Gambling that your e-commerce business can survive solely on traffic and sales driven from search-engine returns is currently, as it has been for at least the last five years, becoming much more of a long shot.

Every new tweak in the major search engine’s algorithms seems to increasingly favor things like paid directories and linkbait pages, elevating them above independent websites specializing in the products or services for which the end-user is searching.

To make the point, we Googled “cell phones Post Falls Idaho.”  Of the approximately 13 factory-authorized and independent cell-phone vendors in the area, three showed up in the Google thumbnail map at the top of the return page.  Only one of those listings, Radio Shack, actually linked to a real company website.  (The other two listings, their operators apparently unwilling to pay SuperPages thousands of dollars for advertising, do not get links to their sites … or even a non-linked mention of their URLs.)

So much for the first item on the return page, Google Maps.

Let’s move further down return page one, to items two and three, which both happen to be somewhat more irrelevant listings — particularly the one for Post Fall restaurants — from our friends at SuperPages.

Next up is a link to a generic article on cell-phone accessories, followed by a link to a PDF of the minutes of a Spokane, Washington, City Council meeting in which people were reminded to turn their cell phones off.

Can any search returns get better than that?  Not really, but this one comes close with its next listing — demographics about Post Falls, which include the startling fact that the community is home to 63 registered sex offenders and two cell-phone towers.  Moving right along, we come to the following links: U.S. weather and forecasts, a J.D. Powers study on college dormitory life (guess what, all the kids have cell phones), Time Warner Cablevision, a mortgage company and, to round off the top ten returns, a link to a site full of generic link-bait articles about gadgets.

Looking at this return page as a whole, one thing becomes glaring apparent.  Not a single mom-and-pop (or even Verizon or AT&T) cell-phone store website appears on it.  Yet, Post Falls has at least six independent and three major carrier-owned-and-operated cell-phone storefronts (plus another five within one mile of the city limits) alive and doing well enough to pay their rent and employees.

Fact — and we can prove it — is that while being on the first or second or 38th Google return page is obviously better than being on the 685th, it is absolutely not required in order to operate a profitable e-commerce site.

How dare we say that?  And how can we prove it?  We say it — and can prove it — based on the irrefutable laws of mathematics.  If being on page one was a prerequisite for successfully selling things on the Web, consumers would have a choice of exactly ten places to e-shop for each category of product known to man.  If not returning in the first ten pages was the kiss of death, there’d be a maximum of a hundred sites selling everything from greeting cards to Great Danes.

But that isn’t the case, is it?  There are thousands of sites offering most common products and anywhere from 90 to 99 percent of those sites don’t return high enough above the search engine horizon to be clipped by a lawn mower with its blades set to turf-skinning height.  But they still somehow attract enough customers to stay in business.

Truth is, the importance of search engine position in e-commerce is vastly overrated.  A good return is fairly important for brick-and-mortar businesses promoted on the Web (things like a fishing lodge in Alaska or an air taxi service in Santa Fe), but much less so for purely e-commerce companies.

Take eBay, the world’s largest e-commerce enterprise.  It gets a very small percentage of its traffic from search engines, yet still is reliably estimated to rack up an average of roughly 3,000,000 (3 million!) sales each and every day of the year.

The world’s second-largest e-commerce vendor, Amazon, isn’t particularly dependent on search-engine traffic either, particularly in their core areas of books and music.  With the second-best brand recognition in the e-tail universe (after eBay), Amazon gets much of its business from consumers who simply type Amazon.com into their browsers.  Another reason Amazon doesn’t need to depend on search-engine returns is that it has what is arguably the industry’s best affiliate program.  Even America’s top brick-and-mortar book seller, Barnes and Noble, secretly sends its site visitors to Amazon when they want to buy something.

“B-u-u-u-u-t-t-t,” the search-engine optimization wizards bluster, “what about all these studies that show 70 or 80 or 137 percent of the respondents claiming they make all their web purchases based on search-engine returns?”

Well, what about them?  Maybe those surveys, many of which are commissioned by search engines, aren’t always – gasp! — totally kosher.

Google “computer peripherals” and you’ll find Newegg.com on page 3; TigerDirect and CDW don’t make it into the top five return pages at all.  Yet they are the three largest online computer-peripheral vendors in the U.S.  So you might just ask the next SEO “pro” who tries to sweet-talk you out of your grubstake to explain that particular phenom.

The other thing you should bear in mind about those surveys is that they invariably treat “search” as if it was a single business model.  But it isn’t.  According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, paid search is currently a $17 billion-plus annual business.

Many of the survey respondents who say they “search to shop” are doing their buying from the big companies who can afford to play in that 17-billion-dollar league.  But those searches aren’t doing a damn thing to help small-site operators dependent on organic search returns for traffic.

Relevant link exchanging, on the other hand, does quite a bit for those operators.  It’s a major life force for a great many of the hundreds of thousands of money-making sites which don’t have Top 100 Google return positions, or $25,000-, $50,000-, or $100,000-a-year marketing budgets.

Relevant link exchanges are free-access points by which literally thousands of visitors — many of them actively looking for the product or service you’re selling — can enter your site.  When you exchange links with another high-quality site, your link will always appear in an appropriate location — it won’t be stuffed between totally irrelevant links to weather information and sex offenders.  And it will be validated by the authority and credibility of the site that has chosen to link to you.

Back some 15 years ago the phrase “reality check” was white-hot on the jargon circuit.  Thankfully, we don’t hear it as much these days.  But once in a blue moon, it’s quite appropriate.  As in the following admonition: Before bursting your heart, lungs, brain, and bank account stressing about search-engine optimization, spend a few minutes doing a reality check on your options.

No matter how much their owners spend on gimmicks, games, and gurus, 90-something percent of all websites will never attain a return position high enough to matter squat.  That’s reality.  That’s simple arithmetic.  Fact is, tearing apart your perfectly good site and remaking it in the image of some SEO consultant so that you can climb from return position 600 to return position 400 is pointless.  You’ve gained in bragging rights, but you won’t attract much in the way of additional traffic.

The dismal truth is that not every site — not even every very good site — can be on the first return page. There are a lot more than ten very good sites for most keywords.

But virtually every very good, good, and even average site can benefit from a well-nourished, intelligent, ethical linking program.  If you don’t already have one, improve your reality and get one.

Click here to recommend this blog:

Is website linking about more than sharing information, building a business, attracting customers, and trying to improve search-engine rankings?

Is it conceivable that the “link to live” imperative woven into the very heart, soul, skin, and facet of the web is also a manifestation of a basic, primal human need to connect with another person, make contact with the outside world, be recognized as someone who exists?

Good, if a bit short-lived, questions, eh?  Questions that won’t be answered here.  Not definitively answered, that is. But we can and will point out that a key linchpin of transactional analysis, one of the major “schools” of both psychiatry and psychology, holds that humans have an intrinsic need to affiliate with others and that contact with and recognition by those others is essential to life.

According to San Francisco shrink Eric Berne, the father of transactional analysis, the absence of such recognition, which he termed “strokes,” in our psyches would cause the “spinal cord (to) shrivel up.” Frightening image that. A world populated with twisted gnomes staggering about like the hunchback of Notre Dame minus his hump.

Was Tim Berners-Lee a believer in transactional analysisat the time he was inventing the web?  Nobody but Sir Tim really knows, of course.  But Eric Berne did develop the science of transactional analysis back in the 1950s, making it one of the fastest-growing, most-controversial topics in the world of psychology a generation later when Berners-Lee was honing his dream of a linked world.

It’s obviously true that without contacts, without links, the web’s spinal cord would immediately shrivel up and the Information Age as we know it would cease to exist.

Overly dramatic? Not a bit.

Imagine a world where search-engine returns didn’t include hotlinks. Where you had to manually type the URLs, or copy and paste the URLs, of every single page that might have the information you needed into an address bar? Difficult, but not impossible. Your productivity would suffer, but you would survive.

Getting past the next level, the one with the sites you’d have to manually visit from the search-engine returns, would, however, almost certainly be more difficult. At this level, many webmasters in a suddenly link-less World Wide Web wouldn’t have the time or inclination to manually type related sites’ domain addresses into their content. They’d tell you what they had to tell you, and that would be that. A great many sites would become just like the infamous roach motel, easy to enter, but very hard to leave except by backing out.

Consider that for a moment.  Have you ever read any SEO blogs in which the allegedly “expert” author advises you to eliminate all reciprocal and outbound links?  Are you following a webmaster forum heavy on posters claiming the only good links are inbound links?  (Think about this. Where all those inbound links are supposed to come from when everyone kills their outbound links is never explained.)

Strip away the surplus verbiage, theirs and ours.  Break out a virtual CAT scanner and peer through the layers of skin and skull into the very brain of your website. What you see will, of course, be dependent on the type, size, and construction of your site. Just like real-life CAT scans of human brains, no two website CAT scans will return exactly the same picture, but there will be similarities.

For example, all CAT scans of the human brain reveal two sets of major arteries, the right and left carotid arteries and the right and left vertebral arteries. In a healthy brain, oxygen-rich blood will be endlessly flowing into one set of these blood vessels and oxygen-depleted blood will be flowing out the other set.

If the scan shows a severe blockage in one of the arteries carrying oxygenated blood to the brain, it’s providing a picture of a stroke, either in the making or already occurred, as the blockage is causing insufficient oxygen to completely fuel the brain’s functions.  If, on the other hand, there’s a blockage in an exiting vessel, the resultant build-up of pressure, if unchecked by medical intervention, will lead to a cerebral aneurysm.

Either constriction, whether in the incoming flow or the outgoing flow, is devastating to the brain.

Now visualize that virtual brain scan of your website.  Is information — the blood, oxygen and brain food of the whole web and each of its millions of sites – steadily, rhythmically pulsing in, around, and out of your site’s virtual brain? Or are your site’s visitors entering a dead-end roach motel with no gateway to a larger universe?

Many people examine a site’s links before actually “getting down to business” on the site itself, if, indeed, they decide to stay and engage with that site.  Any number of reasons exist as to why this is so. Scoping the list of links can provide social or political clues as to quality of relevance of the site the links are on.  A roll call of outgoing links tells visitors that your site is viable, businesslike, established.  They tell potential customers that you are willing and able to make the effort necessary to see that they have access to as much information as they need in deciding whether to make a purchase.

In a healthy brain there is flawless reciprocation between the incoming blood vessels and the outgoing blood vessels.  The amount of oxygen left in the blood returning from the brain tells the heart and lungs how much oxygenated blood has to be circulated back to the brain to keep it alive and functioning properly.

It is a closed, circular system dependent on a very sophisticated biological algorithm to maintain the proper balance between the incoming and outgoing links (arteries, ventricles, capillaries, etc.) connecting the heart, lungs, brain and other organs.

The web, likewise, is a closed, circular system that depends on a steady two-way flow of relevant information to keep its pulse pounding. Eliminating reciprocal links creates blockages in two of your site’s major arteries — the one that offers new visitors a way in and the one that allows existing visitors to reach out for more oxygen.

So what about it?  Have you added any new links this week?  If you haven’t, you better get on it before it’s too late.  After all, you wouldn’t want your site to have a stroke, would you?

Click here to recommend this blog:

Here it comes.

Faster than a speeding bullet and heading straight for the wee bit of real estate right between our eyes.

The end of another year.  One many of us will be more than a little glad to see slink away into history’s dumpster.  But before it goes, we here at LinksManager would like to say “thank you” again for allowing us to serve you in this, our 11th year.

If there’s one thing the economy has reaffirmed in the past year, it’s the crucial role small businesses — all those so-called “mom and pop” enterprises that populate the “main streets” of our towns and internet hosts — play in the economic health of the United States.

Look at it this way.  The Fortune 500 is very important, but the list is only 500 companies long.  And probably half of them, or even more than half, aren’t American companies.  And a fair number of the ones that are American companies were among the welfare recipients who had to be “bailed out” by trillions of taxpayer dollars in 2008 and 2009.

So it could be argued that big business and small business were equally important to the state of the economy in recent years … big business in a negative way and small business in a positive way.

There’s another difference between small business and big business that should be noted.  While the government will sometimes help small businesses raise capital from private lending institutions via the Small Business Administration guaranteed loan program, there’s no true corporate welfare programs for mom-and-pop companies.  No handouts, bailouts, cash for clunkers, stimulus funds or transfer-pricing tax loopholes.

No denying it, small business owners are largely on their own when it comes to riding out recessions, depressions, hard times and reduced consumer spending.

Which reminds us of something President Bush, the first President Bush, George H. W. Bush, once said: We are a nation of communities… a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.

Wow.  What a fabulous sentence, a beautiful image.  A shining vision of the way things are … or at least should be.

(Note: Giving credit where immense credit is due, we must point out that George H. W. only recited the words, they were written by Peggy Noonan, perhaps the best presidential speechwriter since Abraham Lincoln penned the Gettysburg Address all by his lonesome.)

President Bush was, of course, talking about the United States as the “nation of communities (with) a brilliant diversity spread like stars,” but he could just as easily — and even more appropriately — have been talking about the Internet.

Tens of millions of websites spread like stars, each page on each site a point of light in a cyberspace that, while hardly perfect, is far more “broad and peaceful” than the warlike, troubled planet below.

Each of the points of light crossed and re-crossed and crisscrossed and connected, every one to the other, by billions of hyperlinks created by millions of webmasters just like you.

There are, to give them the label they deserve, morons — some of them masters of the Big Lie — who go around preaching the gospel of an unlinked web.  A 1984-like nightmare version of a web where it is considered evil for webmasters to exchange page links and article links and product links to better enable their end users to educate and inform themselves.

These morons — the Antichrist, if you will, in keeping with the Christmas season — are wrong.  Look up at the sky any clear night this month (or any other month) and gaze at the stars.  There they are, all those beautiful points of light … and absolutely no way, at least for us, to travel between them.

Links, all kinds of links — one-way, two-way, fourteen way, links from small businesses to other relevant businesses, links from search returns, and links to Google maps, etc. etc. etc. — are what connect the internet’s points of light.  Links, every different kind of link there is, each doing its part, are what make the web a “nation of communities” we can live, work, and play in.  Links are what empower us to use the web. Without them, the web would be just like the stars.  A thing of beauty we could contemplate but not touch.

That’s the esoteric part of the story.  The practical part concerns link building via relevant link exchange and its enormous ability to enable owner/operators of small and medium-sized online businesses to help each other survive and grow without government handouts, without a booming economy (though having a reasonably good one certainly helps), without a mega-dollar advertising and marketing budget, without a devastating monthly AdWords bill.

How does relevant link exchanging accomplish this seeming miracle?  Ah, well, if you nose around this blog and read some of the “textbooks” at the Linking School you’ll find all kinds of detailed, technical answers. But since it’s almost Christmas, we’re going to steal a page from Hollywood to explain it.

Remember that other “miracle?”  The Miracle on 34th Street?  A pretty popular movie back in black-and-white days.  Popular enough to win three or four Oscars in its original release and to be remade four times as a movie and once as a Broadway musical in the decades since.

For our purposes, the main story is irrelevant.  What we’re interested in is the scene in which Kris Kringle finagles (a nice, old-fashioned word for a nice old-fashioned holiday flick) competing department store moguls R. H. Macy and Bernard Gimbel to refer customers to each other’s store when their own store doesn’t have exactly what the shopper is looking for.

That’s it.  Reciprocal linking in a single plotline.  A reciprocal link gives customers access to information and products that they can’t get from you.  It is, in theory and in fact, doing end users a favor.  A favor that they’ll thank you for — more times than not — by clicking back to your site and buying things you do have.

That’s what happens in the movie, you know.  Business at both Macy’s and Gimbles soars and, though it’s not portrayed on the screen, the other New York department stores — the ones which aren’t taking advantage of this brick-and-mortar “linking” initiative — presumably get flushed.

Though the phrase hadn’t been invented when Miracle On 34th Street first came out, what was depicted in that scene was a very powerful manifestation of what we now call CRM — Customer Relationship Management.

Relevant reciprocal linking, especially when enabled with LinksManager’s patented, search-engine-compliant technology, is an equally powerful CRM tool for today’s online “nation of communities.”

A tool for extending your business’s reach to all those wonderous points of light hovering far beyond the fixed boundaries of your first, fourth, or 230th page search engine return position.

Click here to recommend this blog:

Time out!

We started to work up a blog about a fairly simple sounding help wanted ad someone sent us.  But upon researching the subject we encountered something bigger than the wreck of the Titanic, more surprising than GM or Chrysler announcing a quarterly dividend, more credibility straining than the poorest-ever excuse for an April Fool’s Day joke.

Something so un-credible and incredible that we knew you wouldn’t believe it if we just told you about it. So we took a screenshot and …

Yes!!  It shows exactly what you think it shows.  Googling “search engine” at 1:38 a.m. PST on November 23, 2009 did not show Google.com (despite its PR of 10) in the first return position.  It didn’t show Google.com in the second return position.  It didn’t, in fact, show Google.com anywhere on the first return page.

Imagine that, if you’ve got a wild enough imagination to handle it.  Google, the world’s undisputed #1 search engine does not (or, maybe, did not until somebody in Menlo Park saw this post), consider itself important enough to rank with Dogpile, Yahoo, Bing, etc., etc.

OK, it is more funny (particularly for Google, which is laughing all the way to the bank while their higher-return-position competitors scramble) than meaningful, but it does point out how illogical and uncertain the whole search-engine-optimization process is.

To put it in somewhat gory terms, if making SEO dance is magic — as is frequently said — Google not being in the first return page on its own search for “search engines” is equivalent to a magician opening the box and showing the audience a corpse with bloody stumps instead of a gaily laughing non-sawed-in-half assistant.

Which brings us to the following Craig’s List help wanted ad ….

Looking for SEO specialist who has a good work history in link building, back linking and directory submission.  I have 5 keywords for which I would like to have my website on the first page of Google.  I’m looking for someone who can create 5 to 10 links a day and 2 directory submissions a day.  I also require a daily spreadsheet to track and verify work.

There are a number of things that this ad tells us.  The first is that the person who placed it has, in our collective opinions, entirely ridiculous expectations based upon very little knowledge of how search engines work.  He or she thinks you can simply hire a wizard, have him or her add some links and directory submissions and make the first Google return page for not one, not two, but five of your favorite keywords.

As a demonstration of how difficult that is we decided to check how many of Google’s likely keywords/phrases returned Google.com on page one.  The first, most obvious one to try was “search engine.”  Discovering that it didn’t return on page one so stunned us that we decided to leave Google alone for awhile and try some other Fortune 1000-type sites.

“Locked out” of testing a number of sites we would have liked to check because they use Flash home pages or cloak their metatages, we did find a few global enterprises that do display keywords in their home page source code.  Ignoring keywords or search terms using copyrighted trade names or URLs (i.e. WalMart or WalMart.com), we tested the first ten keywords/phrases for each:

– Walmart: Walmart is an SEO superstar.  Of its first ten non-trade name keywords/phrases, three returned on Google page one.

– Shell Oil: Shell earned page one returns for two of its first ten keywords/phrases … one of which, duh, was “oil company.”

– Starbucks: Starbucks returned #1 for coffee, which has to be considered pretty excellent given the level of competition, but notched only one page one return out of its next nine keywords/phrases.

– Hallmark: Hallmark.com was the “surprisingist” of the sites on which we found keywords to test.  Not because only two of their first ten non-trademarked keywords/phrases returned on page one, but because “birthday gifts” did return on page one while “mother’s day gifts” did not.  Isn’t Mother’s Day Hallmark’s in-house holiday?  The special occasion Hallmark Founder J.C. Hall invented?  (Just kidding, mom’s day actually traces back to the ancient Greeks.)  Also interesting, Hallmark returns page one for “greeting cards” which is no surprise, but not for “funny cards.”

– BMW: We Googled their first ten non-trademarked keywords/phrases.  BMW.com returned on page one for exactly none of them.

As you can see, returning on page one for one or two keywords is tough enough.  To hit on three or four or more you almost always need the clout of a WalMart, Hewlett-Packard, or Delta Airlines.  (HP and Delta did very well in our test.)

It’s fair to say, in our opinion, that the expectation of getting any site to return on page one for five different keywords is unrealistic.  If the site in question is a small site without its own name server and an in-house, full-time webmaster and SEO specialist, the expectation descends from unrealistic to virtually impossible.

Devoting time, money and energy to SEO “impossibilities” chews up precious resources that could more effectively be used to improve your end users’ experience, to enhance your visitor-to-customer conversion ratio, to add new products and content.  Simply put, having excess SEO expectations can harm your business.  So be realistic about your goals.

Looking again at the above help wanted ad we also see that the poster wants his “SEO specialist” to somehow add 100 to 200 links and 40-50 directory listings a month, leading to an annual total of about 1400-2400 links and maybe 500 directory listings.  Will all of those connections, generated in a flurry of activity to meet daily quotas, be good, solid, relevant and likely to positively influence Googlebot?  Or will many of them have a negative effect?

We’d bet on the latter.  It’s hard to weed out all the black-hat and gray-area sites when you’re rushing to meet a quota.  Even if you do somehow manage to avoid bad links and directories there’s still the fact the majority of those you add will be at best passable.  Finding and landing 20 high-quality, productive links may take twice as long as picking up 200 mediocre ones, but the 20 good links will likely produce a return on your time investment (ROTI) five or ten times higher than the ROTI from the 200 bad ones.

Much as we at LinksManager believe in the raw elemental power of linking, there is such a thing as “too much, too fast.”  That great, life-sustaining beverage known as water has a lot of raw elemental power also, but too much too fast will drown you dead. 

Never forget:  The search engines are trending the rate at which you obtain links so slow and steady beats fast and furious.  When it comes to links, directories, metatags, article content and virtually everything else connected with SEO, quotas don’t work, quality does.

Click here to recommend this blog:

Almost two years to the day after we wrote that “the demise of PageRank would rank as a textbook example of ‘good riddance to bad rubbish,’” Google paid to one half of the two-headed PR monster.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it killed the wrong head.

The part that’s been offed is Google Webmaster Tools’ option to view “Distribution and Page With Highest PageRank.”

According to an explanation posted on the Google Support Forum by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa, PR data was removed from Webmaster Tools because “we’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.”

“We removed it,” Ms. Moskwa wrote, “because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

The part that wasn’t de-animated was the PageRank info box in the Google Toolbar and that, frankly, is a darn shame.

Webmaster Tools is mostly used by pros, people who should know exactly what page ranking means and how many grains of salt to take it with.  The Google Toolbar, on the other hand, is used by untold tens of thousands of home and small-business site operators who may be world-class experts in their field while knowing little about the “inside baseball” world of the web and search-engine optimization.

The kind of people who are most likely to fall victim to what Google itself calls “unethical SEOs (who) have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways.”

As Google well knows, that little Toolbar PageRank icon is one of the favorite harpoons used by “unethical SEOs” to spear customers.

The pitch goes like this “see this, this is your site, this is your official PageRank … right here on the Google Toolbar.  It’s three, that’s terrible.  Look at this, look at this … here’s one of your competitor’s sites and it’s got a PageRank of six.  That’s twice yours.  But don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.  I know all the secrets to increasing PageRank, I’ve done it for hundreds of sites. A nd by the way, this is the real deal.  You can go home and download the Google Toolbar and get the bad news right on your own computer.”

Sadly, the scammer is right … the sucker can still go home, download the Toolbar and see PR reporting as alive and well and misleading as ever.

Wow.  Does that make nonsense or what?  People buy into an “unethical SEO’s” program because they think they need a higher PR only to find, on the rare occasions when the SEO actually delivers a PR spike, that it hasn’t increased their traffic or business a zot.

One truth about PageRank seems to be that it is, more or less, an opiate Google created to satisfy the masses … masses of webmasters yearning for a metric telling them how their sites are stacking up against other sites.

Which it does.

It tells people how generically important a page is.  But knowing that is about as useful as knowing how to use a slide rule or a linotype machine.  Search engines do not deal in generics, they deal in specifics.  In terms of getting traffic from the engines, it doesn’t matter how important a site is.  The only thing that matters is how important it is in regard to specific search queries.

To illustrate this point we marked the announcement of PageRank being deleted from Webmaster Tools by Googling “what is the truth about Google.”  Though it’s hard to imagine who would know the truth about Google better than Google itself, the first return from Google.com, despite its PR of 10, was a link to a review of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” all the way back on page four.

Full disclosure time.  There was a link to a Google video clip from the movie at the top of the returns, but that’s where they usually put videos, so it doesn’t count … not that it would matter, given that the movie has rather little to do with the truth about Google.

Equally telling were the page ranks of the first ten returns for “the truth about Google.”  They ranged from a low of zero to a high of four.

Want an even better example of why Google has finally admitted, at least to industry insiders, that Page Rank is irrelevant to … to … to … well, not to put too fine a point on it, everything?  Hopefully, you answered in the affirmative because want it or not, we’re going to give it to you.

Google Books has scanned and digitalized more than 10,000,000 books.  Information about virtually all of them is accessible via a Google search.  Extended excerpts (from full pages to compete chapters) are available for millions of them.  Even more impressive, approximately 1,000,000 (as in a million books, folks) can be read online cover to cover — just as if you’d bought a copy or checked it out at the library — for free.

Google Books is a tremendous research accomplishment and a sterling example of what the web can and should be for people who go beyond shopping in the nude, checking sports scores, and wading in the cesspool of celebrity gossip.

Google Books has a PageRank of eight.  And if you Googled “online books” on the day Google half castrated PR (leaving the world to wonder whether it was the left or the right you know what they removed) you would not — repeat NOT — have found Google Books anywhere in the first 50 returns.

What you would have found, way up front in return position number one, was something called The Online Books Page.  Which offers 35,000 volumes for online reading, a mere 965,000 less than that search-engine also-ran Google Books.

Admittedly, The Online Books Page does, like Google Books, have a PR of 8.  What about some of the dozens of other sites returning ahead of Google Books for our “online books” search?

Well, there’s something called Banned Books Online with a PR of 6.  And Bookspot, another PR six site with an online book database that’s all of 25,000 volumes.  There’s a site which does nothing but sell math textbooks (another PR six), and a site devoted to a “Selection of Ellen G.  White’s Best-Known Books” which has a PR of five and returns at least 20 positions ahead of Google Books.

So why is Google Books in the returns dumpster, while scores of sites with far less relevance to a pure search for “online books” (as opposed to “online children’s books,” “online math books,” “online Ellen G. White books,” etc.) reign triumphant on the opening five return pages?

We don’t know the answer, but we’ll venture a guess it has something to do with this: Google Books links to http://books.google.com; the majority of the sites that return ahead of it have the word “online” somewhere in their domain name.

Cynical Editor’s Sarcastic Note: Looks like Google really doesn’t spend any money on SEO consultants.

Realistic Editor’s Reasonable Response:  Why should it?  Anyone on Planet Earth who can find their … ah … nose with two hands knows how to get to Google without using a search engine.

Enough jokes.  The one thing we do know for sure about Google Books dismal return performance on a search for “online books” is that it can’t have much to do with PageRank.  Google Books has a PR equaled by only two or three of the sites returning ahead of it, and higher than many of them by significant digits.

So again the big question raises its ugly, querulous head:  What actual good is PageRank and why hasn’t Google driven a stake clean through its heart instead of letting it live on, Zombie like, where it can do the most harm?  As always with Google, there’s no outside-the-bunker answer to that question.  It could be something so complex that only mathematicians and statisticians with advanced degrees in astrophysics could possibly understand it.

But it also could be something as simple as the Asian concept of face.  Googlebot has (we hope) no ego or feelings, but the rather remarkable humans who created it, and continue to nurture it presumably do.  Maybe the concept of denial is no more of a stranger to them than it is to the rest of the world.  Maybe they don’t like admitting they’ve been wrong anymore than you and you and you and us.  Maybe they thought dropping PR all at once would be overly embarrassing.

Let’s hope so.  Because if that is the reason for the half-hearted slaying, the other shoe will almost certainly be dropped sooner or later.  And when it is, the last mortal remains of Page Rank will be under it.

Click here to recommend this blog:

Link Moses?

What the heck is that?  Like is it for real?  Can a webmaster somehow establish a link to a religious and societal superstar of monumental stature even though he died thousands of years before the invention of the Internet?  Even though he does not now, and has never, owned a website of his own?

Better yet, is it somehow possible to get a backlink from Moses?  Now that would be some kind of authority link.

Not surprising “Link Moses” has nothing to do with burning bushes, Commandments hauled down from mountaintops, fleeing Egypt, parting the Red Sea or wandering the desert for 40 years.  “Link Moses” in webspeak is actually code for Eric Ward, a website marketing, publicity and link strategist who’s been toiling in these fields for so long (since 1994) he makes people like us and Google, mere ten-year-veterans of the wars, seem like virtual newbies.

What Eric “Link Moses” Ward has in common with that other Moses is a fair number of commonsense commandments that if suitably honored and followed can lead a site into the promised land of good search-engine returns, substantial non-search-engine-driven traffic and above-average conversion ratios.

Unlike the biblical Moses who, as far as we know, had a lifetime employment contract with his boss, Link Moses apparently served as Eric Ward’s alter ego as an hourly worker subject to termination without prior notice.  So Eric fired him last year after what he described as a good run “trying hard to part the black linking seas and lead folks down a path to bountiful linking.”

The move was sudden, public and, in some circles, viewed as rather more significant than, say, George W. Bush firing Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

Unlike Rumsfeld, however, Link Moses did not go quietly into the world of retirement, highly paid board memberships and lavishly remunerated speechifying.  Link Moses fought his way back and, now known as “Link Moses Resurrected,” is once again serving as Eric Ward’s smooth blogging, commonsense-making, envoy to the world.

Because we’re glad to see Linking Moses back on the battlefield and even more because we respect and admire people who really understand what ethical productive linking is even when we don’t always agree with them, we’ve decided to share 10 classic Link Moses quotes and our thoughts about them.

Thou shalt not refer to content as link bait, any more than thou shall refer to your site’s users as carp.

Ain’t that the truth.  Superficial, badly written pseudo-articles with little reference to a site’s topic or in-depth information may attract some links, but those links will be from bottom-feeders.  Operators of sites who don’t know or care that they’re publishing warmed-over words with no real usefulness to end users or anyone else.  Links from such sites generally add nothing to Google rankings and produce little direct traffic.  Fishing for links is futile unless your “bait” is big, sparkly, unique, focused and enticing enough to land some big ones.

A great site that reciprocates links with other great sites does not harm itself in any way.

Quick word association test.  When you read the words “great site” in the above Link Moses’ quote what was the first thing that popped into your mind?  MIT.edu?  Whitehouse.gov?  Microsoft.com?

Think about that for a minute.  Those are all big sites, important sites, authority sites … even.  But whether or not they are great sites to reciprocate with (assuming that was possible) depends entirely on whether they offer real, relevant benefits to the linked site’s visitors.

Take Whitehouse.gov.  Would a link exchange between the Oval Office and a hardcore Fantasy Football site be considered valuable by Google or the Fantasy players?  Rather obviously “yes” if the occupant of the White House at the time was a Fantasy Football fan who posted a lot of stuff about how his season was going on the site.

But what if the President used the site purely to express his views on the non-sports news and politics of the day?  Would Googlebot just shrug and ignore that link or would it say “here’s a non-relevant reciprocal link between a political site and a sports site, maybe I should downgrade the sports site’s ranking a bit.”

I define a manipulated linking pattern as links obtained purely in pursuit of search rank with no thought given to topical relevancy.

Good definition, Mr. Moses.  Google’s Guidelines and LinksManager’s articles and help files all stress that links should be considered and added based on end-user benefit, not search engine manipulation.  But you were there ahead of us all, so take all the bows you want.

To be effective over the long term, you must take as much control as possible over your link-building activities… because no third party can ever care about your site as much as you will.

Thank you for that dead-on observation.  We’ve worked hard to develop and expand LinksManager into a unique, patented system that delivers all the productivity and efficiency benefits of an automated publishing process while vesting total and irrevocable editorial control over link selection, solicitation, addition and appearance in the site operator.  It’s nice to hear someone of your stature publicly acknowledging the importance of hands-on webmastering in building a deploying a successful linking strategy.

Search engnes like to feel a degree of confidence in the rationale for one site linking to another. Call it trust, call it faith, call it relevance.

You could also call it respect.  Links without any rationale are an insult to the intelligence of both human end users and search engine robots.  Since nobody appreciates getting dissed, maintaining dumb links can, and frequently does, come back to bite lazy webmasters.

I hear people saying, “I don’t have time to add real content, what I need is something quick that will make everyone want to link to my site.” And I say, “Like what, the Diet Coke/Mentos fountain video?  But I thought your site sold ball bearings?”

It always comes back to relevancy, doesn’t it?  If your site is about soap opera drama queens, it’s easy to create “relevant” content even if the “facts” presented are 100 percent BS.  If the product is ball bearings, or tractors, or a new video game that’s supposedly better than EA’s “Madden,” webmasters should either take the time or spend the money to generate detailed, informative content that shouts the words “READ ME, I’M IMPORTENT” between every line.

Trust originates with the steward of the content.  The page editor.  The author.  Trust originates from people, and manifests itself on the web as links.  The engine that figured that out first was Google, and others followed.

Moses, old sod, you couldn’t be more right.  Forget PageRank, how old a site is or whether you like the color scheme or not.  Link only to relevant sites whose content is accurate, honest and trustworthy and the increased customer and search engine-bot confidence in your site will be reflected in both increased sales and better return positions.

To me a white-hat link tactic (is when you) seek links for reasons other than search-engine rank.  But this isn’t all.  Even non-SEO links can be spam and make the web an uglier place. “Intent” is at the core of the white-hat / black-hat debate.  Why do you want that link?

Talk about the most basic of questions:  Why do you want that link?  Yet how many of us bother to ask it when we’re checking out possibilities in our pending links queue?  We think about how the link will affect our reciprocal/one-way link ratio, what we category it should go in, what the site’s PR is, etc. etc.  But we rarely ask the simple “why” question.  Why would this link add value to our site visitors’ experience?  Why would it add to the quality of the information our site is providing?  Why is it more important to establish this link that any of ten or 20 similar links?

My younger, flashier peers in the link-building trade like to call me Link Building Moses, because I’ve been around so long and am a huge proponent of white-hat-only link-building tactics.  I bitch about the folly of link bait and Page Rank, I whine about sandboxes and anchor text schemes … I’m boring to them.

If rigid adherence to white-hat link building is boring, we here at LinksManager, along with you, are some of the dullest people on earth.  But, then, neither you nor we are being paid to provide entertainment.  Our mandate and our obligation is to help our customers become more successful by giving them the tools and services they need to better market their websites today, tomorrow and into the indefinite future.

It’s Google’s engine, they can do whatever the hell they want with it.

Amen, bro Moses, they can, they do and they probably always will.

Click here to recommend this blog:

Did you know that the Macy’s on 34th Street in New York is still, 107 years after it opened, the world’s largest department store?

(Note: Korea’s Shinsegae Centum City, opened in Spring 2009, is frequently reported to be bigger, but that’s misleading because Centum City’s twin towers contain all sorts of non-retail facilities such as ice skating rinks, golf ranges, multiplex theaters, gymnasiums, and art galleries. Shinsegae’s actual retail department store occupies eight floors in one of the towers and, while mammoth, is not quite as large, in square footage, as Macy’s 11 floors.) 

OK, Macy’s original structure has been enlarged several times in the intervening century and has not always encompassed the 2,150,000 square feet of selling space it does today.  (The main entrance, however, is, as it has always been, “supported” by the same four lovely caryatids sculptor John Massey created for its grand opening in 1902.)

The point is that the 34th St. (aka Herald Square) edifice has long been the bedrock upon which the entire Macy’s (now Federated Stores) empire stands.  The basic building block for all the other hundreds of stores and untold billions of sales.

Why is Macy’s still standing while so many once equally famous chains have either disappeared completely or are now sporting Macy’s logo above their doors? Because the stores that aren’t around anymore — Montgomery Ward, Bullock’s, W.T. Grant, etc., etc., etc.– failed at or below ground zero.

Their foundations — comprised of the buyers who selected their merchandise, the advertising specialists who promoted the products, the people in charge of shipping and stocking and, most of all, the folks responsible for training employees how to deal with the public in a responsive, respectful manner — crumbled, rotted and eventually caused the meltdown of the visible, money-making part of the businesses, the selling floors.

Macy’s took care of the basics, the chains that failed did not.

This parable has an interesting parallel (bet you can’t say that real fast ten times) in a recent development regarding the responses we get when we ask new LinksManager subscribers why they signed up. Historically, the most common answers were saving time, driving traffic or improving search engine rankings.

Hardly anyone ever mentioned the word “basics” even though hyperlinks are about as basic as the web gets, since without them — links, that is — there would be no web.

None.  Without links you would be in some other business, like pushing shopping carts at people and snarling “Welcome to Target.”  (But don’t feel bad, without links Serge Brin, Matt Cutts, Steve Case and Jeff Bezos would be toiling at Target — or some similar place — next to you.)

Without links no one could connect to anyone else’s site.  Not via a search engine, all those returns, relevant and non, are links.  Not via a bit of underlined type (usually colored blue) on another site, that too is a link. Not by clicking on an ad, “clickthroughs” are merely links by another name.  Not even by typing a URL into a browser address bar.  All you’re doing there is manually invoking a link instead of clicking on it.

So, about six months ago when many new subscribers started telling us they intended to use LinksManager as a tool to get back to webmastering basics and improve their traffic, sales and profits through a more aggressive natural linking program we were not only impressed, we were downright delighted.

Not because this seeming change in focus benefits our bottomline in some invisible way.  (LinksManager’s nominal subscription fee is the same regardless of a user’s motivation, so we really don’t care whether you sign up because you want more links, better links, the same amount of links with less work, or for any other legitimate reason.)

What really delights us about the “back-to-basics” answer to our stock “welcome aboard” survey query is that it reflects our belief that building and operating websites that emphasize sound fundamentals in all aspects of e-commerce is essential if the virtual economy is going to recovery at a faster rate than, say, the car making or $4.5 million condo-sales economy.

We also believe that many of us webmasters have deviated from the basics by allowing — even encouraging — our medium to become our message.  Which is a dreadful thing because nobody on the web makes much money selling the “message” with the exception of service providers like Google and the few ISPs that are still in profit.  Everyone else in cyber-business should be using the medium as a tool to deliver a message about what they have to sell.  Even if your site exists solely to promote a product used exclusively for web-related tasks — say a download manager or an e-mail spam-fighting application — the medium is only a carrier for the message about how great your product is.

That’s fundamental.  Getting people to your site to buy your product is also fundamental and the best “back-to-basics” way to do that is via “word of link,” the 21st Century equivalent of the word-of-mouth advertising that has helped keep Macy’s on top of its game — and firmly on its Herald Square foundation — for more than 150 years.

Click here to recommend this blog:

With summer coming to an end, we thought it time drift off to a virtual beach far from Linklandia. A patch of warm sand where we could chill out and dreamily contemplate something relaxing, non-stressful and totally unrelated to our world.

Something, for example, about Google.

Google!?!  Something about Google that’s relaxing?  Non-stressful?  Something about GOOGLE that’s unrelated to our world?  Are we on crack?  No, absolutely not.  What we’re on about is Google Audio, aka Adsense for Radio, Google Audio Ads and a number of other short-lived monikers categorized under a single four-letter word: B-U-S-T.

Barely three years old when it wheezed into its grave not long ago, Google’s foray into radio ad sales was a short — and not particularly glorious — episode in the Sultan of Search’s history.  A crusade not unlike Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, in which a superbly trained army fielded by a rich and willing nation was defeated by its commander’s stubbornly pursuing the business of conquest as usual in a vast Euro-Asian land of brutal winters and passionate partisans unlike any others he’d encountered in previous campaigns.

Since irony is not highly valued these days, it’s unlikely that people 200 years from now will be able to visit any memorial — on or offline — to Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio. Y et something like the famously apocryphal Latvian marker which says “in 1812 Napoleon passed this way to Moscow with 200,000 men” on its east face and “in 1813 Napoleon passed this way from Moscow with 20,000 men” on its west would not be inappropriate.

Passing “to” — in its own words — the growth and improvement of the “ecosystem of the radio industry,” Google had more than a mere 200,000 men.  It had the $102 million in cash with which it acquired dMarc Broadcasting’s automated ad service business and patented delivery technology in Q1 2006.  It had the $1 billion-plus contingency payment IOU it issued to dMarc’s founders.  It had an untold number of additional millions to lavish on infrastructure, radio ad writers, broadcast media consultants and marketing mavens charged with transforming dMarc’s largely commoditized inventory of 30- and 60-second remnants into branded, premium-priced campaign ads.

It also had, according to long time Google-watcher Steve Bryant, a “hubris (that) leads me to suspect that the radio industry doesn’t appreciate Google’s ham-handed approach to its market.”

Passing “from” radio, Google took little beyond a promise to “focus our efforts in online streaming audio,” a vow to try and sell its radio automation technology, an expectation “that up to 40 people may not be able to find other roles at Google,” and an observation that “we have always accepted that if you take risks not all of them will pay off.”

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.  dMarc co-founder Ryan Steelberg, who once ebulliently boasted that Google was “going to conquer radio,” and his brother Chad weren’t supposed to flee the shiny new Newport Beach headquarters of Google Radio within 18 months of the merger.  Rumored ten- and nine-figure deals with Clear Channel and CBS weren’t supposed to fade to dead air as quickly as radio drama in the mid-1950s.  Station managers and advertising execs weren’t supposed to find the internet’s ubiquitous “bots” a poor substitute for lunch-buying, back-slapping sales reps.

It was supposed to be a slam dunk.  A radio-space replication of the strategy and technology that previously shocked, awed, dazzled, and blew away all cyberspace competitors.  Radio, the World Wide Web, television … they’re all the same, aren’t they?  Virtual worlds one and all.  The only brick-and-mortar structures involved are those housing the computer servers and radio transmitters, right?  Not a bit like, for example, running a railroad or department store chain.

Is that what the Google brass thought?  If so, is there any truth to that perception, or is it 108 percent delusional?

In the sense that programming and advertising content is delivered to consumers from some unknown, far-away place via technology that very few mortals can even begin to comprehend, all electronic media, the so-called new and the so-what old, is pretty much the same.  But the similarities stop there and are largely irrelevant — as are many of the dissimilarities.  Except for this one: The Web, as befitting its name, is truly World Wide. 21st Century radio is quintessentially local.

That doesn’t mean effective local and regional advertising isn’t happening all over the Web.  It doesn’t mean network advertising has ceased to exist on radio.  What it does mean is that the same selling ways, means, techniques, metrics, content, placement and frequency models that work in the Web space won’t — didn’t — work in the radio channel.

There is some indication that Google CEO Eric Schmidt eventually came to see at least a glimmer of the light.  Speaking with the full benefit of hindsight at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America last April, Schmidt cited a corporate culture that prevented Google from developing an adequate radio advertising performance measurement and value-calculation tool as a major factor in Google Audio’s demise.

“With an enormous data corpus, our computers can do the math really well,” Schmidt noted.  “But in the audio case, there wasn’t a good signal back to us about which ads performed.”

Or perhaps Google’s ears were simply not attuned to best radio advertising feedback signals there are:  The chiming of checkout counter scanners, the ringing of shop door entry bells, the footfalls of people trekking through a showroom.

Back in the day when every American town of any pretention at all had its own drag strip or short track, the car dealers who sponsored many of the racers had a saying — win on Sunday, sell on Monday.

Had Google been able to determine which of the ads it served on Sunday were delivering Monday sales in Hometown, USA, it might well — by following the “patience, persistence and perspiration” prescription of that other famous Napoleon (Hill) — have added the riddled bodies of AM/FM and even Siriuus/XM to its trophy case.

Instead, all it accomplished was providing us some pleasant thoughts for a day at the beach. (Probably not a satisfactory ROI from their POV, but plenty good enough from ours.)

Click here to recommend this blog:

Though many of us don’t often remember it, there is one simple truth about websites that transcends all others: Sites that don’t work for end users — aka customers, visitors, browsers — don’t work.  Period.  Absolutely. They’re just no darn good.

Unlike so many of us humans, major search engine bots are not prone to forget this particular simple truth. They always put the end-user friendliness and informational quality of sites — as best they can determine those factors — fairly high on the list of factors they consider when assigning page ranks and doling out return positions.

How do we know this?  Because the engines say so.

For instance, the first “basic principle” under Google’s official quality guidelines says “make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”

Likewise, Yahoo! says the sites it prefers to index contain “pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary.”

Microsoft advises webmasters trying to optimize for Bing to concentrate on making sure the site’s “target audience is interested.”

And the 1200 pound SEO gorilla, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search engine spam search-and-destroy unit, says that the best sites recognize that their “users’ interest and the search engines’ interest is the same.”

It might be useful to think about this “basic truth” the next time you read or hear that backlinks have become the end all and be all of search-engine optimization.  That these one-way links, regardless of quality or relevancy, are the only kinds of links the search engines are still including in their ranking calculations.

That reciprocal links, the silken strands of which the whole web was — and still largely is — woven, have somehow lost much of their legendary ability to win end users and influence search engines.

To uncover the fallaciousness of this revisionist reasoning, you first need to fully understand exactly what a backlink is: A simplex (i.e. going in one direction only) hyper-pathway between, say, CharlesManson.com and the vintage music e-store in which you frequently list such Chuckie M. favs as the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter?”

Certainly good backlinks — like any good links, backwards, forward or upside downwards — can often help a site’s search engine rating.  All links are a sign of popularity, a “vote” for your site, and search engines do tabulate those votes favorably as long as the links are relevant, organically obtained and non-spammy.

Also, while it is unlikely that backlinks — over which, bear in mind, you have no logistical or legal control — will ever hurt your PageRank, it is not impossible.  It could happen, for example, if your music site has the misfortunate to become a destination location for serial killer and murder-cult site webmasters looking for something to link to.

Explanatory note: Search engine bots trade in relevance and make few, if any, value judgments.  If your site specialized in e-tailing filleting knifes and strangling wires rather than CDs, backlinks from Mr. Manson, the Zodiac Killer and others of that persuasion might improve your search engine returns significantly.

The plus side of backlinks is this:  They can — if relevant — drive potential customers to your site and be counted as beauty contest votes by search engines.

The downside is that they provide absolutely nothing , zero, zilch, nada of benefit to your end users.  Your site visitors and customers won’t even know backlinks exist.  In terms of helping you comply with Google’s first basic principle — make pages primarily for users, not for search engines — backlinks are totally useless.

Backlinks are equally worthless in crafting the “pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary” that Yahoo prefers.

Backlinks offer nothing to keep your “target audience interested,” as suggested by Microsoft , and, to speak to Matt Cutts’ point, add nothing whatsoever of interest to anyone or anything — human or android — viewing your site.

Quality reciprocal links, on the other hand, are an integral part of making a site “primarily for end users.”  They can be doorways to virtual rooms jammed with useful information, portals to necessary service providers, gateways to tips and tricks for making things work.

Bottomline is that a quality reciprocal link is better than a one-way link because its duplex nature enhances your site’s search engine appeal twice over by providing both a backlink which search engines tabulate as a “vote” for your site and a forward link which can help you comply with search engine recommendations to “make pages primarily for users.”

One other thing, the high degree of relevancy inherent in organically grown, human-edited reciprocal links usually produces higher conversion rates than either search engine returns or Pay Per Click links.

Click here to recommend this blog:

If pay-per-click search-engine marketing (SEM) is such a fabulous way to peddle your website’s products and services, why do so many e-enterprisers who use it — even those with substantial search advertising budgets and a full-time in-house professional SEM staff — hate it so much?

Or maybe “hate” is too strong a word.  Maybe dislike is more accurate.  Or perhaps distrust.  Maybe it doesn’t matter how you label the attitude.  Maybe the only thing that really matters is that 57 percent of senior-level corporate SEO operatives recently surveyed on behalf of [x+1], a leading provider of predictive marketing solutions, ranked the expected efficiency of their 2009 search-engine marketing campaign at one or two on a scale where seven is best and one is worst.  (Zero was not an option, but would probably would have been a popular choice if available.)

According to the [x+1] survey, only 10.3 percent of the survey respondents reported a lift conversion ratio (the ratio of “hits” resulting in a purchase, acceptance of an offer or other action relative to the total number of hits) of more than 20 percent for keywords purchased from search engines.  Over 50 percent reported a conversion rate of under 20 percent and a full 15.9 percent said they hadn’t experienced any appreciable increase in conversion rate at all.

Understand that [x+1]’s poll takers weren’t talking to mom and pop site owners who, perhaps, were newbies to search-engine marketing and didn’t understand all the nuances of selecting the right keywords to buy and the optimum ways to SEO their pages to maximize conversions on those keywords.

Almost 90 percent of the people reporting such dismal results from paid search, [x+1] says, lived at or above the VP or director of marketing level on their company’s organization chart and 51.4 percent had “decision-making authority on spending and allocation of search.”

And while it’s true that only 53.3 percent of them had annual marketing budgets of more than $5 million to play with, a lucky 7.5 percent were planning to pull the trigger on at least $100 million.

So we aren’t talking about clueless dweebs here.  Or, if we are, they’re probably the highest paid clueless dweebs in the industry — especially the 15.9 percent who claim to be working for companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

If these experts, armed as they presumably are with the best metrics, analytics and strategic thinking money can buy — not to mention very little to do with their working hours except trying to get and keep their company’s marketing communications program on track — are getting such poor results from search marketing what hope do all the little fish in the SEM pond have?

Quite a bit, actually.  Since there really is no direct correlation between money and brains (think Paris Hilton vs. Einstein), there’s no reason a’tall why some intelligent, aggressive operator can’t develop a better, more effective keyword-bidding strategy for his kitchen-table website than some 31st-floor executive can for his offshore-owned Fortune 500 one.

This is particularly true because the small-site operator is quite likely to be a lot closer to his customers and have a much greater feel for their interests than the research associates doing the grunt work for the seat warmer in the executive office.   You can call this ability to connect with end users intuition or empathy or gut feelings, but whatever you call it, it’s one of the few things in the business world you can’t put a price tag on.  Steve Jobs would have it even if he left Apple to become CEO of a corner hamburger stand and ex-GM CEO Rich Wagoner wouldn’t have it if he were managing a neighborhood lemonade stand.

There is another side to this story, of course. The execs polled by [x+1] can afford to be wrong.  If their SEM effort is underperforming this year, they can just throw more bucks at it next year.  We’re not making that up, nearly two thirds of [x+1]’s respondents said they plan to spend at least as much on SEM this year as last and more than 13 percent planned to crank up SEM spending by over 20 percent despite economic cutbacks in other areas.

Small business operators are in a different boat.  While risk-taking is an integral part of operating any business, the scale of the wagers they can afford is far smaller and their margin for error is far, far thinner. Which makes ethical, relevant linking an even more compelling and viable strategy for building traffic, converting visitors to customers, and branding a website in bad times than it has historically been in good ones.

The reason is this: There is no such thing as a losing scenario for a quality linking campaign.  That may sound — and probably is — self serving coming from LinksManager, but that doesn’t make it any less true.  We’re not saying you always come up a winner with a link exchange, some links just aren’t productive.  But you haven’t lost anything on those non-productive links because you haven’t paid anything for them; they aren’t draining cash from your pocket every time they get clicked without resulting in a sale.

Meanwhile, your productive links — which are also costing you nothing — are adding sales to your bottomline with zero overhead.  Which is a great win by anyone’s definition.

If you’re a regular reader, you probably know that we frequently dispute the opinions of the SEO guru community. In the case of Pay Per Click SEM — particularly Pay Per Click during the worst economic crash in exactly 80 years — however, we have to agree with SEO Pro Steve Baldwin, editor-in-chief at Didit, the well-known search engine marketing agency.

“Paid search is an exceptionally difficult marketing medium to master, despite the perception promoted by the search engines that it’s a self-serve, plug-and-play road to profits,” Baldwin wrote in late June 2009. “Here, failure isn’t just an option: it’s practically guaranteed for the unwary and unequipped.”

And, frequently, if the [x+1} survey is to be believed, for the wary, well equipped and enormously funded as well.

Click here to recommend this blog: