The Thrill of Competition

How much competitive research do you do when looking at an online business opportunity?

I presume that most people are going to do basic keyword research using some sort of data mining tool. That research will probably show you where there might be some open opportunities to exploit online usually due to large buckets of traffic with minimal competition. Now I am not going to go into the accuracy of the data most Internet marketers use for their research (that will be a subject for a later post). What I want to focus on today has to do with all the areas of research that you should consider before moving forward with an online business.

It is amazing to me that most Internet marketers do not take full advantage of all the information available to help "build a better mouse trap". By understanding gaps in the competition, you can ensure a value proposition, call to action and overall visitor experience that is significant better than the other sites ranking on a page. Of course, you would only want to look at the first page results for the major search engines as the competitive benchmark for your site.

Why just the first page?

Because anything less will not provide you the traffic necessary to build an online business. In addition, if you apply the principles of "Everlasting", all of your efforts are based on first page ranking in Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.

So, what competitive factors should you look at?

Each commercial site (make sure it is a commercial site) on the 1st page should be reviewed for the following information:

(1) On Page Statistical Factors

(2) On Page Keyword / Content / Theme Factors

(3) Off Page Statistical Factors

(4) Off Page Keyword / Content / Theme Factors

(5) Call To Action / Conversion Factors / Value Proposition

By creating a detailed analysis of the competition in these areas, you can develop your own online business to outperform the competition in almost every regard. "Everlasting" websites always win in keyword rankings, traffic generation, lead generation, sales conversion, etc. As of today, my "Everlasting" program has a minimum 10% organic traffic conversion rate with over a 40% conversion on clicks from internal ads. Consider the potential of those statistics applied to the traffic estimations you see in your own keyword performance research.

So, if you are interested in upgrading your online efforts from the old Internet marketing BizOp strategies and want to really learn how to build a solid business online that can stand the test of time (or search engine algorithms changes), please get in touch with me.

Send me an email at: nicolas@nicolasmesse.com

Tell me you are interested in the "Everlasting" Program and I will be in touch to discuss if this program is right for you. Please remember, I am not charging for this program. However, I am requiring a good amount of experience from potential partners.

All the best,

–Nicolas

Pick You Hat Wisely

I am always amused when reading a marketing forum that talks about the different color hats we wear in this industry. White hat, gray hat and black hat are the 3 colors always bantered about with different personal takes on all three or widely made accusations being thrown at one forum member or another. Personally, I rarely ever see any of my true BH friends hanging around the most popular and/or traditional Internet marketing forums. That part is quite unfortunate for the overall Internet marketing community. My experience has been that some of the most innovative strategies and great intellect come out of the BH community. Of course, reality is, hardcore black hatters would never feel comfortable sharing some of their wisdom publicly (outside their traditional channels of communication).

What I want to talk about today is why I think more people should consider going to the dark side. In many ways, I think they are fooling themselves thinking that their current strategies are somehow white hat in nature. If you have any decent amount of experience in Internet marketing, you will probably be able to relate to an announcement recently made about a Web2.0 property called Squibd. It seems that a few groups and individuals instructed their students / members that they could collect a massive amount of highly regarded back links by creating posts on Squibd. The instructions were correct and the effect was tremendous. It was also very short lived as Squibd very quickly changed their policy concerning off page links and reduced their effectiveness to nothing. People using the strategy got a quick bump up in indexing / rankings and also a quick fall back down. Definitely not a strategy I would call "Everlasting".

So what does this have to do with going black hat? There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to choose to be a BH marketer. Just the one click verses two could be enough to convince someone to go to the dark side. The other could be the potential quick impact of BH techniques on indexing and rankings in the search engines. Of course, BH marketers fully understand the whole risk / reward aspect of their business strategies. Most would not decide to penetrate a market that cannot produce significant short term income. The risk is way too high of having a BH business strategy cause a site to be deindexed from one or all of the major search engines. However, if they can stay online for a period of time, the financial reward can be significant…significant enough to take this type of chance.

Most of the things I see going on really come closer to a BH risk / reward system verses building something long-term (Everlasting) in the WH world. New tricks, tools and techniques wrapped in fancy words like Web2.0 or even Web3.0 will not work long term. Unfortunately, I am not fully sure that the people using these techniques completely realize the full extent of the risks. They only come to these conclusions after seeing their work destroyed (deindexed or given a ranking penalty that stops organic traffic) 2, 3 even 4 times or more.

So if you are going to take the same risks as a BH marketer then you might as well also get the faster and better converting payouts. Go “Black” before you run out of money or get so depressed seeing your work come tumbling down that you throw in the towel and quit. I will write later on some of these options.

If you want to be a white hat marketer, then build Everlasting sites. It takes time and hard work, but the rewards are fantastic and you never have to worry about where the search engines are going. If built correctly, an Everlasting white hat site is actually marching step by step with the search engines' algorithms. I would refer to my previous post about starting with a strong foundation.

All the best,

–Nicolas

"Everylasting" Is Launching Soon

Please contact me at nicolas@nicolasmesse.com if you are interested in be part of this mastermind program.

There is no cost for the program. All the training is at no charge.

Candidates must be experienced Internet Marketer.

We will be capping the initial membership at 10 to 20 people so if you are interested, please get in touch soon.

All the best,

–Nicolas

Why My SEO Techniques Are Everlasting

"Progress on building computer systems that process natural language in any meaningful sense requires considering language as part of a larger communicative situation.

Regarding language as communication requires consideration of what is said (literally), what is intended, and the relationship between the two."

-Barbara Grosz, Utterance and Objective

The New House That Microsoft Built Is Broke

Well I have come to the conclusion that MSN and Live search have big time problems with the implementation of their new search strategies.

Before the launch of Live (www.live.com), I knew I could grab top rankings just as a byproduct of being 1st page in Google and Yahoo. Many of those ranking were lost with their algorithm update and launch of Live. At first, I thought it was something wrong with my SEO strategy. I started tearing apart competitive ranking factors and comparing them to my sites. The more I dig the more muddled became the logic behind how rankings were being achieved. Then, I noticed that it was not just rankings that were changing, but Live was actually de-indexing the inside pages of websites in massive quantities. Good solid competitors that I had been enjoying fighting against everyday for top ranking were literally disappearing from the "long tail".

Very frightening indeed!

Looking through the back rooms of Live, I had found a potential source for answers. You might already be aware; Live has launched an interactive webmaster portal to give you real time feed back on how your sites are performing in MSN or Live. Just go to this url and sign-up for the service (it is free):

http://webmaster.live.com/

The tools available are pretty basic, but it will give you a decent idea of how you are doing. What was more important was my discovery of the webmaster forum (also available within the webmaster tools). Not only were people able to ask questions, but there was a very active programmer from MSN named Jeremiah Andrick who was quickly answering those questions. Right now, this is the best, most timely support I have seen…better than Google and Yahoo combined. Unfortunately, there are 2 major proglems:

(1) The forum seems to be pretty new and not well known. There is enough action on it to keep in manageable, but I think it will quickly become overrun with support questions. So my advice is to get in now while you can.

(2) The forum is filled with webmaster all with the same question. I have included part of one post as an example,

"My site has been listed on Google, Yahoo & MSN for as long as the business (nearly 3 years) and has good positions on Google & Yahoo. It used to be top of its keyword searches in MSN for well over a year but since a week ago….nothing!!!! Why? I have mad no major changes to the site. It's not the best site in the world but to be dropped out of the keyword searches completely is TOTALLY confusing!! Not even a search on my business name returns anything!! No explanation for it! I've searched SEO forums and some people are experiencing the same! My competitors sites (some worse than mine and also for spamming!) still apear in top keyword searches where we were placed. Can anyone shed some light or explain to be me why?"

Here is the usual response given in the forum:

"I have heard from a number of customers that they don't understand why their total pages indexed is low. The basic answer is that, while MSNBot crawls billions of web pages, not every page is indexed. For a site to be indexed, it must meet specific standards for content, design, and technical implementation. For example, if your site’s link structure doesn't have links to each page on your site, MSNBot may not find all the pages on your site. Ensure that your site follows our indexing guidelines. These guidelines will help you place important content in searchable elements of the page. Also, make sure that your site doesn't violate any of the technical guidelines that can prevent site ranking. For more information about site ranking in web search results, see About website ranking."

Although this is a great answer from a search engine that wants to focus on great quality search results, it does not address why so many top quality sites have been penalized. In other words, when you look at some of the sites requesting answers from MSN in the forum, you can easily see that these sites fully meet the standards listed above.

So, what is the real answer?

I am not fully sure….except for one thing.

The MSN team keeps including this small statement about not having the room to completely index sites. They focus on the off page and on page "quality" score; yet, they keep on pointing out concerns about search capacity.

All I know is this problem is everywhere and it has not been getting any better (going all the way back to October).

This forum member said it the best,

"Fa Get About It…Many of us are in the same boat. My MSN traffic Stopped Cold at 10 am Pacific Time on Oct 1st. when they flipped the switch to the new Algo. I've posted the problem on this forum but have not read a concrete answer from Live Team. If you have G traffic…I wouldn't touch a page of your site trying to get on MSN serps. It's probably not your site if it's all white hat, it's a bug in the Algo. Hopefully we'll get some positive news soon (any news on this issue would be appreciated) because judging from the posts on this forum and other forums on the web…this boat is getting mighty full."

Anyways, I thought you should know.

All the best,

–Nicolas

My Contact Info

I am kind of surprised on how many contacts I am getting from starting this blog. It seems like I have "hit a nerve" on my "build to last" Internet Marketing advice.

If you never got my contact info from some of the other projects I have been involved with, here it is:

email: nicolas@nicolasmesse.com

skype: nicolasmesse

Please feel free to drop me a line.

I cannot always answer promptly, but, I will try my best.

All the best,

–Nicolas

The 60/40 Rule

My reputation regarding organic search really came about from my work on off-page factors. In fact, most of the questions I get are still related to this aspect of optimization. The funny thing is that I really spend most of my time concentrating on the opposite - - on page factors.

Why?

The main reason is that I have found about 60% of all ranking factor comes from the URL combined with on page factors. That leaves only 40% for off page. Now I must admit that I really take off page for granted. I am usually very confident that I can put forward the required off page juice to be successful in any market. It has gotten to the point where the off page is almost now on auto pilot.

Here is the real opportunity. Most of my competition only really concentrates on off page factors. In fact, I have found that the SIGNIFICANT majority of all websites get a failing grade as it relates to on page factors. The real magic happens when you combine solid on page and off page factors together in a very focused SEO strategy. When done correctly, you need significantly less off page factor to win a niche (against the competition), when your on page is fully optimized.

You might ask, "how much less off page factor"?

The answer is really surprising. I have won 1st page Google rankings with up to 10X less back links because of my work with on page factors.

The other great part is that on page is just as much a science as off page. Good analytics, hard work and great organizational structure can win the on page battle everyday.

The "art" of SEO is quickly becoming a pure science.

This is great news for those of us who want their online business to be exactly that….a business….not a casino game.

–Nicolas

Do You Have A Strong Foundation?

Over the past couple of years I have been repeatedly asked for the secret to building a successful online business. It is funny, because every time I give my answer, the questions is usually just repeated again like I had never responded in the first place. Now I realize that a question like that can have lots of different answers, but, my online business success has been based on organic search traffic, so my answer always revolves around a search business strategy.

My answer is always the same, I tell them that it is like building a house. Forget about all the "extras" that would go into a house building project (like the color of the carpet or what kitchen cabinet to purchase). Concentrate on the foundation, the common components that define the structural strength and quality of house. Relating to online business, that means stop looking for the next hot software, strategy or private membership program that will make you rich. Work on your foundation, build strong walls and a solid roof. Once you have completed those tasks successfully (and yes, there are ways of easily knowing when you have done that correctly), you can move on to more advanced techniques.

You see, most of the times when I am asked to review some one's online business, I find that the roof is leaking, the walls have holes and the foundation is cracked. The house has no hope. Yes, you can always temporarily create the image of success by overwhelming the search engines with to much ranking factor of one type or another. But, as we all know, that type of success is very fleeting and it is only a matter of time before your website is back to producing little or no results. So, it seems that instead of finally addressing and fixing the basic structural flaws, many Internet marketers want to jump on to the "next big thing".

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not one of those anti-guru people. I am in no way implying that these hot products are not adding some value. What I am saying is that it is a complete waste of time focusing on something like Web2.0 strategies when a search engine spider cannot properly read your site. Just to drive the point home, at least 70% of the sites I review have major on page problems. Problems that will significantly impact the ranking potential of their site. These poorly constructed websites would be lost in the search engine rankings except for one thing. The significant majority of their competition have as many if not more problems.

So, what are we left with?

First page search engine rankings that can best be defined as the "best of the worst". No wonder most of the top rankings today are being covered by non-commercial sites. If these trends continue, the first three pages of search engine results will be nothing but .edu's, .gov's and wikipedia.

So, what to do….what to do?

So, I have decided to start this little blog.

To shed some light on some basic concepts and principles that can dramatically impact both your organic and paid search strategies.

(hum…what does paid search have to do with organic?)

I will occasionally even make some product recommendation. Products that I use on a daily basis and have given me a multiple return on my investment.

But, that is for later.

Right now there is a lot of information and ideas that I would like to cover.

Starting with two basic questions:

"What Do The Search Engine's Want?"

and

"How Are The Search Engines Going To Get What They Want?"

Two very simple questions. You would think that if you had their secret formula you could dominate any niche you wanted. Just reverse engineer their algorithms and your golden. But, that is not the answer to the question. Why concentrate on the "secret formula" when you could potentially better understand what the formula is trying to achieve. You see, reverse engineering the algorithm is fine. It gives you a perfect frozen picture of how the search engines are ranking for your niche. In fact, there are some incredibly bright marketers online who do a great job with that strategy. But, what if you could develop a strategy that did not fully require that in depth knowledge? What if you could develop a site that was always ahead of changes to the search engines algorythems?

You can…..

"What do the search engines want?"

They want to understand content and relevancy the deliveries good unique information in response to a search query.

"How are the search engines going to get what they want?"

By building a system (a methodology) that mimics our understanding of language.

Now here is the real beauty of the complete answer.

There are rules to language. People have been studying these rules for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Some of the best universities in the world have whole departments dedicated to the study of language.

Now, you do not need to be a PhD. to get your arms around this concept (and actually be able to apply it to your online business). You can tell by my stream of consciousness grammar that I am definitely not a language major. What I do know is that there are some very basic principles to understanding content and relevancy. I also know that if you apply these principles to your web site structure you can achieve amazing ranking results with the search engines. In addition, these results stand the test of time because the evolution of the search engine algorythems is always moving towards those same basic principles of understanding content and relevancy.

So if you find these ideas interesting….stay tuned, there is a lot more coming.

All the best,

–Nicolas

Search Engine Rankings Everlasting

The Thrill of Competition

Pick You Hat Wisely

"Everylasting" Is Launching Soon

Why My SEO Techniques Are Everlasting

The New House That Microsoft Built Is Broke

My Contact Info

The 60/40 Rule

Do You Have A Strong Foundation?

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