UK Expert SEO

I was asked by someone how to get their web site up the rankings…..common question by the way

So in order to avoid the usual; tag this , keyword that link this and link that , I went to a far more base level…

the enlightened of you will have heard of www.cluetrain.com (markets are conversations) and taking my que from that, I explained by my learned friend that he had to get into a conversation with the right people in the internet.

Conversations and seo !?!

If we assume search engines want to leverage humans as a quality control tool for filtering links and information, then places like wikipedia, DMOZ ….and blogs, make complete sense.

Aside: this explains why a few years back, google ranked those niche directories.

Blogs follow a set format, they have humans filtering stuff and importantly their prominence mirrors off line social interaction. i.e. the more opinionated, knowledgeable and entertaining the writer, the more likely the person will rise to prominence within their sphere of other influencers. Prominence in this case is links and commentary in from the right sites.

So back to my friend
My advice was:
- spend on pay per post/reviewme
- really bend overbackwards to help the paid for bloggers write good stuff
- pick you keywords carefully, going for words which are’nt too competitive early on and build from that
- use this opportunity to build some goodwill from the bloggers
- if you do it right and really enter into the spirit of the cconversation you will get a buzz going
- that buzz means more writeups and more links (unpaid for)

and then you should get on to the google SERPS for some meaningful keyphrases.

The other point about paid for blogging is that its dips under the search engines radar for ’spammy’ paid for links, unlike the template text links of old.

and since there is a self adjusting ‘human filter’ involved i.e. write crap, and your fans abandon you, it seems like a relatively sustainable model.

Finally. If I were paid for this, how do you think a search engine would know!