Comments on: Is Search Engine Optimization Unfair For The Little Guy?

By: Web Traffic

Web Traffic — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:37:26 +0000

Great article. It can be unfair as master SEO experts take a monopoly on virtually every topic even when they know nothing about that topic. If you generate unique content, however, you can get your way to the top by doing so and properly marketing your website.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:30:24 +0000

@Nihar, Indeed… every day I find some ‘shady tactic’ used by big companies. Recently, for example, it has been suggested that Dell might be buying links from high PR websites to help them rank highly for certain keywords. So, it is definitely unfair.

By: Nihar

Nihar — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:00:04 +0000

Nice post. I agree with you. Big guys have undue advantage of getting their websites optimized by paying more to SEO guys.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:29:44 +0000

@Frank, yes that is a great tactic. Many times the big companies can afford to target the most popular words and neglect those with less competition. So this does leave quite a bit of flexibility for low-budget or no-budget websites.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:24:45 +0000

@Kurt, thanks for the followup on the adsense payouts.

As for receiving fewer clicks, your adsense is conveniently located out of the way. So users can easily ignore it. And while I wouldn’t advocate putting it at the start of the post until your blog gets more traffic, I think you should do something to make it more prominent. Or you can just focus on getting more traffic for your site.

And yes, Google often penalizes for sponsored reviews because they are used in many cases to get a ‘paid link’. What some bloggers have done is to offer reviews but they have explicitly stated that all links will be ‘nofollow’ and that they don’t offer ‘paid links’.

By: Frank Carr

Frank Carr — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:08:42 +0000

Overall, it’s not that hard to rank well for low competition terms and even mid-level competition keyword terms. All it takes is a little basic knowledge that’s mostly common sense and a few simple promotional skills that only cost a little time and money.

By: Kurt Avish

Kurt Avish — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:44:45 +0000

The payout are the same per click. I have my account in US dollars itself and the cheque too come in dollar. So for example when i get a cheque of $100 it becomes about 3300 Mauritian rupees.

I am thinking of using 250 x 250 blocks now for adsense. The conversion are really low for the last two months.

I think people have stop even looking at my sidebar adsense lol :p Do you think that putting a square adsense above the start of the post is annoying for readers? Let me know of your opinions please.

By the way there is something which keeps me wondering. I read that google don’t like sponsored reviews. Till now I have made only one sponsored review about a bicycle company..and rejected the others. Do you think a one or two sponsored review per month is bad for our google pagerank?

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:21:52 +0000

@Kurt, yes there is some great satisfaction knowing that you are doing it yourself. But it can also be equally rewarding to get faster or better results by paying for it.

And that conversion is shocking. I’d limit my expenses as well. I wonder… I see that you have Google Adsense on your website. Are the payouts the same for publishers where you live as for people in the US or the UK? Or are they lower, adjusted to the relative ‘value’ of your money?

By: Kurt Avish

Kurt Avish — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:26:31 +0000

I have never spend a cent on seo till now. I personally think its more fun and challenging to do it without spending a dime. However its true the more you have the bucks to spend the more the best result

I am still a university student and so got to limit my expenditure… when you consider that $1 = to Rs34 here where I live lol

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:05:16 +0000

@stratos, but who wants to wait an eternity??? Whether or not you blog for fun, you do want to find readers…. After all, it is not a lot of fun when you find yourself writing for the crickets.

@TechZoomIn, I agree, SEO is a huge advantage. And while, as Stratos says, it is about content. SEO helps you to not only get ranked quickly, but get ranked more highly as well.

@Stratos, by the way, do you employ SEO techniques on your blog? Or are you doing it for fun, without ANY regard to search engines? lol.

I think all of us use SEO to some extent, even on personal blogs.

By: stratosg

stratosg — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:05:43 +0000

for sure but as mentioned in another article by Shirley here it's primary fun so you will have fun and eventually be indexed and known...

By: TechZoomIn

TechZoomIn — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:51:00 +0000

Spending budget on SEO is always advantage.Small bloggers will face all these and it will take so much time to indexed or succeded without spending buget.

By: stratosg

stratosg — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:53:44 +0000

well in my opinion i think that if the content is good and well formated then people will come in eventually. so what i think is that if you are a blogger write quality and good content and then sit back and relax. the content will be ranked accordingly and people will come in sometime. the challenge for a blogger is to transform the search engine visitor to permanent reader.