echwa.com

Just when is it right to accept a free gift or money in exchange for an article or review on a website or a blog? Always, in my opinion, so long as you are open about that transaction and don’t dress your article as anything else than a paid piece of prose.

Michael Gray makes a challenge to the ethics of TechCrunch writer, Sarah Lacy, today in his post about the difference of ethics between types of writers; be they bloggers or journalists. Fair enough.

With spin being the staple of successive Governments and also of traditional offline PR, Media and Business it can hardly be that surprising that these same tactics are employed in the online environment. The sad reality is that payola in all of it’s guises is a publishing fixture and is likely to remain such so long as there are hearts, minds and importantly consumer spending habits at stake.

Aside from the potential infringement of numerous country specific regulatory controls regards honesty and integrity in communications it may not be immediately appreciated that a lot of good writing talent is forced to tow the line in creating biased copy.

The humble writer can be drawn into a murky world of paid constructions through their need to satisfy the ’style’ guidelines of their employer and even perhaps the ‘brand guidelines’ of a brand that may be sponsoring the writing.

Complicating the matter more in the online world is a lack of consensus from the traffic driving search engines in defining where the lines of bias lay, as they themselves are not always completely transparent about their commercial benefits that they relinquish for bias (of positioning, thinking paid inclusion (Microhoo)).

I have worked with a number of demanding clients over the years and it is often taken for granted that clients understand the implications of actions that they demand in an online world; but they seldom do and nor are they keen on listening. Clients are pressured by what their competitors are doing and a need to be seen by their own executives to be responding.

Considerations such as a penalty being applied by a search engine for flouting a search engines definition of acceptable are measured against the risk of being caught out. This is not anything new, search for “Max Clifford” in your favorite engine to see shocking examples of media and populous manipulation.

I also agree that we are well enough into the era of online to understand that there are certain rules that should be adhered to. I do not think that the determining point on this whole issue are for the search engines alone to release their next iteration of how they each respectively determine if a link is valid or not, paid for or not. The argument is far wider than that and consistency is needed:

• across international law dealing with advertising standards,
• search engine policy applicable to not just links but persuasive text,
• search marketing professional adopting a code of practice, and;
• client organizing groups that are willing to drive change

I beleive that these combined have the power to endeer change to us all. Of course there are more important issues facing us such as plastics in our oceans.

I have always found that link building quality links is one of the most time consuming tasks that can be done when implementing an SEO strategy. There is the whole discussion about which links you should obtain and at what speed they should be sought and Arron Wall over at SEOBook.com has a great post today about the Link Growth Profiles that adds even more to the mix.

An element of Arron’s article (regards the geometric link build) conjures up thoughts of the fabled 200+ signals that Google says their algorithm looks for — notably a subset of Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) caught my train of thought. With the proliferation of blogs that are created and crafted purposefully to obtain rank advantage for a site it begs to ask that there must also exist, along with QDF a suite of dampening levers to ensure that only sites that pass those filters truly benefit from so called freshness.

Anyway, moving on as I got sidetracked there. I have always found it quite helpful when it comes to addressing the link building task to commit to a period of thorough research of your market; the image of the search results landscape that your site will be competing within. This is going to be composed of your direct and indirect competitors along with highlighting potential commercial opportunities for you. Typically you create this image (or graph) as a follow on task to your keyword research.

Steps to produce the Competitive Focus Graph:

1. Undertake your keyword research
2. Use a tool such as Advanced Web Ranking to scoure the main search engines for the top 40 results against each of your target keyword phrases and produce a CSV version of the Top Sites report.
3. Import the extracted CSV data from Advanced Web Ranking into Excel into a new Workbook and call it ‘Competitive Research’. You should have a number of columns of data in this sheet if everything went well.
4. Advanced Web Ranking exports the Full URI, so you will need to create a copy of this column data and run the new column called ‘Domain Name’. I have found it best to do this at the end of the data set so that when I run the Text To Columns tool (deliminator of /) my ranking data is not overwritten ;-0
5. Name your data sheet ‘Data’ and add some columns to this Excel sheet called ‘Competitor’, ‘In-Direct’ and ‘Opportunity’.
6. Select all of the data in your ‘Data’ sheet and sort it on your new ‘Domain Name’ column.
7. Manually filter through the data and mark each of the rows in your newly created columns with an x if it is a competitor, in-direct competitor (newspapers, portals, blogs, government sites) or opportunity (if it is a directory site, ebay, amazon, affiliate, or other potential commercial opportunity).
8. Create an Excel pivot table on this data sheet and apply thresholds (auto-filters to limit the data that you are looking at) on the SUM of the top 10 results across all your checked keywords and keyword phrases against the domain level of the data that you have extracted.
9. You now have the basis of data to understand where and who your search landscape competitors are and importantly where they are getting ranking traction from (assuming that you are filtering also on keyword concept areas).

Now that you have this new understanding of competitors you have a lot of power in focusing your efforts on those competitors that are worthwhile to uncover where they are getting their inbound links and also making an analysis of their on-page/on-site optimisation tactics.

Link Assistant is a fantastic tool that I use to understand where a competitor is getting their links from. SEOmoz also has a great tool, LinkScape, that allows you to enter in a competitors domain and export upto 3,000 of their inbound link partners.

Both of these tools provide you with tutorials on how to assess which links are those that are potentially valuable for your own optimisation efforts so I will not repeat that in this post. As with anything, there are many ways to do this task and folks develop preferences for one tool of another. I encourage you to go ahead and look at the tutorials and try their tools before committing to purchase and adding them to your SEO tool-belt.

Fellow blogger and illustrious SEO tool developer, Jon Henshaw, has written an interesting post entitled “Forget About Relationships, Twitter is the Perfect Channel for Support and Push Marketing” where he highlights an experience that he recently had in getting service for his internet connection — via Twitter.

Consumers should rejoice when large corporates seemingly embrace an obvious improvement to the customer experience process. Strangely I have found a number of businesses (who will remain nameless) that highlight any number of reasons to not use these cost effective tools such as Twitter to communicate with their customers as they fear the power shift that they place into the hands of the customer.

The agencies and clients that are prepared to trust their customers by harnessing the power shift that these tools enable benefits, i.e.: strengthening their online reputation management (ORM) more so than the burden that the management of the additional communication channel may create through changes to workflow or extra resourcing.

The true power of negative and positive interactions in these overtly public forums is to provide would be customers a sense of a company’s commitment to keep the customer satisfied.