Thank you Rhea, Thank you.

You can read more about Rhea’s heroism from every link in this sentence.

@Rhea sure know’s how to linkbait – Just do a little thing like saving an entire industry

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Rhea Drysdale Saved SEO as we know it.

While I have worked on other peoples sites for as long as I can remember – I just have not had the time to make any of my own affiliate sites. Thanks to a blog post that inspired me I have created a site to sell Benchmade Griptilian knives.

What I hope to do with this site is to do a full on case study – From conception to $$ and outline each step along the way. I will show everyone my results and hopefully write about how it all happened and the steps I have taken to accomplish my goals.

Making money on the web is pretty easy if you know what you are doing – And we at 10kThings want to help teach all of you how to do it.

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Affiliate marketing

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Bye bye those big upfront buys

Good design is, well, good design. This means that a site is easy to navigate, with relevant and congruent content that makes users view multiple pages, spend more time on the site, and hopefully produce the desired out come (a conversion metric such as – a purchase, phone call, leaving a comment, etc) while differentiating its self from the competition, if necessary.

Well executed search engine optimization will ensure proper messaging when being indexed by search engines. This means that the messaging of the site (a product of good design) will match how the site is read by the search engines and then ranked in order by keywords. Once design and SEO is in place only then should proper Pay Per Click advertising tactics should be used.

When all three elements come together this is what a search experience should look like:

1. An internet user types in a the keyword that is targeted by both PPC and SEO
2. The ranking of the site appears in both the organic and paid search listings of the search results page, thus increasing the chance of a click through.
3. With good design, the user finds what they are looking for and a conversion metric is triggered
4. Search engines reward the PPC advertiser because the high relevancy with lower cost per click and higher ranking

PPC rocks but it isn’t the end-all be-all that so many people incorrectly believe it to be. SEO, design AND PPC are all required for the most effective online branding strategy.

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PPC Rocks! Well Kinda…

I then went on to explain that while we don’t have access to the code that makes the crawlers work – we still know how to work with and around the system.  We know these things through testing and thanks to the free exchange of theories and experiment results from people across the world – we know what works and what doesn’t.

Being able to have an open dialog and discuss SEO with thousands of other people who have a very vested interest in SEO and search marketing is an incredible thing.  With this open discussion and rapid advancement of SEO it has caused something, perhaps, unexpected.

As SEO’s get better at what they do, by being able to communicate in such an advanced way, so too does the mighty Google get better at thwarting their efforts.  Each advances the other as quickly as they advance themselves.

It is social media that has allowed SEO professionals to take their game to the next level and keep ahead of the constantly changing Google landscape.  Without being able to go to sites like Sphinn and find the latest news, developments and ideas about search – SEO would be a much more difficult thing.  Only those within the most trusted of networks would know what worked and what didn’t and because of this Google would likely not be where it is today.

Communication is key but it is also a double-edged sword.  Speaking freely with each other is what makes us better at getting our sites ranked and it is that same free speaking that lets Google know where it needs to tighten its defenses… and so the cycle continues.

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SEO and Google – Arms Race