Today we’re having a guest post from an old friend and colleague, Steve Holmes. We had lots of good times at digital agency 9xb, but since then Steve has taken the admirable step of starting his own affordable SEO business. I’ll let him take over…

Dotcom Digital Marketing

With Britain in the midst of one of the worst recessions on record it might seem like a bit of a daft time to embark on a new business venture. In most cases this would be true but with the Digital Industry continuing to thrive, despite the tough economic conditions, it may just prove to be a stroke of genius.

Digital marketing can be done on any budget providing you can find a company willing to work within your financial constraints. Unfortunately for many small businesses there are very few SEO and Pay Per Click providers willing to work with their meagre budgets, which leaves them either continuing with relatively ineffective offline marketing activity or risking the welfare of their business by forking out more than they can afford.

Having worked in two separate digital agencies who cut their teeth on smaller clients, before turning their backs on them in order to focus on landing big fish, I decided to cast my own net. In February this year I started Dotcom Digital Marketing with the sole purpose of providing affordable SEO and Pay Per Click services to small to medium sized companies. The preceding 6 months have been interesting to say the least but I would have to say that overall it has been pretty successful. There are a lot of small companies out there who want to dip a toe in the water before committing fully to a long term SEO contract, and Dotcom Digital Marketing offers them an opportunity to do that. I started off taking any work I could no matter how small the fee, but by servicing these clients well over time and showing them results for their spend, the majority of them have now committed more budget. In addition to this, I am starting to get referrals from my existing client base, which, in my opinion, are the best kind of leads you can get.

I suppose what I’m trying to say, in a roundabout sort of way, is that you should value your smaller clients as much as your larger ones. Often the tendancy to over-service your big blue chip clients leaves the smaller guys feeling undervalued. However, with a little bit of nurturing you can grow turn that small fish into a whopper, and it’s a lot cheaper to grow existing clients than it is to capture new ones.

You can find Steve doing SEO and all sorts of other web stuff at Dotcom Digital Marketing.

That’s right folks – Think Vis Tickets are available to buy as of this morning. For the princely sum of £99 you could experience an action-packed day of online marketing excitement – with just 225 tickets on sale you’ll feel like a VIP!

It may be a bit more expensive than last time, but compared to, say the SEOmoz seminar at $899 per person I’d say it’s pretty good value. Plus you don’t have to go to That London

After the immensely enjoyable Think Visibility conference in March, I was flattered, surprised and somewhat horrified when Dom asked me to speak at Think Vis II. After all, my experience of public speaking amounts to a big fat zero and I’m just some girl from Leeds – not an SEO guru, a company owner or an affiliate superhero.

I do like cats though and I know a little bit about my job, which I imagine is why I’m on the speaker list.

I think Dom’s going to announce the schedule and the subjects soon so I won’t give away what I’ll be talking about. To be honest, speaking is massively outside my comfort zone so it’s not the content I’m worried about! I know people give talks all the time but it must take a huge amount of courage to get up on stage so if I get through it okay I’ll be over the moon

Think Vis II isn’t just about giving people like me the chance to embarrass themselves(!), there are some big name speakers like Judith Lewis and Joost de Valk, and completely awesome, successful local folk like Elaine Forth and Karyn Fleeting. Its sort of awe-inspiring to be in that sort of company so…erm…wish me luck!

Recently the Reuters blog reported on a Twitter campaign started by some ‘My Name Is Earl’ fans to try and save the axed show. I think this made the news firstly because it’s about Twitter (and when is that ever out of the news at the moment?) and secondly because the campaign has attracted over a million followers.

The ridiculous bit comes at the end of the article:

And whether it succeeds or not in bringing the show back to a TV screen somewhere, the petition has notched up a new entry into the English language – the first known use of the word “Twitition.”

Erm….what about, you know, Twitition?

The silly thing is, they could have just googled it:

Happy days here at Branded3 – we’ve been made Internet World’s official ’social media partner’. Internet World is a huge 3-day event held down in London and it’s attended by some massive agencies, so for us to be chosen to help the organisers tell everyone about the power of blogging, twitter etc is pretty special.

This is the press release, taken from the Internet World site:

Branded3, the Leeds based digital agency, has just been appointed by Internet World as the official Social Media Partner for 2009.

Branded 3, based in Aberford North Leeds, is one of the most successful ethical SEO & social media companies in the UK, boasting high profile clients such as Interflora, Dial-a-phone and Abel & Cole.

One inlink + trackback = new SEO trophy term thanks to Nick Naylor’s post.

World-leader in biscuits, Gentleman-Adventurer and Piggynap’s desk-sharer, Paul Carpenter has agreed to be interviewed in the Interests of Science and All Things Pointless. Ten difficult, probing questions on SEO were asked and his answers will surely set the tone for SEO in 2009.

Hi Paul. Thanks for agreeing to this interview. You’ve had a really varied career path…how did you get into SEO?

I was a caretaker originally, which was basically a batshit idea to mark time while the band I was in tried to make it big (hint: we failed). My real interest was in writing though, which landed me a job as a copywriter/technical author with software house in Leeds which doomed itself by basically doing the opposite of everything Joel Spolsky would recommend. The best thing about that job was working for a month in Seattle on the basis that I could “code HTML.” Those were the days! It all went bust in 2002, and I slipped into a jack-of-all-trades design and PHP programming role for a while with a couple of small companies. The programming aspect started to get a bit complicated for me, so I toyed with either doing pure design (and I was sensationally good at CSS back in the day) or trying to get into copywriting. The MD at 9xb asked me to R&D an online marketing offer and I began to get into the SEO/marketing side of things, which has kept me busy for the best part of the last 3 years. I’d still rather be a zookeeper though.

What do you like the most about the job, and what do you dislike?

I like the variety of learning about markets. There’s so many queer little niches out there with tonnes of knowledge to learn and digest, and I’m a sucker for anything obscure. The thing I dislike the most is clients who don’t appreciate the value you bring to their business. SEO is probably like most branches of marketing these days – there’s people who get it, and people who view it with a kind of relentless suspicion but, like a moth to the flame, want it to deliver them the earth. Hint: get off the damn phone and let me do my job!

Write me a poem!

I say I am an SEO
You look at me and then say ‘oh’.
Then brush past me to get to the cheese
Because nobody knows what SEO means.

You’re a bit of a technical wizard. How important do you think technical skills are to an SEO?

Want to see my wand? (Ed: No) SEO is becoming more and more of a marketing discipline, so you’d have to say that the technical aspect is lessening in importance. More companies take the time to build websites properly these days so there’s less margin in the whole ‘perform technical optimisation’ part of the job (which doesn’t stop some companies charging umpteen grand for it). Having said that, you need to know your way around a website so you don’t get scammed by developers, so I think it will always play a role. There’s a kind of technical understanding you need to decipher the SERPs, but a lot of it is just reading the entrails in my opinion.

What is your favourite biscuit?

Traditional digestive – it’s a good multitasker, being suitable for dunking plain or for carrying materials as diverse as jam and cheese. Lovely. The exotic charms of the fig roll aren’t far behind though.

You grew up in the hotbed of cultural activity that is Leeds. Why do you think Leeds and surrounding area has so many internet companies/SEOs?

Maybe all the financial and legal services that have flocked to the area over the last 15 years has something to do with it – they’re the kind of companies that have budget and understanding of marketing. There’s also this totally other number of students in the city, and you know what kids are like for tech. And of course if there’s one thing that motivates Yorkshiremen it’s money.

So: money + youth + prospect of more money = SEO/Web startups

What’s your favourite SEO tool?

I’ve got a soft spot for Yahoo! Site Explorer (bless their cotton socks). It mightn’t be perfect, but you can get a great feel of almost any market by running the top performers through it and seeing how they’re getting their rankings. Also great for divining those ridiculous auto-generated site networks, which reminds you of how far Google have still got to go to ‘rid the world of spam’ or whatever they’re driving for these days.

Are Google our Orwellian overlords?

I’ll pass you over to my Google account manager for an answer to that.

Sum up SEO in one sentence

Making products and services interesting enough to be linkworthy, whilst hiding a small cough behind your hand.

Eat Me Crunchy was your greatest success and some say the peak of your career. Where do you go from here?

Probably home to bed to reflect on that very fact.

I’d just like to say thanks to Carps for taking the time out of his busy day to answer my questions. Next week on Piggynap: Breaking News From Dave The Cleaner.

I’ve been thinking of doing a post about what I call “grey-area paid links” for some time, so when John of Eggrage wrote a post yesterday slamming Chris Garrett for blogging about a Supercar driving day my interest was piqued. Now, first of all let me say that there’s been a lot of…um… “rage” flying about because of this (but no eggs for some reason) and I get the feeling that by writing about this I might be opening myself up for some of it. But whatever, it’s a hot topic so here goes.

I think the point of John’s post was to say that he doesn’t agree with bloggers using their blogs to promote things outside of their ‘genre’. In his book it’s tantamount to spam. So Chris Garrett ‘ruined’ his internet marketing blog, because he wrote a post about a Supercar day and linked to the supplier, Supercars having nothing whatsoever to do with internet marketing. John goes on to say that it’s hypocrisy because Chris and the other bloggers who wrote about the Supercar day preach good SEO practice and then create ’spam’ on their own blogs.

So far so good. John’s angry that these bloggers got something for free and then wrote about it and of course there’s an argument to say that he’s right. After all, this is a prime example of my grey-area paid links. If someone sends you a free product and you write a review of it and link to the supplier, is that a paid link? Well sort-of, yes! You’ve been given an incentive after all!

On the other hand, bloggers write about stuff all the time. My mum wrote a book for example and I did a post about it. If she sold it online I’d have linked to her, and yes I had an incentive to write that post (she gave me a book). Pretty much everyone with a blog has written about a product or service, but John seems to be arguing that it’s only OK if you didn’t get it for free. Otherwise it’s just spam.

The trouble is, this is a HUGE grey area. In the case of the Supercar day, it was a genuinely great experience and of course people wanted to blog about it! The same goes for loads of other products that bloggers get. Bloggers also totally pan things if they don’t like them – if someone sends you a free camera and you write a post saying “it’s shit”, would you still be guilty of paid linking? John makes the point that he hates ‘paid positive reviews’ whether they’re online or in magazines or whatever. Well, what if the review is negative but you still get paid?

I think that bloggers have been writing about stuff for years, and linking to stuff for years, and in the world of marketing sending out products and getting user feedback on blogs is an established technique. If the reviews are good then that’s great, and if they’re bad then you know you have to work on your offering. The fact that you have to send something out to get a review in the first place just goes to show that people won’t do something for nothing. So when John accuses the bloggers of arranging a free day out so that a client would get some links…well, yes that was the end result but as Patrick pointed out in the comments, the bloggers did what bloggers do and blogged about their experience. Grey area!!

The trouble with the whole Eggrage post is that it pretty much started out as a personal attack on Chris Garrett. Then when people inevitably started commenting, John used phrases like “Patrick, you are clearly just a pathological liar” and “You are what I like to refer to as a “scumbag”” and my personal favourite “I am flattered that you girls are calling each other to come help”.

Dude, girls rule.

Any point John was trying to make was overshadowed by the militant way he went about it. Dave Naylor wrote his own reply which has been described by John as nasty and libelous…which sounds a little like pot-calling-kettle to me.

To wrap this all up, I have to say that John’s managed to create a lot of interest in his blog thanks to this fiasco and if that was the motivation then bravo. As I said above though, this could have been a good debate about bloggers being paid for links…but it’s not. It’s just a big mess, and the author of Eggrage has come out with egg on his face.

You enrolled in lots of link exchange schemes a long time ago. You’ve got about a dozen link pages on your website all linking out to random places, and your link profile is mainly low quality directories and keyword-rich-domain websites – you know the type, garden-furniture-sales-direct.com!

Google is discounting low quality links such as directories more and more, and they don’t like it when you link out to spammy websites. So what would happen if you removed all your link exchange pages?

No really…what? Leaving them there won’t hurt, but will removing them damage your rankings? Answers by pigeon post please!

Somewhat unsurprisingly – it is Dave Naylor after all – this search engine ranks number one for ‘uk search engine’ above Altavista, Yahoo!, Ask and Excite.

There are no results within the search engine at the moment (not very relevant then is it Google?) but adverts show on some pages. These seem to follow the same format as Google Ads but redirect through a ukwizz URL so I’m not sure where they’re coming from.

What are Bronco up to? Answers on a postcard please…!