You probably think I am crazy to make such a statement, we are a company offering SEO services to our clients, I am in charge of online marketing, and I tell you that there is nothing new? Let me explain…

Yesterday night a friend of mine told me that he wants to get some videos up on YouTube, for SEO, so I asked him what these videos will be about and he answered it doesn’t matter.
“Well”, I said, “it actually does matter, even when you manage to get some hits from there, what will they be worth? How qualified will the traffic be you can catch like this?”

These are the kind of things I find frustrating, there is so much bs in this industry, so many self-proclaimed SEO experts announce new techniques to catch some hits every other day, without any understanding what the real deal is, wasting the money of their clients or giving worthless advice.

I think in the last couple of years not too much has changed in the world of SEO - it was and it still is all about the distribution of quality content - adding value tothe site, giving the visitor a real reason to come - and Bingo! The “me too” strategy won’t work.

If you want to optimize your website for search engines you have to think like a search engine. What is it what a search engine wants to accomplish? It wants to deliver relevant results to it’s users. Why? Well, delivering relevant results means the user will come back resulting in more possibilities to show paid advertising which equals more money. Google makes more then 90% of it’s profit with paid advertisement.

So, we shouldn’t optimize our pages for search engines, we should optimize them for the visitor, we should provide quality content, and we should make it easy to find the quality content on the site. This also means the search engine will find quality content on the site - and it won’t have a problem to find it.

Optimize your site for the visitor, and you will automatically optimize it for search engines. And all SEO really is about is the distribution of quality content, and to make sure that everybody can find it, and a huge part of SEO is actually to optimize the usability of your site.

Now you probably think I am even more crazy, because what I am telling you is you actually don’t need an SEO expert? Well, if your business is running by itself, then yes. But this is very unlikely in most cases, and the creating quality content and making sure everybody can find it is way more tricky than it sounds. Do you really have the time to stay on top of this game to know where and how internet users are actually looking for quality content? Probably not. So why don’t you do what you do best and run your business, and leave it to the SEO expert to figure out the online marketing part for you?

Talk to the SEO expert you trust, and if he/she can not explain in detail what he/she wants to do and why and is talking gibberish instead, well, then I recommend to reconsider your choice.

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Let me begin with a couple of sentences about my background. My major is not CS, it’s business, my profession is online marketing, and I write code because I enjoy doing it. It helps me to think straight, so besides being fun it is also kind of a mental exercise. Of course it makes my life as online marketer way easier at the same time, because I really understand what’s going on behind the curtain, which has three major advantages:

1. I know what is possible, so I can came up with a good strategy for each individual case
2. I know how it is done, and sometimes it is just quicker to do it by myself than explaining somebody else what to do
3. When talking to a client I don’t need to throw buzz words at them like “URL architecture” and such, I am able to explain what’s going on and why

So, until one and a half years ago I wrote all my scripts in PHP and it allowed me to accomplish anything I wanted to accomplish. Then I learned about Ruby on Rails. A lot of people I was dealing with believed that Rails will revolutionize the web, I didn’t, I thought it is nothing but a hype, but as my major is not CS I thought I might be wrong so I started to learn Rails.

In the last couple of weeks I found more and more articles where people talked about the decreasing hype of Rails, the one by Matthew Mullenweg was the first one I stumbled upon. Matt is referring to 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails by Derk Silvers. check out his reason number 7: “programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because you are better” - I think this is so true, Rails kind of forces you to become a better programmer… but: you can also be a good programmer when you write your code in PHP - it’s up to you.

Regarding the believe that it is Rails that will revolutionize the web, I agree with Rami when he states that the language is irrelevant, and Matt: “Through it all, I still haven’t heard of a start-up or web service that failed or succeeded due solely to its web framework or language”. Here is another hilarious post about the fall of Rails, written by Rob Connery. Read the part where he is talking about the problems Twitter currently has, he says: “looks like Twitter is riding Rails right off a cliff”. Rob concludes his post with: “I think Rails will fade unless they get this one thing straight: It’s about you”.

And the customer? The customer simply doesn’t care about the technology, all the customer cares about is to get a working product.

I don’t want to be anal, but I’ll say it anyways: I knew it from the beginning, and it feels good to be right.

As soon as I have a little more time I’ll check out CakePHP and ZEND Framework.

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I recently read this quote in the Marketing Sherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007:

Organic and paid clicks convert at fairly similar rates. If you can get a good organic ranking for critical keywords, your resulting traffic will be far higher than all but top position paid campaigns (”PPC”) on the exact same keywords. Therefore, if you can shift traffic to SEO, it’s better for your traffic volume and cost per click.

Well, not really, unless you focus your Search Engine Optimization efforts only on directly converting keywords, and leave out all those potential site visitors who don’t know yet that they are in buying mode. In printcountry’s case case for example we optimized the site for keywords like “free hp printer driver download“, it’s easier to get a good ranking for these kind of keywords compared to critical keywords where you might have to face way more competition depending on your industry.

The traffic generated by those keywords is less likely to convert as the visitor is obviously not in buying mode yet, but maybe there is still a chance for a conversion. It’s easy to generate traffic with not directly related keywords and when you have enough of them it makes totally sense, this traffic is almost free!
Of course you wouldn’t run a Pay-Per-Click Campaign on these keywords.
So no, for a well optimized page and a well set up PPC Campaign conversions won’t be the same, as you target way more keywords with SEO.

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Ok, so here is my first official post for the Jupiter Labs blog, and as the online marketing whiz in our organization I will take care of the online marketing / search engine optimization section in our blog.

This is pretty exciting for me, I am teaching online marketing for undergraduates and graduate students here in San Diego, so I am used to talk about search engine marketing, but writing a blog is kind of new to me, and at this point I would like to take the chance and apologize upfront, as a native German it is obviously twice as hard for me, so my first couple of post about seo will probably read kind of rough, but rest assured, I’ll work on my style and write as entertaining and informative as I can - I am sure we will get there.

Ok, so why this blog? Well, we recently discussed in an internal meeting that honesty and transparency are definitely core values of Jupiter Labs, so we would like to use this blog as a medium to keep our customers informed about what we do, and share our knowledge with the rest of the world.

Why is Jupiter Labs doing SEO - Search Engine Optimization? As we see ourselves more as a service provider, we want to provide our customers the best service available, meaning we don’t want to sell just web applications, we want to help businesses to grow, and search engine marketing is obviously one of the most important parts in making an online business a successful online business.

Let me give you a synopsis of Marketing Sherpas ‘E-Commerce Benchmarks 2007′:

“2006 was another good year for ecommerce as the industry continued growth of nearly 25%, matching 2005 almost exactly. Growth in orders continued apace, with a slight shift down in hyper-growth of more than 20% toward strong growth of 10% to 20%, barely 5% report a decline in the total number of orders for 2006 compared to 2005. A drop in orders may not be a bad thing for all organizations. Some companies have restructured their offerings to reduce the overall number of orders while increasing the size of each order. The most common method is to institute a free shipping over $XX policy. For these companies, less is indeed more.

Five years ago, ecommerce represented slightly less than 1% of all retail. It has grown in every quarter, and by every measure. That growth has been about 25% every year since, and for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2006, ecommerce hit a full 3% of the total. That may sound like a small number, but it’s 3% of $991 billion, or $29.73 billion.

This data is consistent with benchmarks gathered around the industry, although it is somewhat higher than U.S. government estimates. Overall, domestic online retail grew by nearly a quarter from 2005. If there is any discrepancy, it’s likely that the research undercounts the expansion of ecommerce by auction selling and smaller sites that may elude the methodology. In other words, ecommerce may be even healthier than it appears.”

So, there is a lot of business out there, but just having a well designed website won’t bring you any - search engine optimization does the trick.

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