Expert: Aaron Wall, SEO Book.com
#16 of 30
About the Expert
Aaron Wall is author and owner of SEO Book.com, a leading blog started in 2003 that covers the search space and gives tips and news on online marketing strategy and search analysis as well as Threadwatch, a blog on the latest search news and speculation. Having literally written the book on SEO, Aaron has been quoted and mentioned in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Slashdot. Some of his other projects, like Myriad Search Engine, have been been referenced by college libraries and given awards like the JournalismNet pick of the week. Chitika is extremely pleased to have this SEO and SEM guru participate in the Blog Bash.
At one point in time, due to an aggressive filter that knocked sites out for having too much similar anchor text, my site did not rank for SEO Book. While my site was not ranking for its own name my sales were still 85% of the prior month, and that is for a person selling an information product on how to rank in the search engines. For expensive (or high trust) purchases, search has a low value unless it is working syndergistically with other marketing or leveraging others brands. Virtually all SEO techniques that revolve around tricking search engines are dead by the time you read them, because they are either already outdated, or they are about to be abused so heavily that it forces the search engines to react. If you aim your marketing toward people your brand value, mind-share, profit margins, and rankings all increase in parallel. Google has discounted the value of many low quality links by being less willing to index sites that link to bad sites, and by being less willing to index sites that have too many low quality inbound links relative to their number of high quality inbound links. Google is also trying to minimize the value of creating content for the sake of creating content by setting crawling priorities that require a minimum page level PageRank score to include a page in the primary index. Going forward the key to doing well is to move a site away from being static to being something that is dynamic and comment worthy. If other people are talking about you then you win. If they are talking about the competition instead of you then you need to change your approach to make people want to talk about you. Attention, subscribers, traffic, mind-share, and links are all signs of quality. If people talk about you then you get all of them.