done appropriately. 2) link bait SIGNIFICANTLY proves it effectively driving traffic — even Google’s Matt Cutt says link baiting can be good. However, Cutts says he doesn’t like “fake link bait” as indicated in the following:

“Where does Cutt’s and search engines stand on something like this?”
My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: “Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.” There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.”

**note: this post didn’t really dwindle down the advice into 2 sentences, but it did summarize it into two points in the middle if you want the meat of this post.

• Provide a useful one-time service.
• Provide an ongoing service.
• Become a resource

And more here in Matt Cutt’s advice in securing links.

A lot of it is intuitive, but it’s good intuitive advice that we should be reminded about.

Well, that’s what my impatient side of me said…however, if the more mature side of me appeared, it would of reminded me that it’s a “long process” after you publish an article or post & you’re not always guaranteed traffic due to it.  Also, I should have simply accepted I did a good job by writing a decent post in Youmoz and should be happy with it.

The learnings from the experience are that the internal links were more popular than people checking out my profile and coming back to me. At the same time, who knows? There may be a more intrigued person later who reads the post and contacts me later to partner up or even do some work for them?  So, hopefully, the wise, more patient & good side of me helps me not to worry too much about the short term effects of the post As the SEOsons Turn…

Some “Outside of the Box” techniques that were suggested were:
- Widgets
- Templates
- Template Sponsorship
- Contests: Free iPhone
- Content Trades

And much more…here.

However, they seem to be doing something right.  The “make money” by blogging or “learn how I made a killing” type of blogs are ubiquitous on the Internet.  There’s John Chow who has a very expensive sports car splattered all over his front page telling you how he’s made his millions.  There’s John Cow who’s made fun of John Chow, but still has over 50,000 monthly visitors to his site according to Compete.com

And there’s Stone Evans who is one of the top websites on the Internet with over 1.4 million visitors a month (again, according to compete.com) and doesn’t even show up as #1 in the search “stone evans” which you KNOW should be happening with his url www.stoneevans.com.  (He does redirect it — so maybe the Search Engines are just punishing him for that)

The point is that these guys drive traffic from the 10’s of thousands of visitors to over a million a month.  They’re doing something right & perhaps we should be paying attention to some of the things they’re doing.  Perhaps it’s due to the search phrases that pump traffic to their sites just being so high or maybe there’s too many gullible people on the Internet.  However, they’re doing something to drive the traffic & it may not be a bad idea to learn a little from them.  You don’t even have to buy their service to learn…

A few of his tidbits of wisdom are:

*Place JavaScript in external files and reference them as needed.

*Each page must have a unique <title> and <meta name=”description” content=”This is a sample.”>. Don’t put these in server side includes.

*The description should be the first one or two meaningful sentences of content unless you are told otherwise.

For more, read up on the article here.

“SEO Firm Rip you Off? SEORipOff.com - Don’t let them get away with it. Let us know. Post your story today.”

I clicked through the link and the site looks like a nice version of a wordpress blog which only identifies the month of October 2007 as far as past reports. Nothing was filed.

The thoughts immediately go through my head…does someone file and then this site follows up and asks if they can be MUCH better or MORE ethical than the supposed “fraud” that this site claims may have victimized someone. Well, the site ranks #1 for the keywords “seo rip off.” These guys are getting business from people trying to filter out the “bad consultants” out there promoting SEO or somewhere to report or support a bad experience.

The #2 (or #3 result as seen today) is an SEO consultant based in NY who is creating his business via publishing on Associated Content. See below**

The second result today was another article as well identifying the proper steps in avoiding a bad SEO or doing the due diligence required to secure the proper internet marketing services.

Regardless, you can see this appears to be a method of securing business for some new SEO’s themselves.

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**You can see this guy isn’t doing it for the benefit of everyone, but rather just himself in getting himself called after someone reads his article:

Here’s what’s written in the About page:

I have decide to write this article as a result of numerous emails. It seems more and more people are falling victim to bad SEO. The main complaint is that they are paying entirely too much for little or no results. Additionally, many fall prey to bad SEO practices. If you plan to hire an SEO pro in the future, I suggest you use this article as a set of guidelines. Before going with any SEO firm or individual, do the following: A) Find out how established and experienced an SEO firm is before you negotiate. Do they have a sizeable client list under their belt? Are they published? B) Scrutinize their portfolio. What kind of results have they achieved? Contact a few of their clients. Were they satisfied with the work performed? C) Consider and confirm their methods. How will they optimize your site to reach your keywords? Do they use organic methods? Some individuals or companies use doorway pages, hide text in the background, utilize re-directs and other blacklisted methods. Stay away from these. D) Get a least three proposals from different SEO firms. Look at each one carefully. Are there similarities? Proposals will help you see which companies are honest and which are trying to sell you something you don’t need. What is the cost? The cheapest isn’t always the best, however, the highest price may not be attached to a comprehensive and viable course of action. Try to find find an individual or organization that will give you what you want within your SEO budget. E) Contract, Contract, Contract. Get everything in writing. Look over the document carefully. Be sure it covers everything you have discussed, including methods of achieving your desired results. Have the copies signed by both parties. If the job is a large one you may want to consult a lawyer. F) Clearly state the terms of payment. While most SEO firms will not do any work for free or agree to a results based pay scale, many competant SEO professionals will not shy away from a base plus performance incentive package. I am not a firm believer in prepaid contracts.. Most SEO professionals will abide by the 50% up front, 50% upon completion standard. Make sure all financial terms are as clearly defined in your contract as the actual scope of work. This will protect all parties involved in the event that expectations are not met. All in all, try to do your best to educate yourself on SEO. Have a basic understanding of SEO terminology and SEO methodology. Anyone offering SEO services should not have a problem explaining how they intend to get you results. If they fail gain your confidence or raise a red flag for any reason whatsoever, keep searching. You will eventually find someone who will help you reach your goals for a fair price. Happy hunting. To read more articles on SEO read Joe’s blog http://mr-seo.blogspot.com. His SEO services can be found at http://www.mr-seo.com.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/3955/the_seo_ripoff.html