Move it too fast in one direction, and it "bounces"...

Within the realm of political science there is a concept called “The Overton Widow” – which has been popularized by radio and television talk show host “Glenn Beck” who has recently released a fiction book based on the concept.

The idea is this: That there is a window of “acceptable” political opinions that can be voiced with varying degrees of acceptance. anything outside the window is viewed as “not acceptable” or “radical”. The ambitions of politicians over the long haul is to shape public opinion by “moving” or “expanding/contracting” this window of acceptable ideas.

After thinking about this a bit, it occurs to me that this concept applies to all areas of collaborative discourse where there are more than one person (and perhaps in a schizo way, it can even apply to a single individual). Smaller groups with a more cohesive overall plans (Say a team of engineers) will have a large window that will encompass most of the possible spectrum of ideas within the group, without much need for moving or shaping the window. Larger groups, or groups that employ more “Brain Storming” and creative types would have a larger spectrum and smaller, more variable windows of opinion.

But if you look at our current political climate, you will see something else – what I like to call “The Overton Bounce”. This is the case where someone attempted to move the window (The Democratic party in the last presidential election) towards a more radical, socialistic idea of government. When that did not work out so well, the window bounced like the ball in the old-fashioned pong games and started moving quickly towards the political “right” and toward “more freedom” and less desire to trust politicians of any party.

(And I might add, that is a good thing)

So in your collaborative campaigns for Marketing your products, do you take stock of the Overton window of public opinion about what your product offers? Do you even know what people think about your service in general, that, if you shifted that window just a little, could reap you great benifits?

Something to think about.

David T. McKee

(Looking for Part I? Here you go: The Top 3 SEO Tips and Tricks)

Links! Links! Links! I say!

The Chains that Bind...

That is what you hear, and it is correct for the most part – at least it is partially true.  But before you go off to every social site on the planet to build back-link love, you might want to concentrate on the most important part…

Content.

If your content sucks (and there are so many ways that it can suck) your links are worthless.  Yes, I know someone is shouting that there are tons of horrible sites that are currently getting good SERPS or even have a high PR – but don’t count on that happening for too much longer now that Google has started using their new Caffeine algorithms. The other search engines are sure to follow suit.  Content is King, and it will remain king.

That being said, you still do need to know how to build good back links.  So how do you do this?

Well, lets look closer at what a link actually is – it represents on its most basic level a relationship.  It is a relationship between one site and another – and it should represent a relationship that brings value, hopefully to both sites.

And that in a nutshell, what Google and all the other search engines are trying to tell you with the search results you gather.  Their whole reason for creating ever more complex algorithms is to bring the searcher just such results. For much of the time it has been marketers intention to game that system (not all marketers, but many).

So, here is my 2 cents on how to gain good SEO, and before I go on, let me challenge you.  Go to Google and type in “The Top 3 Copywriting” – and you will see that I hold both the number 1 and number 2 position for that key-phrase (as of the writing of this post Jan 28th).  I do know a bit about what I am talking about.  (By the way I currently have the number 3 position for “The Top 3 SEO” -not too bad eh?).

Other than good content, highly targeted keywords and key-phrases are a necessity.  Make sure they are in your content.  If your domain name has your keywords all the better (actually that is a real good help when starting out, but gets less important as you add content and good links).

Back-links from high PR sites: This goes without saying, but if you can get back-links from highly rated sites such as high traffic forums, blogs, and social networks, that is going to bring a nice bit of PR juice to your site.  You can also use reciprocal sites, however the juice goes both ways there and you build up more slowly (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

Traffic.  Google monitors the traffic to your site, and the more you have the higher your rating – yes, I know, that is a bit of a catch-22, I need ratings to get traffic, and I need traffic to get ratings! What to do!

Go back to the basics, that’s what.  Submit your site to every search engine including some of the specialty search sites (check out Search Engine Watch for lists of these at: searchenginewatch.com).

But you simply cannot beat real relationship links.  Just like business in the real world where you network with real people, on the net is no different. Behind every one of those great sites are great people – get to know them, perhaps by posting good commentary on their blogs, and eventually becoming a guest contributor.  Guess what, that kind of link is very powerful!

You can, of course, go the latest fad – massive spider-webs of low value links from dozens of social web-sites, “Link-Wheels”, etc.  That stuff can bring some immediate impact, but search engines are getting wise to these synthetic methods and are even penalizing and de-indexing sites in some cases because of it.

The truth is, if your site has real value – you will have real valuable visitors.  In the end, traffic is not as important as paying customers, and a lower volume but steady stream of paying customers is way more valuable than a massive stream of traffic that buys nothing.  And that is true any day.

-David T. McKee

One of the new buzzwords in SEO and Internet Marketing these days is the term “Link Wheels”.  Link Wheels are pages that loosely speaking claim to have at least two important kinds of links.  Looking at the first picture (which I grabbed from a random Google image search) you can see that it shows “wheel links” in red, and “money links” in green.  You can see similar things in the other two link wheels examples.

The question that needs to be asked is this: Does this topology of linkages really do anything to boost traffic, or is it wishful thinking based on flawed understanding of how Google and other search engine spiders actually prowl the net and create that “elixir of traffic” known as Page Rank.

One of the explanations of why the wheel works is that the idea is that the spiders rotate around the wheels causing ranking to “flow” from site to site and ultimately to the central site.

Standard Link Wheel

Another Link Wheel

Big Link Wheel

That idea, however is not true.  Spiders are programs that go to a site, evaluate the content, gather all the links, compare those links to a database of links it already knows about, and then makes decisions about which links to traverse next, and what final evaluation to gie the sites and the links between them.

So, what we have here is an idea that in fact is quite meaningless. I’ll tell you why, but it requires a rudimentary understanding of directed graphs, which is what the internet is.

A directed graph is any set of nodes (web pages) and “edges” (links) where the edge has a directionality, which internet links have. There is a rather complex and in-depth mathematical discussion about the internet directed graph and how page rank is computed on it at Wikipedia (here).  In the final analysis there are some important things to understand about which links actually contribute traffic, SEO ranking, and finally page-rank to a site.

The bottom line is that link wheels are really no different than a host of other link topologies and any meaningful ranking you get from any topology is from the direct links to your main site.  Page rank is computed in more simplistic terms in a manner shown int the diagram labeled “link juice”.

Link Juice

Secondary links do not contribute directly to your page-rank, but do so only in a round-about way as they affect that site to which you are linked, and as a pathway for both the spider and the live-human visitor.  The problem with this logic is that the “spokes” are already heavily linked by tens of thousands of other pages, so you little extra link here really adds nothing in the way of getting a spider to rank you higher, and is also meaningless for the human – as they have presumable already read your article so a link to the same article on another site is not really going to be useful to them.

Add to that the sophistication of today’s spiders and their content comparisons, even those show “spin” their articles are going to have very little gain from these “spoke to spoke”linkages.

This spoke-to-spoke linkages in a link-wheel is supposed to be the “discovery” that makes the wheel so powerful.  It is not really is not that useful at all, and is a waste of your time if you are setting them up by hand.

Rank Sources

What really matters are the direct links and some other aspects that rank your site as illustrated with this picture labeled “Rank Sources”.

You might still make the argument that the spoke to spoke links help by distributing the content around and thereby cause the search spider to take that route and see the content – however the spider rates the link importance more due to the importance of the site it comes from.  What that means is that your juice comes from the spokes themselves, not the interconnectedness between those spokes.

The real juice comes from the importance of the site, the freshness and relevance of the content, the keywords in the content and the how often these keywords are searched for, and the number of times the web-site is visited and then clicked on directly from Google search page url.

The algorithm for page rank that is currently published over at Wikipedia has been highly modified in actual practice by Google with many proprietary filters and other formulas and has a host of additional controls that allows Google to penalize or ban certain practices from contributing to page rank – we can also assume therefore that there are formulas that contribute more than “normal” for practices they want to encourage.

With this in mind, I submit that Google is well aware of those who try to game the system by creating these wheels – but even if they are not, if last time their spider crawled the, and  your site was not there, and the next time it crawls the net and your new site is there with thousands of links to it, that is going to be a tip-off on what you are doing.

So a better solution to setting up you marketing pages is to concentrate on the spokes themselves – get linkages from powerful sites to you money site using great content, lots of comments on great blogs and forums, lots of feed aggregators, and add these over time.

That last point is important as to increase of page-rank and and avoidance of Google bans – build the links over time.  This way you do not suddenly appear full-fledged with thousands of links because that is a dead giveaway to Google and others that you are a marketer pushing a product.  This is a perception problem, it does not matter how good your product is, Google is notorious for penalizing this.  So build over time, and build multiple sites for multiple products – or different versions and bonus packages of the same product and eventually cross link them.  This looks more organic and will raise your SEO rankings in a more solid and long lasting manner.

David T. McKee

(Article originally titled “Look at Me! Look at Me! Getting Noticed in the Internet Marketing World Using the Protesters Model”)

Anyone who has read my blogs or other articles knows that I am a pro-Liberty minded, conservative individualist and I make no bones about it. I have been criticized for how I comport myself when I get too passionate about my views – I detest the politics and philosophical ideas of progressive liberals and socialists – mainly because they are wrong, they don’t work, and they hurt people.

But politics aside, I have to give progressive liberals, especially those we might call “the rabid protester” some credit.

They know how to get noticed.

In the internet marketing world, getting noticed (that is, positioning) is next to getting paid. The second does not happen without the first. So it behooves us to examine any tactic that actually works.

Most protest groups, no matter who they represent, suffer from many of the same problems that most nascent internet marketers suffer from: lack of both money and brand recognition. So what do rabid protesters do that internet marketers might copy that would greatly leverage their small resources in such a way as to increase brand recognition?

I believe there are some basic steps to this approach, the first three of which are:

1. Know your target audience.
2. Get your information out to your target audience.
3. Motivate your target audience to take specific action.

These three are basic and most marketers should know them – and they are no different for the rabid protester. Those protesters may look disorganized, bizarre, unprofessional, and angry, but effective protests are run with specific goals in mind, and the three principles above are never deviated from.

The first interesting thing to notice is that the target audience of the protester is NOT the people or institutions that are being protested against! That bears repeating: The specific audience of the protester is not those whom they are protesting against.

The protesters audience is like minded people. Their primary (and usually unstated) goal is to motivate those who believe as they do to join with them and then work toward their stated goals.

So I have developed a list of seven points in the order of their priority on how to get noticed in the Internet world. Notice how protesters use most if not all of these to achieve their stated goal, which is the first item on the list.

1. Have a Specific, Stated Goal.
2. Position Yourself Where Your Target Audience is.
3. Be Interesting, Be Different, Be Crazy – Your Unique Brand.
4. Have A Unique Selling Position.
5. Don’t Be Afraid Of Offending People.
6. Give Back, Give Away, And Give Value.
7. Be the Expert, Even If You Are Not.

So we begin by having a specific stated goal. You need to know what you’re selling and what you wish to accomplish. Then you need to put yourself where your target audience is – they don’t buy what they can’t see. This is perhaps one of the more difficult tasks to perform in today’s Internet, you don’t want to be labeled a spammer, but there are just so many blogs, websites, links and social networks they are outstripping the people who use them. How do you get noticed even if you are where the customers are?

The protester gets loud, garish, holds big signs, gathers tones of people is a small place, and sits where everyone has to pass by them, in other words they position themselves.

The next principle states that you must be interesting, different, and even crazy! You must present a unique brand so that you don’t look like all the rest. This segues right into your Unique Selling Position – an essential you must have. You have to be able to give the so-called “elevator pitch” of your product, the protester know how to do this – they scream their USP’s in your ear!

The fact is, if you are going to be different, unique, and stick out, you are going to bother somebody out there – well, as they say, even bad publicity is better then none! People will be offended by your marketing techniques – they may even call you a spammer, or worse… even though all you are doing is making sure everyone sees what you have to offer! Too bad, they don’t have to buy it, but you must sell it if you are going to survive.

You have to give good value, and be willing to give bonuses and free stuff – not junk either but really good stuff. That is how you attract anything from flies to customers – by having really good stuff to give away. When customers see the value of your free stuff, they will really value what they buy from you – provided your products and services are excellent as well. Most well run protests give away at least some T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Finally, in light of the last point, you need to make it your business to be the expert – continually improving. You need to position yourself as the expert even if you are not… There will always be someone who knows a little bit more than you, but you can always learn more and then be better than you were. Be the expert, and make sure your customers know you are.

I will be writing more on this topic as I address each of the seven points specifically in future articles, so start thinking of ways you can “bootstrap” yourself into that vast landscape of the Internet, or wherever you do business.

- David T. McKee

P.S. If you want to start being the expert in Internet business right now, may I suggest buying a compilation of Internet Business, Marketing, and Copywriting books, articles and reports written by some of the most well known internet businessmen such as Yanik Silver, Michel Fortin, Dan Lok, Joe Vitale, and many others. This is a collection of over 250 books, reports and articles: Marketing Magic Collection 1 For only Seven Bucks ($7.00).

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee