Learn From Your Own Experience

159 Pages·2013·4.3 MB·English

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by Gabriel Goldenberg
Editor Richard Kershaw
Table Of Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction 1
What’s the Big Idea?
Principles of Creative Search Marketing
Rule 1. Constantly Learn From Others 5

Read Constantly To Gain Public Information
Network Relentlessly And Gain Private Information
Networking: Much More Than A Source Of Learning

Rule 2. Teach Yourself 15

Learn From Your Own Experience
How To Run An SEO Experiment
Useful Testing Jargon
Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion Program
SEO Tests In The Wild
Steps in Testing

Rule 3. Study Patterns 26

Learn By Looking For Relationships In The Data

Rule 4. Think Laterally 30

Is This Relevant To My Situation?
Principles of Critical Thinking

Rule 5. Define The Problem 34

What’s Going On Here?
Question The Motives
Rule 6. Question The Logic 46

Assumptions, Premises, Logic And Conclusions
Logical Limits – Deductive Validity And Inductive Validity
Controlled Testing Leads To Wild Testing
Rule 7. Making The Right Decision 55

What Google’s Mad Poker Skills Can Teach Us
How To Miscalculate Expected Value
The Newspaper Test And Personal Tastes
Convert 66

Tactic 1. How To Rank Despite The Splash Page
Tactic 2. Write Conditional CSS For Higher Conversion Rates
While Protecting SEO Traffic

Tactic 3. Message Match Despite Dynamic Slideshows
Tactic 4. Message Match On Longtail Keywords
Tactic 5. Defend Your Reputation... and Your Margins
Tactic 6. Sexy SEO Headings
Tactic 7. Forums – A Great Source Of Longtail Traffic and Affiliates
Tactic 8. Local SEO: Protect Call-Tracking Integrity
Build Links, Buy Links and Fight Paid Links 88

Tactic 9. Undermine Competitor’s Paid Links
Tactic 10. Why Email and Whitepapers Facilitate Paid Links
Tactic 11. Three Sources For Link Prospect Inspiration
Tactic 12. Link Campaigning With Demographic Targeting
Tactic 13. The Stock Photo Hook
Tactic 14. Disguising Paid Links As AdSense
Tactic 15. Ngrams For Anchor Text Selection
Tactic 16. Cloning Expired Sites
Tactic 17. Promote Linkbait By Email, Not Digg
Understand and Discover Keywords 111

Tactic 18. The 5 Minute Official Commercial Intent Keyword Research Tool
Tactic 19. FREE: Your Competitors’ Keywords
Tactic 20. Are These RATS Gnawing At Your ROI?
Tactic 21. SEOs Rejoice When Pirates Share Their Booty
Tactic 22. Glossaries And Indices Are Keyword Databases
Perform Other High-ROI SEO Tasks 125
Tactic 23. Test SEO/PPC Copy 10 Times Faster!
Tactic 24. How To Beat Captcha Cracking Bots
Tactic 25. How Legal Privacy Trumps Whois Privacy
Tactic 26. Mix Contextual / Demographic Retargeting For Brand Lift
Tactic 27. Niche Market Research Beyond Keywords
Tactic 28. How To Filter Your Leads By Education And Linkability
Tactic 29. Tailor Your Site To RSS Subscribers
Tactic 30. How To Consolidate Content And OutWikipedia Wikipedia
Tactic 31. Mine This Data For Competitive Intelligence
Conclusion 152
What’s Next For Advanced SEOs?
Introduction
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What’s The Big Idea?
If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you’ve fed him for life.
(Assuming he really, really, really likes fish.)
Want to learn sport-fishing, so you can catch the big ones?
This book is for online marketers and webmasters at an intermediate level or higher, who want to:
• Go after the highest-ROI, most-competitive markets
• Gain respect, raises, and promotions for delivering results
• Increase sales for their agency
• Spend less on search marketing services and be more self-reliant
• Have more time for themselves, by avoiding things they don’t enjoy
• Get creative and move outside the box, rather than be an unremarkable also-ran
This book is about problem solving in search marketing. I want to teach you principles that will di-
rect you to think deeply and act intelligently so you can reach any goal.
The assumptions I made in writing this book
At the heart of this book are some assumptions I’ve made about you, dear reader. It’s important to
explain the assumptions I made because the more you fit the profile, the greater the value you’ll get
from this book.
I assume that you are:
1. Savvy on search - obviously. If you’re a beginner, this isn’t the book for you.
2. Goal-oriented - mostly building your business or non-profit.
3. Open-minded - this book finds inspiration for whitehat and grayhat tactics in blackhat and
grayhat SEO.
4. Willing to think critically and implement - you don’t have to already be a critical thinker, but
you’ve got to be willing to improve.
A lot of this is about encouraging you to think outside the box and sharing tips to do that. But the
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value you get out of this is entirely in your hands. As my grade 7 math teacher, the ever-cheery Mrs.
D’Ermo, would tell us: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink!”
I hope you’ll make good use of this book.
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Principles of Creative
Search Marketing
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