Lately many influential bloggers have written about the end of the golden age of tech blogging. They say “tech” but in a way they mean blogging in general it seems. Some people were furious and asked whether “over” is the new dead. I didn’t really care.

Then over the recent weeks as I considered my own blogging “career” I realized that indeed an era is over. It’s the stone age of blogging that is over now. Also I recognized partially what replaced the Neanderthals of blogging and what’s next.

I want to summarize what really happened in the first decade of blogging.

Who am I to look back at a decade of blog history? I was quite late to blogging. I think I tried Blogger when it came out in 2001 but I was only reading blogs for two years when I finally started my first real blog in 2003. It was a private blog about art, design and activism. I had written it in German. I remember that at some point in 2004 I was even among the top 100 German blogs in two separate Technorati-like lists.

I tried to convince my very first SEO client in 2004 to establish a blog and even started one for him. In 2005 I finally started to blog professionally aka for money and clients. One of the clients back then was the largest union of the world. I created a whole blogging portal with dozens of blogs for the youth organization of the union. Ironically I worked up to 80h a week for the union or the “agency” that actually paid me. This union is known for the “35h work week” demand.

In 2006 I created my first full fledged blog for a personal client of mine. In 2007 I started this blog – SEO 2.0 and the rest is history.

I’m still one of the most well known bloggers in the SEO industry, mostly due to my contribution over at SEOptimise. From 2008 to 2011 I have written hundreds of flagship blog articles for them and made them the best SEO blog in the UK, both by the number one ranking in Google.co.uk and by winning the UK Search Awards. Sadly I wasn’t even notified or invited to the ceremony. The SEOptimise team has received the price instead of mine. I only got an email a few weeks later that they don’t need me anymore in 2012.

Meanwhile I have established and written for two flagship blogs for German clients. One of them is profitable for more than 2.5 years now. The other is the top ranking cycling blog in Germany despite me not really having the time to take care of it a lot. Additionally I have started a blog about science fiction in 2011. Last but not least I update a private Tumblr blog for two years now.

Internationally I have written for all kinds of SEO blogs and beyond like the Hubspot inbound marketing blog, Google Blogoscoped when it was in the top 30 of the most successful blogs worldwide. There many many more I can’t even remember. So indeed I know something about blogging despite being a late adopter.

So what has actually changed in the last decade, the time I consider the stone age of blogging?

The definition of a blog has changed itself

When you look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs these days and compare it to those from just a few years ago you will wonder why there are almost no blogs on the list or in other words how a blog is defined now.  A blog seems to be a popular corporate news site with a team of writers who publish items almost every hour. Real blogs like BoingBoing or Kottke are the exception. Even they have transformed or lost in popularity.

Blogging is a multimillion business not personal anymore

In the early days blogs were not much more than personal diaries. Over time they become more and more like corporate media until corporate media swallowed them or outmatched them on their own turf. The CNN Political Ticker is the #11 most popular blog these days. Some blogs were bought and sold for many millions of dollars. Others earn millions of dollars or venture capital by the millions. I rarely see personal diary-like blogs of importance now anymore. People still care for opinion but not for the person behind it.

Blogs are about topics and teams not bloggers

I was really astounded when AOL bough the seemingly anti-corporate activist site Huffington Post. When they sacked Michael Arrington, the original founder of TechCrunch I was still somehow shocked but when it happened to myself on SEOptimise I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Blog readers today don’t care anymore who writes the stuff they read on their favorite “blog”. It’s just a site or news source like any other. The unthinkable, removing the main blogger from a blog, is not an issue by now. Bloggers get hired and fired. People read blogs not bloggers. The teams are interchangeable as long as the topic stays the same.

Everybody blogs today but people do not consider it blogging

What do people on Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter? They blog. When I started blogging a blog posts was the size of the typical status update of today. A short sentence with a link was a perfect usual blog posting for years. The flagship blog post aka huge well written article is a relatively new phenomenon. So in a way most people have embraced blogging but without the attitude attached to it. Today companies like Facebook or Google own your updates and they can remove them any day. They even decide what you are allowed to write about or what “profile” picture you use.

WordPress is a full fledged advanced CMS

When I first used WordPress I was late again. I think I switched to WP when it was in version 1.2. It was clumsy and ugly back then but still it was the most advanced, user friendly and popular blogging tool at the time. I didn’t like the backend code of it but I was glad that I didn’t have to code everything myself. Yes, I have coded my websites by myself! Today WordPress is a full fledged CMS you rather use for your whole site where the blog is just part of it. Many people do not use the blog “module” at all. WordPress is really advanced when it comes to features, extensibility and customization.

WordPress themes are high quality web design today

In the early years I hated all WordPress themes. I’d take a theme and styled it completely new until it looked a bit better. As I’m not a designer I just stripped most styles. Over the years the themes got better and better but most of them still looked like diaries for teenage girls and poor poets. I’ve recently been looking around again for a great clean and minimalist theme and I was overwhelmed be the sheer number of highest quality themes that look a design for a few thousands of dollars. Many of the best are premium themes but you also get outstanding free themes.

Blog writing is almost of journalistic length and depth

As noted above blogging in the early days was often like tweeting or writing Facebook updates today. Short sentences with a link were quite common. Adding images or even videos did not happen a lot at first. I remember that I rarely added images in the first months of my blog in 2003. Blogging and journalism were like two opposite sides of the same coin, they never touched each other.

Over the years not only journalists have embraced blogging but blogging itself has become more journalistic and in-depth. Some blog posts over at Search Engine Land are so long I rarely have the time to read them in their entirety. Also journalism itself has degenerated. Today most journalistic articles are just republished agency news reports from AP, Reuters or DPA. Blogs posts are often much better than actual newspaper articles.

Blogs are interfaces and hubs in a social Web environment

Without a blog a site is like a dead end. There is nothing really you can offer to make people used to social media engage with your  site unless you have at least a blog. Forums or communities are of course even better but a blog is the easiest one of them to set up and maintain. In a social Web environment people are not keen on reading your sales copy or pseudo-objective press releases and news articles. They want to know who you are and how you think. Blogs are interfaces between companies and customers. Journalists and readers. A site that doesn’t have such an interface is effectively dead. The blog is also a hub for all your media related endeavors. You cover or announce it on a blog. You get popular via your blog, the rest of the website is just the structure.

There is no such thing as a blogosphere anymore

I seldom hear the term blogosphere anymore. Do you know what it is? It was something I felt in the early days of blogging in Germany. The blogosphere was like a virtual family. Whenever you wrote a post you knew everybody else in that huge family will in some way relate to it, even by not reading or noticing it. When a post didn’t get linked by other bloggers, when it did not become part of the blogosphere everybody knew that it wasn’t really on point. When I started blogging in English around 2007 I didn’t feel really as a part of it but I felt that it was still there. Today I feel nothing. There are people who write for blogs they work for. There are many blogosphere if there are at all.

Every niche and industry has its own blogosphere and rules

Every niche, industry or topic seems to have a blogosphere of its own these days. When I started this blog I wanted to cover many topics at once, blogging, social media, SEO but also “make money online” topics or web design. Later I added usability, freelancing, self improvement. Today there is a whole sphere of blogs for each of these topics, some of them already imploded, for instance there are just a few good and active freelancing blogs left.

On the other hand I can’t “compete” with all social media all the time blogs anymore. Web design blogs are filled to the brim with resources lists I can’t match either. Every topic requires a different kind of writing, strategy and even design it seems. Self improvement blogs are clean and sell ebooks. Architecture blogs show off building by architects all the time instead of writing about architecture. Web design blogs do now describe the practice of web design either but they list tools and resources on how to design for the Web yourself. Every niches has its own rules of blogging.

Consolidation, a few blogs dominate each niche or topic

Every blogging topic has one or a few blogs that dominate it. Search Engine Land dominates search blogging, SEOmoz does it for SEO, Mashable for social media and Social Media Examiner for social media marketing. TechCrunch still dominates tech blogging even though the founder is gone. Nobody needs him, his new blog is nowhere as popular as his old one. There are few other blogs who still try to compete but unless you have a team of dedicated bloggers you can’t really compete for attention with them.

I follow people on social media who share SEOmoz articles every day it seems. I’ve followed those who did it with Mashable. I prefer to use an RSS reader for that purpose. I don’t need people to shove the most popular blog down my throat each day. Most other people seem to like it and use Twitter instead of RSS. So even a renowned figure like Arrington can’t compete with the giants anymore.

Commercial blogs that use blog software and are full of ads abound

There are not only the huge corporate blogs you have to compete with for attention these days. There also myriads of blogs that are technically blogs, as they use WordPress or Blogger but they are just a collection of keyword driven commercial content mixed with undisclosed affiliate links to lure  search engine users and make them click. Finding a real blog with a real human behind it gets more and more difficult. Either the authors are not really associated with that particular blog or you don’t even know who the “Admin” is.

Blogging is the new normal, nothing to talk about

What I have noticed about blogging in recent years that you don’t have to talk and write about it that much anymore. In the early years blogging was new, amazing and still unfolding. Right now blogs are the most common form of regularly updated publication on the Web. Corporations websites add blogs because people are used to read like that. Almost everything about blogging has been already said and written numerous times. That was one of the reasons why I didn’t even care for the “golden age of blogging” meme.

Blogging is about personal branding not writing anonymously

My first blog was anonymous in a way. I just didn’t mention my real name on it. It was like Tumblr today. Nobody cared for my name. Also I didn’t want people to expect certain kind of content and opinion beacuse I was a pole. Today blogging is personal branding. You are somebody if you blog. Or at least you should try to be somebody when you blog. Otherwise blogging will become frustrating quickly.

People won’t trust you as much as they trust bloggers with real names. Even Google won’t rank you as high as an author who discloses who s/he is. These seems to contradict same of my former points when I wrote that people do not care about the bloggers abnymore. They indeed don’t unless you make them. You have to highlight the fact that you write and not “Admin”.

These are the changes that came to my mind right now. I could write on for hours. What I want to stress is that as you see above some of the changes are rather positive, others can be viewed as negative, some are ambiguous. Overall they show that blogging  has evolved beyond the stone age.

We do not live in cages anymore. Indeed a new WordPress with a modern theme is like a condo compared to a cage of WP from a few years ago. I welcome this change.

On the other hand I do not consider AOL or CNN to be bloggers thus I don’t have to identify or even compete with them. It’s a bit sad that the categorization of weblog is a bit meaningless these days. It can mean anything and everything.

• So what’s next?
• Will only corporations blog?
• Will we just “blog” for corporations like Facebook or Google?

Remember that some things haven’t changed. What I have learned over the years is that bloggers care for other bloggers. Not all of them some will actually attack you just to position themselves in a better light but overall blogging connects.

I may not be a particularly gifted writer but people who like me, other bloggers, tell their friends and followers and thus my blog posts get shared. It’s as simple as that. I read and share postings by other whenever I can.

Half a year ago I wrote about what I called then “smart mob SEO“. The smart mobs of the early blogging era are still there. They might occupy public places but they also can form and support bloggers. Often when other bloggers link to me or I link to them we outrank huge corporate sites. So it’s possible. Real people are always better than mindless corporate drones or just employees who happen to blog.

I don’t want to return to my cage but I still like sitting occasionally around the virtual fireplace

and convene with other bloggers to change the world. Facebook and Google are not replacements for blogs, they just parrot them without the inherent meaning. For real bloggers Facebook and Google are only tools to promote their own blogs.

You can still or now more than ever create your audience. You won’t get as much traffic as the AOL blogs but you don’t need that much. You want a small but dedicated audience. The 1000 true fans who can feed you are not a myth.

* CC image by Roger Smith.

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1. 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me
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The Search Marketing Standard is not only the oldest search marketing print publication I know of, it’s also the most focused and probably most popular one. Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading numerous issues of the magazine.

Recently I had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Frances Mary Krug, associate editor of Search Marketing Standard magazine about

the past, present and future of SMS, print publications, SEO and search marketing.

I have added emphasis on some passages in the replies I personally think are important.

Tad of SEO 2.0: Hello Frances, it’s almost two years since Search Marketing Standard (SMS from now on) has been acquired in summer 2008. You are still here so it seems to have worked out. Tell us a bit more about how your magazine has developed since then.

Frances Mary Krug: It’s certainly been an interesting last two years. Moving from a small office in New York to being part of a much larger business was a big step. We had some turnover in staff, including our editor-in-chief, who completed his college degree and left to pursue other goals. But we’ve managed to make the transition successfully, even in the midst of a huge, continuing economic crisis.

SEO 2.0: It seems everybody out there is bemoaning year after year the agony of print journalism. SMS started out as a print magazine in the middle of the ongoing print crisis and it seems to fare quite well, what’s your secret? Are the subscriber numbers stable, rising or rather stagnating?

Frances: It’s kind of funny, actually. Right after the acquisition, we decided to transition from an advertising-based model to a paid subscription base, which certainly turned out to be the right move given the general collapse of print advertising through 2009. It has enabled us to get by even though advertisers choose to increasingly put their ad dollars into online.

As far as our subscriber numbers, we are moving away from the “free subscription” model to the “paid model”, which entails some flux in the subscriber count. Our paid subscriptions are growing steadily, which is an encouraging sign when you see print magazines failing daily. Giving away magazines is a lot easier that charging for them, but paid subscribers provide a better picture of what’s really important to readers, since they are willing to pay for the content. That’s helped SMS focus on what’s really important to readers in the industry.

SEO 2.0: I’ve noticed a significant change in the last issue of SMS. For the first time I remember you have a “cover girl” or rather boy. It’s analytics guru Avinash Kaushik. How come? Do you plan to focus more on people than tools and techniques?

Frances: The change in design for the cover page isn’t meant to indicate a shift in focus of the magazine content, though we do want to recognize key industry contributors by providing attribution on the cover of our magazine. We’ve even had non-subscribers who are fans of Avinash purchase individual copies of the Summer issue of the magazine to add to their collection of Avinash material.

SEO 2.0: You told me beforehand that there are some changes to come up in the near future at SMS. What are they? Have you already introduced them in the current issue? My impression is that you don’t focus on one topic anymore as much as you did in the past.

Frances: One of the biggest changes will be the debut of a digital edition of the magazine with our upcoming Fall issue. Even though our primary purpose and selling point is the fact that we are a print magazine,

there is no doubt that digitization of the magazine format is inevitable.

We still believe, however, that a print version will remain as a preferred format for a significant group of people, and we intend to continue offering a print edition. A digital edition will also help mitigate the increasing problems we’ve seen with mail delivery to some international destinations, which are a large part of our subscription base. We can’t speed up delivery of the mail, but we can offer an alternate way to access the magazine if an issue goes astray or is continually chewed up by the machinery.

Another big change is a redesign of our website. The main goal of the redesign is to organize and present our content in a more logical fashion that better reflects the topics and subject areas that our readers are interested in. For example, if you are interested in seeing all the posts written by a specific author, you will quickly and easily be able to get to a listing.

The past few issues have had a more generalized approach in content. What we want to avoid is having readers glance at the cover of their issue, see that everything seems to be focused on one general topic (be it International Search, Mobile Search, Social Media, etc.) and feel that there is nothing in the issue to interest them if they have no wish to read about that topic. In reality, even in issues where we have focused on one topic, we still have articles and columns about other topics, and we don’t want to give the impression that it is otherwise. Since we are only a quarterly publication, a subscriber certainly wants to feel that in each and every issue there will be something of interest to them.

SEO 2.0: You have covered the search marketing landscape for a few years now. What are the most significant changes lately?

Frances: Wow, that’s a very tough question because there is so much that could fit into that category. I think, however, that the changes to the Google SERPs are both a symptom of the ongoing change in the industry, as well as a factor in that change.

The days of being on the first page of Google results and ranking first for a keyword on Google are gone.

Universal search and so many different kinds of results (not just web pages) competing for the attention of searchers has led to an overcrowded, visually unappealing results page. Real-time results, while providing relevancy, have the power to change the entire approach toward SEO.

Another enormous factor, I think, is the local/mobile search powerhouse. Technology has finally hit the nail on the head and although there will be winners and losers among app builders and developers, the real winners will be searchers. The battlefield is going to be bloody, however, and even Google is realizing that if they provide a less-than-perfect solution for too long, a competitor may find something to exploit.

SEO 2.0: Do we still have standalone SEO these days or is it always part of the bigger picture as in “search marketing”?

Frances: I think it has to be part of a larger picture. It’s no longer enough to make sure the mechanics of a site are working and the necessary tags have been optimized. Ranking on the first page of Google is no longer the gold standard in the same way as it used to be.

It used to be that we didn’t really consider it “search marketing” unless you were actively advertising online via AdWords or more traditional display advertising.

Now, however, in order to compete, you need to be involved in social media marketing, email marketing, etc. We’re not just in the business of optimizing websites so that search engines can read them and judge relevancy to specific search queries – although that is certainly still a vital part of the business. Now, we need to ensure that all parts of the equation are covered and tracked. What will be interesting is to see how some SEOs adapt (or fail to adapt) to some of the skills needed to succeed in areas like social media.

SEO 2.0: How do you combine online and print efforts? Your business model is still selling the magazine isn’t it? Does the website actually sell subscriptions? Or do you get new subscribers via the print issue itself?

Frances: Juggling online and print efforts is a huge challenge, especially with the general downturn in the economy through 2009 and the resultant advertising crisis. Because of the subject matter of our magazine – the search marketing industry – we feel that our website cannot just be a place for people to manage their subscriptions. We need to have a site that offers more than that – that’s why we have a number of contributors who write informative blog posts, a twice-monthly newsletter, an extensive online events calendar, we have put together webinars, white papers, etc.

New subscribers come from all different sources.

We exhibit at some conferences and distribute free sample copies at others, which helps get the word out. Others see the magazine on a coffee table at their web designer’s office or read commentary about an article in a current issue on a blog.

SEO 2.0: When will I be able to buy SMS at my newsstand along Newsweek and Wired here in Germany?

Frances: Tad, I’m sorry, but there are no plans to take SMS to the newsstands in Germany or any other country for that matter. I think that would be a tough business model to sell in the current challenging market for print.

SEO 2.0: How would you define SEO 2.0? Does it mean something to you more than this blog’s name?

Frances: Well, it certainly IS a clever name for a blog, but SEO 2.0 is much more than that. It’s really the next logical step in the development of the industry. SEO is no longer just a set of “rules” that you can follow and put in place and expect to see concrete results from.

SEO 2.0 is about optimizing Web 2.0 content, and as such, includes an emphasis on creativity and social behavior

and how to use the new tools available (such as Twitter) to optimize and boost visibility within search engines and other online destinations.

SEO 2.0: Thank you very much Frances for taking the time to inform the SEO 2.0
readers.

Frances: Tad, thanks for inviting me to speak and letting me share some of my thoughts about why the online marketing world needs a print publication!

SEO 2.0: As you see there is still a way to earn money with print publications in a quite small niche like ours. I’m very impressed. Take note for full disclosure: I was both a contributor (once) and an affiliate of Search Marketing Standard some time ago.

What are your thought on the future of our industry and print media?

Related posts:

1. 3 Search Marketing Magazines in Print
2. New Search Marketing Standard Issue Out: International Search Markets
3. Google Suggest Effects on SEO, Search Usage and Business Predictions

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2. New Search Marketing Standard Issue Out: International Search Markets
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With international markets, content and localization go hand-in-hand. Sure, over 50% of the European Union speaks English to a native or fluent standard, but almost half don’t speak it to any reasonable standard. Indeed, three quarters of the world’s population speak no English whatsoever and even the ones who can speak English to a reasonable standard simply prefer to communicate in their own tongue.

With this in mind,

the need to establish foreign language equivalents of your company website is imperative

if you want to tap into new markets.

Localizing the content of your company website should only be done by professionally qualified translators working into their native tongue. Fluency isn’t enough – the intricacies and nuances of language are such that only a native-speaking linguist should localize your important business communications.

Indeed, this even extends to specific language dialects. The differences between Swiss German and German (Germany) aren’t significant, but there’s little room for complacency when you’re targeting international markets. For example, Germany use the ‘ß’ (Eszett) symbol to denote a double ‘s’ sound, but in Swiss German, they tend to just use ‘ss’ in stead.

Moreover, the use of present perfect (Perfekt) for past events is much more frequent in Switzerland than in Germany where past simple (Präteritum) is preferred. This applies particularly to marketing texts where the reader is addressed directly.

Similar differences exist in the various French, Spanish, Portuguese and English dialects across the world. Déjeuner is ‘lunch’ in France, but ‘breakfast’ in Switzerland and Belgium. And coche in Spain is a car, whereas in many Latin American countries it is a baby stroller. And for those who speak UK English, a baby stroller is a pushchair or a buggy.

The point here is simple.

Before you even consider your international SEO efforts, you have to first talk to your potential foreign client base in their own language.

So, with a fully localized website in your target market, how exactly do you begin the SEO process? Well, the good news is it isn’t all that different from your domestic optimization initiatives.

However, the key is not to translate your keywords from English. Even a correct translation from a native speaker may not be what people use to search for products and services locally – they may use colloquialisms, abbreviations or, indeed, a synonym that means exactly the same thing. In the same way as you research what words and phrases rank highly in your domestic market, e.g. through Google’s keyword finder, you have to use the in-country equivalent for each of your target markets. These should then be incorporated into your translated/localized website.

Further to this, there is an argument that says you can actually rise quicker on foreign search engines than on English language ones. English is the most dominant language on the Web in terms of content, but Asia accounts for 40% of the world’s internet users and China has around a third more internet users than the US. Most of the world’s internet users are native speakers of a language other than English.

This disparity between the web’s dominant language and the world’s dominant non-English languages means that there’s less competition for key search terms in other languages

– which in turn means you may find that you hit the giddy heights of Google’s top five much sooner than on Google.com or Google.co.uk. And that’s something you can’t put a price on.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder of global translations company Lingo24, who specialize in website localization. Lingo24 has clients in over sixty countries and translated over thirty million words in 2009, resulting in a turnover of over $6m USD.

Related posts:

1. Blogging for World Domination
2. New Search Marketing Standard Issue Out: International Search Markets
3. User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps

1. Blogging for World Domination
2. New Search Marketing Standard Issue Out: International Search Markets
3. User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps

One of the basic best practices of SEO are user and search friendly URLs. URLs are simply Internet addresses like something.com/more/details

Step 1: Make URLs user and search friendly
My example is already both user and search friendly. It’s readable and understandable (you sometimes even call them speaking URLs). So you already know that we talk about “something”, “more” of it and some “details”. A better example would be

ford.com/cars/ford-focus

Here we quickly notice that the page deals with a Ford car by the name of Focus.
The actual Ford site is almost as good, but that would be the ideal URL structure. It’s also perfect for Google and other search engines as it already includes both keywords and a site structure with cars being a folder or rather directory and ford-focus a specific page out of similar ones in this directory.

Now consider an international site. Ford is a good example here as the Ford Focus gets sold in Europe too. In Europe people speak a few dozens of different languages. Just covering the more important ones like

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Polish
• Russian

is not an easy task. It starts with the URLs. Let’s assume Ford.com would be a multi-language site, that is a site that covers all those languages. In contrast there are plenty of companies who prefer separate domains for each country like

• ford.es
• ford.fr
• ford.de

etc. Maintaining so many sites is quite an effort though. So many companies of smaller scale won’t operate an extra site for each country. You should reserve a domain for each at least even if you plan just to use one.

Let’s assume though that Ford.com would develop a multi-language website including all those languages. We would encounter several problems as each of these languages has special characters other’s don’t and Google has some difficulties with. I don’t want to focus (what a pun! ;-) on those.

Let’s also assume that we don’t deal (yet) with the special characters. Let’s talk about the standard procedure for user and SEO friendly URL design for multi-language websites.

Step 2: Separate URLs
What’s most important: You need separate URLs for each language! No joke. There are sites that have several languages on the same page (using the same URL).
Depending on you browser language, IP or according to your choice the content language changes but the URL stays the same. This way you would view ford.com/cars/ford-focus from Spain and see the page in Spanish, from France in French ans so on while in the US it still would be displayed in English. This is the worst case scenario from a SEO perspective. Google will only index the English version. Your site won’t get found on local Google search at all. Plus the automatic setting of languages doesn’t work as desired in many cases. American expats in Spain get the Spanish version in spite of not speaking Spanish for instance.

A simple and SEO wise good solution would be adding a directory (or virtual one) for each specific language.
Thus we would end up having:

ford.com/es/cars/ford-focus
ford.com/fr/cars/ford-focus
ford.com/de/cars/ford-focus

Step 3: Translate URLs
That’s almost fine but there is one problem: You use the English word or keyword “cars” for the Spanish and French version. In France people even can get angry at you for doing that.
As I’m doing SEO in Germany I’ll use the German examples from now on. The next step is translating the URLs as well:

ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus

You see that the product name remains the same but the keyword describing it “cars” changes to the German “autos”. We would be happy here as users and website optimizers but in most cases the programmers behind the content management system will cry out and telly you that it does not work that way.

Step 4: Add URL numbers
You can’t create different pages with varying for each language without risking chaos.

So we need a small change in the URL structure and we will tell them that so called URL rewriting (in most cases using the so called mod_Rewrite module for Apache) will suffice.

The simplest way to deal with this issue is adding a unique number to each page. This number stays the same across the languages to allow handling the same pages across multiple pages with much hassle.

So we end having something like this:

ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234

take note that “1234″ is a random number here, it could apply to the data set number or page number or whatever you choose to count. It has to be assign just once for a single URL and stay permanent. It’s not a session ID or something like that. Also take note that I added the number at the end. This is to prevent Google from assigning too much authority to the number as directory “name”.

Make sure that an URL like this can always get identified just by the number. So ford.com/1234 should still lead to the same page at ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234
This also works with WordPress blogs. Having numbers in the URL allows you to change the keywords in it or mistype it without breaking it.

We’re done. Now we can optimize a littel if we like to.

Step 5: Optimize URLs
This step is already optional. Some of you might argue that an URL like the above ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234 still has some issues. For instance it mentions ford twice which is a little too much if you ask me. It looks like SEO out of 1999.

So you could cut the second “ford” in “ford-focus”. This results in:

ford.com/de/autos/focus/1234

Also if you change cars to autos earlier on you don’t need the “de”. You could use

ford.com/autos/focus/1234

instead as “autos” applies to the German part of the site only. The English site says ford.com/cars/focus/1234

Now we’re really done. At this point we’ll probably face the special characters issues with so called umlauts (äöü) for instance but that’s another post. So you see the basic user and search friendly URL design for multi-language websites is no voodoo at all. 4 easy steps are enough.

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3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

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2. Digg-Like International Social News Communities
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

Today I will focus on doing SEO but not telling anbody that you do.

Approximately 95% of webmasters practice SEO clandestinely.

Webmasters and bloggers

1. use search friendly software like WordPress
2. optimize their page titles
3. add XML sitemaps
4. use keywords they want to be found for
5. submit their articles to social media
6. use Twitter to promote their work
7. create content they want to linked for

In short webmasters and bloggers adhere to SEO and SEO 2.0 best practices. That’s fine. When asked whether they do SEO though some of them will vehemently deny it. They get angry at you. Some even publish the typical “SEO is bullshit” articles after searching on my SEO blog for “why is SEO bullshit”. Others will simply not acknowledge that they practice SEO.

Recently a well known search marketing industry figure was featured on TechCrunch. The TechCrunch article mentioned nowhere whatsoever that he is involved in SEO or search marketing. He got two links nonetheless, one to a company of his and one to his private cartoon blog.

On Twitter I wrote him that it doesn’t mention the fact he does SEO. He replied in the typical manner of one of the main group of SEO deniers: Jokingly. As it was a private message I won’t disclose what he said. Most such webmasters are fully aware of doing SEO and quite OK with it but unlike me they don’t want get the heat of doing it. In fact unless you like an occasional fight and do not care for people not liking you by default

the best SEO strategy even in 2009 still is: Don’t do SEO! At least do not admit it!

There are several ways to outsmart most people though: You can say things like, “I do”

• search marketing
• Internet marketing
• online marketing
• Internet consulting
• Internet business consulting
• social media consulting

etc.

Only practice SEO and admit it if you really care.

Why do I? I’m a Pole living in Germany. You know Poland was the country that was invaded by Hitler to start the WWII. The Nazis considered Poles subhuman which was almost as bad as being Jewish. Thus they not only killed off the Polish Jews but millions of Poles as well.

Today most Germans don’t even know that 6 millions Poles were killed by the Nazis.

What most Germans know are Polish jokes though, jokes that are not made by Poles but jokes that ridicule Poles among other aspects of prejudice. Poles are really among the most disrespected foreigners in Germany. Only Turks are more detested according to statistics. Most Poles that moved to Germany chose the easy way: Adapt as much as possible and become invisible. I on the other hand will never hide who I am or where I come from. Thus I also won’t hide what I do or write about. I’m not ashamed of any part of my identity. Especially as SEO is practiced by almost everybody unless they’re stuck in 99 and there is no rational reason to hate it, like there is no reason to hate Poles.

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Tonight I dreamt of Zen Master Seo-ing Singsun again. Last time I had attempted to make an interview but the outcome of my dream was difficult to understand as Zen spirituality is not easy to grasp at all and trapped inside a dream it’s even harder. So this time I decided to ask less questions and to let Zen Master Seo-ing Singsun speak more freely.

In spite of my international fame as a SEO 2.0 I still do some conventional SEO work in Germany like linkbuilding e.g. with all it’s local difficulties (no real Digg, StumbleUpon etc. for German language sites).

So when Singsun appeared again in my dream I decided to ask him to explain how I can build links when there is no real social media around for getting links like in Germany the case.

Tad Chef: Dear Seo-ing Singsun why is linkbuilding so tedious and ineffective and how can I get links in Germany where there are no social media sites able to generate links?

Zen master Seo-ing Singsun: Let me tell you a koan about a beggar and a monk. In Asia many monks are dependent on the good will of the people. They go from door to door and receive food from villagers. Also there are many other beggars. These beggars are just plain beggars, they are not practicing Zen. One day such a beggar joined a young monk called Wep Lo Ging. Wep did not say anything and let the beggar walk with him.

At the first door the beggar snatched away the food from Wep and swallowed it as quickly as he could. Wep did not get angry and proceeded to the next door. At the second door Wep took the food and gave it to the beggar and smiled. At the third door the beggar was already less hungry so he waited what happened. Here Wep asked the beggar if he is still hungry and then gave him the food.

The beggar was already full so he could not eat everything. Wep smiled and ate the left overs. Then Wep went to the next house. It was bigger than the houses they visited before. Here the food was better and there was more of it. Again Wep smiled at the beggar and asked him if he wanted some but the beggar could not take anymore. So Wep ate all the better food alone. The beggar was angry though. He shouted at Wep: “You knew it! You tricked me! You knew that the best food is served at the fourth house!”

So on the next day Wep went to the big house first and the beggar ate all of the better food. As Wep stood up and wanted to go to the next house the beggar said “you can’t trick me again” and “I will follow you anyways even if I’m not hungry anymore”. So he followed Wep.

Of course the villagers noticed that there is another guy walking along the monk and taking most of his food. Some even assumed that he was his disciple. Others were wary of the beggar but Wep was always quick to acknowledge that the beggar is free to follow him and there is enough food for both of them.

So people started admiring Wep for being that generous and the word spread beyond the village. Beggars from the nearby villages wanted to see the monk “who feeds the beggar”. More and more of them came. Soon Wep had a whole group of people following him and the villagers became quite uneasy. They wondered “how can we feed all of them?”.

At the same the owner of the big house was about to die. He invited Wep and his followers to his house.

Sadly the dream stops here. I have to go to sleep now so you can find out what happened next. I am not sure what Singsun wanted me to know but it seems he meant that not the guy who eats the food gets the links and the exposure but the monk who is giving it away. What do you think?

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Give. Image by Mr. Kris

Personally I hate the term “marketing” as well as combinations like search engine marketing. Even more than that I despise the term social media marketing which is an oxymoron in itself. I wonder why I forgot to add to this list of despicable terms.

In fact I do search engine and social media optimization instead of marketing.

In SEO 2.0 you do not sell to people, you inform, but they want to pay you anyways to get more.

The difference between social media marketing and optimization is like that of shareware and freeware. Marketing means selling the people stuff, optimization giving it away for free. In SEO 2.0 you get one step further: You give it away for free to get something else in return without tying both. So you do not just give away a freeware version to sell your professional software package.

SEO 2.0 is more like creative commons or open source: You give away everything to get something else: Reputation, attention, authority etc.

With these you can sell to other people while you do not take away anything from the people who have received from you.

So in SEO 2.0 you do neither sell not trade. You practice true altruism. Many people know already: Altruism is the better egoism. The more you give away the more you get back.

This is a fundamental rule of humanity ever since. Just think of your family or friends. The more love you give to your children the more you will get back. The more time you spend your friends the more friends you’ll have. Of course this rule has some limitations as you can’t just give everything to your children out of love as well as you need to identify who your real friends are and not feed people who start to exploit you (like most employers do). Nonetheless it works.

So how does this make sense for blogging, also regarding business blogging, especially to make social media marketing superfluous?

Let me tell you a little more about Germany: Here you do not have social media that really bring visitors to your site. Imagine no Digg, Reddit, Propeller etc.
The biggest German Digg-like site will bring you as many visitors as the still nascent Mixx community or a niche social site like Sphinn. Also you can’t submit most of the German content to international social sites.

So how the hell can you get traffic for your blog without targeting social media at all? Yes, it’s possible. I do it for my blogging clients as well as for my private blogs.

Here is a short list of actions you can perform to get more visitors without social media marketing:

• Look for other bloggers who write about the topic of your post, link to theirs and ping or trackback them this way.
• Comment on blog posts that cover a topic you already posted about explaining what is missing or why your perspective adds some crucial info. Add a link to the particular post. Bloggers and their readers appreciate that alike.
• Find a topic everybody speaks about and write a resource or overview post with deeplinks to the posts. Do not trackback everybody, pings are OK, but people will notice anyway.
• Look up Technorati and your referer stats to find out who linked to you and submit them to social media, of course only if the posting are more than just “look what I’ve found, click here”
• Check which popular media support trackbacks and use them as your favorite news sources, refer to and trackback them once in a while (not daily)
  

As you see it’s basically about two things: Commenting and linking out. Becoming a part of the blogosphere. Your blog is not an island.


Blogging without using social media yourself for marketing purposes and the frowned upon self-submission has some major advantages. Just look at all the time you spend on social media while most of them even don’t respect you for doing it, either by their own policy, their hostile users, or both. So the ultimate goal should be to be able to stop using social media for SMM reasons at all.

The zen of SEO 2.0: Succeed on social media without self-submission.

As a proof of concept we do not submit our own stuff at the SEO 2.0 on Mixx although Mixx allows this. It works fine. In fact I almost never submit my postings, sometimes I won’t even vote for it. Still my blog posts have been submitted over 40 times to Mixx.

I use social media as they were intended: for fun, sharing and news filtering and get popular anyways. People know me and even vote for my stuff across different social media.

So skip social media marketing, do social media optimization. It’s not about what the blogosphere and social media can do for you, it’s about what you can do for them. The more you give the more you get.

Did you ever see a-list bloggers submit their own postings?

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Click to enlarge! Oh, it doesn’t work?

This is not a funny post. Some days ago a client of mine wrote me an angry email threatening to end our cooperation. Not any client, a client who is with me for years now. It came out of nowhere, so I was like, wow! what the heck!?!

You know, although I am preaching SEO 2.0 here, most of the time I work as SEO 1.0 for clients, doing keyword research, SEO copywriting or link building mostly for the German market.

As I read the email I wondered whether I am in a parallel universe as he claimed that our traffic was down for the last 6 months, whereas Google Analytics clearly showed that it grew continuously over the past half year.

When I read on, I realized what the problem is. Half a year ago the client’s PageRank was at 5, then it fell to 4 some months ago and finally in January it got a 3 in the PageRank lottery.

Remember that the traffic, and the rankings, mostly at #1, 2 and 3 for the most important terms, went up or remained stable all of the time. Only neglected keywords or where Google tweaked something performed less good, but still with no traffic problems at large. Even in December when most people do not need what the client is selling (it’s used for work thus not neede on holidays) the traffic was only 10% down.

In fact, just yesterday the site hit a six months high! A traffic record, mostly due to organic search rankings and thus my work.

Then I checked the bounce rate, meaning how many people are leaving immediately upon seeing yuor page (between 20 and 30% here), pages per visit (around 5), I checked the keywords, most of them really really targeted, many long tails keys with an exact match for what the client offers.

So what the hell is the problem here? It’s PageRank! For many clients you must enlarge your PageRank! This is the only part of SEO they can actually see. They will ignore your thorough reports with analysis of rankings, traffic etc. They will look at the PageRank bar and be either happy or angry. So you basically do not need to optimize the pages. Just start PageRank optimization and people will be satisfied!

On a more professional level: What could this client do? He pays for the lowest possible SEO maintenance plan. A plan that basically only allows you to stay where you are after initial optimization and gaining some rankings. Nonetheless the rankings improved. With only a few hours for stats checking and link building a month you really can’t take a look at more refined metrics though.

Last time he complained about poor sales I proposed to him that he should check his “shopping cart abandoncy rate”, meaning how many people try to buy something and fail during the process. Also what I suspect, the market he sells to is saturated, so you have to extend your scope to other similar niches.

The less the people pay though, the more they will assume that you, the SEO is responsible for their failure.

Some clients expect you to perform magic tricks for a few bucks.

While in this case the numbers are exactly the opposite of what he claims and only PageRank fell there are at least 7 metrics you should make the client aware of instead of PageRank:

1. rankings, are you at the top or not, if yes you should check
2. traffic, to determine how many people find you
3. bounce rate, to determine if the right people find the right product or service on your site
4. conversion rate, how many visitors reach the goal you want them to, here to buy something?
5. shopping cart abandoncy rate, how many people fail to end a transaction?
6. sales, this is obvious
7. ROI, for instance this client spends the same amount of money for Google Ads while getting 5 to 10 times more visitors via organic search results, so the Return On Investment is at least a few times as high with SEO than with PPC here, as I can’t ascribe all visitors to my SEO efforts but most. Sadly I don’t how many actually bought something to make this a real monetary metric.

For some clients sadly just one metric counts: PageRank. So enlarge your PageRank and make people happy. Quit SEO and start PageRank optimization. It’s less work and it offers instant gratification!

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Do you remember the bad guy from the early James Bond movies? The one with the white cat? Blofeld was his name. If you really want to become a popular blogger you must aim for world domination! Imagine yourself to impersonate the typical villain 007 fights against. What do you need to make a global audience aware of your evil plans?

I strongly recommend not to use nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction the typical movie villain would use. You still want to keep your audience and not to annihilate it do you?

So you have to use tactics to capture the imagination of a global audience that are less destructive while at the same time as spectacular. Also remember that your message must spread globally. In order to achieve this you have to take heed to several aspects of online publishing that others can ignore. Most notably you have to break down language barriers.

English
Write in English. This might be obvious to you if you already write in English or rather if you can only write in English in the first place but for non-native speakers like myself it isn’t. Germany is a very tough place to blog. Most people do not take blogs seriously and blogging is very limited due to laws similar to China. For instance you are not allowed to blog anonymously anymore. You are forced to give away your street address etc. so many bloggers have already been targeted by lawyers or some even by fascists.

A German court ruling even says that you are not allowed to publish comments on blogs before checking them for illegal activities like potential slander.

That said the German blogosphere is small and not really beautiful. If you blog in German you are quite lucky if you have more than 100 subscribers or more than 500 visitors a day. The local social media isn’t of much help either.
Besides the fact that while you have around 100 million potential readers you only reach thousands if you’re lucky in German you won’t even reach the people a few miles away behind the border. For instance I live and work in Berlin, one hour away by car from Poland. Nobody will read your blog in Poland if you write it in German. So if you want to write for an global audience you have to write in English.

Plain English
This might be evident too but while most of you will imagine to write in plain English already most of you aren’t. I did American Studies in college and started learning English back in fifth grade so my English is quiet good by now, but still I do not understand everything people write. Plain means you should use

• short sentences,
• simple words like do, have, is
• no idioms, “dark horse” is one, everybody will wonder why you write about horses
• no colloquial language, like with idioms, colloquial language is even more of a problem, a while ago I had to look up what “crack me up” means
• no omissions, instead of writing “hybrid” you have to write “hybrid car” as outside of the US most people won’t even know what a hybrid is

Read a novel by Paul Auster to see how plain English is used to convey complex meaning.

Translation
encourage translation by writing in English, plain English and expressing gratitude towards those who translate your postings. In fact some of my posts have been translated in multiple languages and I am very proud of it. The last one to be translated was the SEO vs SEO 2.0 comparison. It’s available in Spanish, Polish and Portuguese by now.

Images
The use of images can effectively bridge any language barriers. This might be the most obvious thing but if you have an image in your post even a visitor who does not really understand English might wonder what it is about and translate it.

Open mindedness
While the Bush administration only agrees with Iran on the death penalty and that nuclear weapons are vital for self defense Iran and Iranians are vilified to an extent I remember from my history lessons about world war II. I do not buy into this. Iranians are people like us or rather they are even more friendly than we are it seems.

SEO 2.0 was twice on the front page of Iranian Digg Balatarin. If you want to be read all over the world you can’t ignore the cultural differences while acknowledging that we are all part of the same human “race”. You have to be open minded enough to accept difference as something valuable.

Topics
Choose topics that unite people all over the world, topics that matter all over the world. Arts, photography, peace, love, astronomy, technology and yes money are just a few of them. I even sometimes “read” Iranian Web 2.0 blogs.

International social media
Do not limit yourself to English only social media like Digg. On Digg non-English sites fail They are buried and banned. We have very strong social media in Spanish, French or Polish and these will also feature English posts. A front page appearance on Polish Wykop for instance can bring you more than 10.000 visitors although Poland has roughly a population of 40 million (I count poles abroad like myself too).

Do not ignore the rest of the world while publishing online or blogging! It does not make sense. The Internet is hailed as one of the positive driving forces of globalization while it’s becoming more and more nation or language oriented again, partly due to Google promoting local results from each country.

You must be a citizen of the world to aim for world domination! Conquer the world without nuclear weapons. Fascinate the people with what matters most to them, universal human values.

Btw. did you know that I will conquer the world and enslave the global population with my advanced SEO 2.0 hypnosis? Meeeooow!

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The Web 2.0 Expo was in town, in this case Berlin, Germany where I live and work. I’m not the typical expo or conference guy. I do not wear ties you know, I don’t even have a real business card because I move office and positions so often that each time I get one it’s already outdated. I guess I should print one with nothing but my URL on it, as it did not change since 2001.

Well, I digress.

So how did I sneak in into the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin without paying the 1000$ or something entry fee?

Well, you know, all SEOs are crooks and liars! So it was easy for me as I’m even SEO 2.0! Here are the 5 steps:

1. Pose a someone important, especially if you are a VUP (very unimportant person) like myself, create a website and call it Whatever 2.0 (substitute whatever with your site name), in my case SEO 2.0
2. Propose a session to the overworked and far too busy staff that only cares for the VIPs not the VUPs
3. Soon you’ll get an email which isn’t of much help, or rather confuses you. Just reply that it’s OK and that you’ll be there
4. If you’re a VUP (not a VIP!) you’ll end up on a guest list if you’re lucky, or in my case I was asked to add myself to the Wiki as it’s Web 2.0 and we’re all very modern and all about UGC and participation
5. Go there, be late to your session, at least 20 minutes and tell the hostess who has got no clue about the expo that you have got no clue where you’re session is but that you are an invited speaker and you are late (more than 20 minutes)

DONE.

Then you will find lots of people who have no clue either and can’t help you. Especially they have never heard of you or any wiki and they can’t find it on their website. Of course as you’re only a VUP you can’t find your scheduled session anywhere so you can just dive into the expo and listen to all the VIPs. You can even stay for a free lunch, I hope free, as people who pay 1000$ or more should get food for free I guess.

I did not stay as I was told by another disgruntled visitor that the food sucks.

Before I left I had an interesting talk with a representative of one of my favorite Web 2.0 services, Zoho. As I wrote some weeks ago Zoho offers the best web based word processor among of it’s by now huge number of advanced tools and applications for online office. Ian of Zoho introduced me to the Zoho Creator where he dragged and dropped a data base driven email application in front of my eyes. That was awesome.

Besides that my favorite social browsing tool was present: Yoono. Sadly I could not find them. As I wanted to quickly return to my work place i did not look too hard for them.

If you’re in Berlin right now and stay for a while and you are interested in meeting a VUP like me I guess we can arrange something, because the Web 2.0 expo itself was not a good place to get in touch. Well, wait didn’t you actually tell us that you met Tim O’Reilly?

Do you trust crooks and liars SEOs?

Well, I did and I almost interrupted a TV interview with him in the press room aka speakers lounge or whatever. We had eye contact twice as he probably wondered “who is this annoying guy looking like the Mexican who sells the burritos in LA where I stop by sometimes?”.

I even thought about chatting with Tim but then I was to busy too wait as long. Tim, skip those boring interviews next time if you want to speak to the guy who coined the term SEO 2.0, kind of.

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