Growth Partner owner and President Nathaniel Broughton was featured in an interview with Vanessa Zamora at Pubcon 2010, ahead of his session on the State of Domain Names.

View the full video here.

People who hate on SEO have always had this as a common rally cry: “Title tag.  H tag.  Done!”

What that means is SEO is simple, and all you have to do to rank is put your keyword in the <title> tag, in the <h*> tag, and boom you’ll rank.

This chant is always rebutted with the “PPC – The lazy man’s SEO” t-shirt I had a few years back at Pubcon.

While we all know these forms of online marketing both require a lot more attention than those remarks imply, I think it’s time to update the SEO one.  Ready or not, here it is:

Buy exact match domain.  Done!

Google’s boost for exact match domains is as strong as ever based on my experience.  You want to rank for “beach sandals”?  Screw everything you’ve heard about building links or title tags.  Get your hands on BeachSandals.com and things are going to work for you.  I promise.

Now, I support the reasoning behind the exact match bonus.  I know why it’s there.  It’s just one of many things going on in SEO that make me want to spend my time on something else these days.

The others?  How about the pandemic link drought on the web.  No one will link to anything.  Good viral content can bring eyeballs, but rarely will it bring links.  Retweets don’t count yet in the rankings to my knowledge . . .

Even still, if you are able to develop a way to bring in links on scale, you’re likely to get scrutinized.  They could be 100% free, earned, “yes I like this site, think it’s good for to link to and here’s the link”.  Anything on scale is going to get you into trouble.

Forgive me, but when the person who does less gets rewarded, I’m pissed.  I like the beach but only after a good day’s work.  The link economy is so jacked up that getting less links is actually better.  Try competing in that environment for awhile.  “So I should do less.  Okay, how much less is enough less?”  Ridiculous.

A few other complaints include-
You can’t buy links much any more.  People that sell them have polluted pages filled with casino, UK crap, or payday loans.  Good sites don’t sell them.  Getting them in the sidebar or the footer seems more like an eyesore or red flag than an honest vote.

Plus, the new Google design has also hurt organic CTR’s, just one instance in the line of many that have pushed organic results down and out from the top of the SERPs.

So I’m left with these thoughts-
Buy exact match domains.  That should work for awhile.  Don’t get too many links to them.  Just a few good ones.  Let it ride.

Down the road, I better get a lot better at monetizing social, PPC, and building a list/platform to survive, with all my businesses.

Cause the SEO route is competing for a much smaller chunk of traffic than it did 5 years ago, and it’s no fun in a link-less economy that lets exactmatch.org rank on name alone.

5 years ago I was an SEO all the way.  Today I’m basically a domainer.  In 5 years, I’m not sure I’ll be either.  Pick a buzzword: “zero sum game” “diminishing returns”.

How about “no fun anymore”.

Image: Paul Thurlby

Lifehacker.com is one of the most popular blogs online.  But their on-page SEO is hurting their traffic.

I bet if they made a few small changes they’d see a nice spike in traffic, that would stick around for the long-term.

I’m calling you out Lifehacker!

It sure isn’t about your incoming links (they have ~8 million), or unique content.  People love Lifehacker and the site puts out great content.  It’s funny, cause that’s the ‘hard part’.  They are messing up on the easy parts.

Here are the Problems

1. Title Tags
I wouldn’t be a nerdy SEO without looking right away at Lifehacker’s sloppy title tags.  First off, they need to drop the Category and the omnipresent “Lifehacker” from each post’s title tag.

Looking at this post on Webmonkey Stopwatches, the current title “The Browser Stopwatch Speed-Tests Page Load – Bookmarklets – Lifehacker”.

That should be changed to “The Browser Stopwatch Speed-Tests Page Load”.  Why?  They lose relevancy as the title tag gets longer.  Also, they are going to rank for “Lifehacker” regardless of including it in all their page titles, and Google might view this as duplicate crap.

This is a quick change in their CMS.  If you use something like WordPress, be sure to do this on your site.

2. Title Tag decouple/Keyword smarts
Second thing with these title tags is to try to be more aware of what keywords are worth ranking for.  This post entitled “First Look at Window’s 7 Backup and Restore Center”.  That’s a good title to show users on the site as a headline, but Lifehacker should go do some keyword research on Windows 7 before they post on it.

A keyword like “Windows 7 Review” gets 135,000 exact match searches a month.  This post could easily have a <title> of “Windows 7 Review – Backup and Restore Features”.

With 8 million freaking backlinks, and such a popular site, I bet they’d rank very high for ‘windows 7 review’ with that title, and ultimately get more traffic.

Decoupling a post headline and the <title> of a page is easy in any CMS.

3. Take the 4949422 out of the URLs.
That Windows 7 post’s URL is http://lifehacker.com/5144757/first-look-at-windows-7s-backup-and-restore-center

Why with the ‘5144757’?  Take that out.

Or look at http://lifehacker.com/5535583/first-look-at-ubuntu-light-and-unity-the-super-fast-mac+like-netbook-os

Any time there’s a “:” symbol in the post title, it goes as a “+” in the URL.  And look how long that is.

Lifehacker should micromanage their post-URLs to be shorter, cleaner, and more keyword-focused.  Cleaning up the <title> values is part 1, then translating that into the URL is part 2.  So http://lifehacker.com/5144757/first-look-at-windows-7s-backup-and-restore-center might become http://lifehacker.com/windows-7-review-backup

That’s how I’d do it, and I bet the traffic would go up, up, up across the site.

Easy Changes
That’s 3 simple things that are on-page changes Lifehacker should do that would instantly increase their traffic.  The current setup is poorly leveraging all the link popularity they’ve built up.

The point is these are easy changes that have the greatest effect when it’s a big site like Lifehacker.  I just wish they’d take a listen . . .

If you want to successfully market your business online, you need to generate great links for your site.

SEO is all about links.  Jay-Z wanted “Girls, Girls, Girls”.  You want “Links, Links, Links”.

(It might help to sing “I want lee-inks, lee-inks, links” each morning to keep the focus going.)

Every business we’ve successfully built with Growth Partner has benefitted from a steady supply of high quality links.  There are already a lot of good guides on how to build links online, and here’s a discussion of what makes up a “quality” link.

Here are 5 ways to go about getting links you might’ve not tried before:

1. Start a glossary. Any site in the world can have a glossary.  Hire a freelance writer to put together a unique glossary around your topic.  Put it up on your site at /glossary.html, and then go email a bunch of relevant sites in your niche about it.

There are also a bunch of sites that link to multiple glossaries.  You can find this with a “inurl:glossary” search in Google.  These likely won’t be as valuable links, but they will be easier to get.

The best links you’ll get out of this are the niche sites around your topic, who find the glossary useful for their visitors.

2. Start a legit scholarship. Start a yearly scholarship sponsored by your company.  Host it on your main site, with a sign up form.  Then go contact university websites and scholarship sites to get a link.

Don’t be shady about this – give a legit scholarship to someone.  Maybe it’s $2,000, maybe it’s $5,000.  Site owners might think you are not legit at first, but you can solidify the scholarship in two ways.

First, send notices out to the winning person’s school that they won (bonus: It might get featured in a school newsletter that gets posted on the school website).  Second, profile the student on your scholarship page.  Show a picture of them and interview them.

3. Anything can be a ‘calculator’. Widgets and calculators have always been easy ways to get links.  Consider this – any scenario where a user inputs a few bits of information in order to get a result can be a calculator.  That means any business or any site can make one.

Examples?  The “Find your hat size calculator”.  The “Best schools for you calculator”.  The “Laptop of your dreams calculator”.

Think along the lines of matching people with a result based on their input.  The link benefit can come in an embedded link in the calculator code (be sure to rotate them).  If it takes off, people will share it and you’ll get the best links virally.

4. Brand your blog. Years ago, boring company execs read a news story that pleaded them to start a company blog.  So they put up /blog on their site and posted about the company picnic and birthdays.  Maybe a new product or 2.

That’s weak, self-serving, and better for an internal company blog.  If you want links, you need to have a blog with some personality.  So dig into your niche and figure out how to brand your blog as a separate entity from the main website.

Give it a different name.  Focus it on a core customer segment.  And interact with that segment by having guest bloggers and guest blogging on their sites.  Again, don’t fake this.  You should care about these people and engage with them.

For the links, you can still host it at /blog.  Just call it something different and don’t talk about your company.  Talk about people.

5. Get married.
I’m serious.  Or have your employees get married.

Marriage announcements in newspapers can bring in links.  You know when they say “the bride-to-be is employed at _________________”?  That’s your shot.  Make sure they put a link in there.

A lot of companies struggle getting links from any mainstream news outlets.  You may think it’s goofy, but it’s probably one of your best chances.

Takeaway
Links.  It’s all about links.

Photos: Imagonovus and ptrol

Our resident PPC stud, Bryan Rahn, helped contribute to this post.  Bryan has been running PPC campaigns in some of the most competitive industries online since 2004.

As seems to happen every new moon or so, a friend came to me today looking for help with his pay per click campaign.

He is selling a book that helps to increase memory, focus and brain activity. After giving the account the old “once over,” I noticed some common problems I see with most people’s campaigns.  These are fairly standard suggestions that could apply to any account, so I hope it will help with your campaigns as well.

THE GOOD SECTION

Tight Keyword Ad Groups
The most common mistake people make in Adwords is in structuring their campaigns.  The best campaigns, those with the highest click-thrus and quality scores, are broken down into numerous Ad groups.  Each Ad group consists of tightly-related keywords.  Each Ad group points to a specific landing page containing those keywords.

That’s how you setup a great Adwords campaign.

Truth be told, my buddy’s was set up pretty well.  Each Ad group matched the Ad group name to a set of tightly related keywords.  That is, each Ad group contained 8-12 keywords that were closely related to each other, and matched well with the ad copy.

THE “HELP WANTED” SECTION

A Common Mistake
The exception was his “AdGroup #1”. It was way too broad, and similar to what I see in a lot of people’s starter campaigns.

It included keywords about Life Coaching, the 4 Hour Work Week, Make Money Easy and what just felt like random keywords. Plus, it had way too many keywords for one Ad group, nearly 100. These should be split out into smaller groups with matching ads.

A lot of the keywords also had a ‘poor’ quality score. As an example, the keyword ‘increasing creativity’ had a poor score.

Better, Specific Landing Pages
Part of the problem is ‘creativity’ is nowhere in the ad or the landing page.  It also stems from having so many random keywords in “AdGroup #1”.  Remember kids – keep ‘em tight.

Nearly every PPC campaign I audit could benefit from creating more landing pages, specific to a subset of keywords in a new Ad group.

It doesn’t have to be complicated, really it’s quite simple. You just need to dig in and do it.  In my friend’s campaign, if he would split out his ‘Life Coaching’ keywords into their own Ad group, then that Ad group needs a landing page that talks about ‘Life Coaching.’

The content on that landing page doesn’t have to be real in-depth. Just get those keywords on the page somewhere.

Think about Your Title Tags
The <title> tag on all my friend’s landing pages was “Pre Order.”  Not good.  Even though this was a no-index page, and SEO/organic CTR didn’t matter, I still believe each landing page should have a relevant page title and meta description.

Think like an SEO here – it looks better in the browser and may affect conversions.

Remember what You’re Selling
Some PPC ads seemed to leave out the most important part. My friend was selling a book, but the ads did not mention it was a book.

People looking for a seminar or some online help guide may have clicked on the ad when they had no intentions of buying and reading a book. Just letting the user know in the ad that we’re selling a book here will help prevent wasteful clicks,

Nix the Mobile When You’re Just Testing
Since he was just testing and had a small budget, I removed ads from showing on iPhones and mobile devices. For well-established campaigns, it may be ok to have ads showing on iPhones.  If you are just starting and testing out what you will get, you should probably leave them out (in my opinion).

Be Wary the Content Network
Right now, my friend’s campaign is opted “in” to both Search and Content. If you do want to show on the content network, then I suggest making a duplicate campaign, one for content and one for search. Then you can bid, write ads and track separately.

The reason I recommend this is the type of traffic you see from the content network is different than straight searches.  Run them separately, analyze them separately.  You’ll be better off.

Negative Keywords are Important
My friend’s campaign initially had no negative keywords. (Quick tip: Here is a great resource for a list of standard negative keywords that apply in almost every campaign. Before adding these to your campaign straight up, make sure there is nothing on the list that you do want to bid on. Once you confirm, add the whole thing at the Campaign Level.)

To find out what negative keywords to add, I ran a search query report.  I saw he was getting a ton of impressions, but very few clicks from these exact matches –
[focus]
[goals]
[retirement wishes]

I immediately added those keywords as negative exact matches at the campaign level, Without attention, they could kill his quality score.

Why? Because they are too broad for what he is trying to drive traffic for, and all the impressions with no clicks will just drag down the overall quality score of the campaign.

I was also able to pick out a few specific keywords for negatives -
“focus vitamins for kids”
“get rich online”
“does moss always grow on the north side of trees”

Adding specific negative keywords at the Ad group level can also help increase quality score, and ensure both you and my friend get the exact traffic you want coming in.

Takeaways
Most PPC campaigns I see have a good start, but remember- keep your Ad groups tightly bound to specific keyword sets.  You cannot have too many Ad groups.  Make specific landing pages for each one.  Mind your negative keywords.

Images: Follow*Sound and delitefulimage