Before I continue, let me just say I have tremendous respect for Shoemoney; he is a smart, successful businessman, and you would be a moron to dismiss out of hand anything he writes or is written on a blog with his name. Now that we have that out of the way, I have to say, I think the premise that SEO is dying, or threatened by social media, is bullshit.

I know these little holy wars flare up from time to time and I am normally happy to watch from the sidelines. In this case, however, I really wanted to take a look at the arguments against SEO and respectfully set the record straight -

• Real time search will kill Google/SEO - SEOs who know what they are doing and understand search behavior have nothing to fear from RTS. People love to talk about it now, but I think they are way way way overestimating the public’s appetite for it. As time goes on, there is a good chance it’ll turn out to be a novelty that’s truly useful less frequently than lapsed Catholics go to Mass. The current implementations are way too raw and even if Google or another engine perfected them,  the number of queries RTS would impact would be shockingly small.
• Users will flock from link-based algorithms to social-based ones - Somehow Facebook search is going to out-google Google because they can leverage the recommendations and opinions of people I did kegstands with in college? Now if I were searching for things like ‘natty light’ that might be awesome, but other than that, I don’t see where the benefit is. If I wanted to know what site/service/product my friends recommended, I’d ask them, I wouldn’t search Google or Facebook. (I love this argument because you so often hear it from people who can talk for hours about how great social media is without ever mentioning money.)
• Local search will kill SEO - When it’s the middle of the night and your toilet stops working and you need a plumber, you’re going to tweet about it? Maybe, but only after looking them up in the phone book or doing a search on your phone. There are already hundreds of talented SEOs out there helping companies optimize their sites for exactly this scenario, so it’s tough to see how SEO will be hurt by local search.
• Google will or can prevent humans from impacting its algorithm – I have heard this one before, and it never made sense to me – even if it were possible, why would you want it?  From content creation to querying, humans are so entrenched in the search process that the idea of eliminating them from the search component seems almost absurd, and that’s if it were possible in the first place.

SEO is not going anywhere in the near future – every year since 1995, people have been saying SEO is dead and every year they have been wrong.Is there any reason to think that 2010 will be any different? Absolutely not.

Will people continue to claim SEO is dead or dying? Of course. There are too many people who don’t understand searchers or don’t ‘get’ search search engines (links above excluded) for these claims to stop. Besides, there is too much to gain by being contrarian (or dogmatic).

Every year people will continue to claim SEO is on its last legs, and each year they’ll be proven wrong. I think Aaron Wall summed it up best with this quote from the SEOBook blog -

So long as search engines display a list of sites, for which payment is not required, SEO will exist.

How SEO is done will change. It has always changed.

Niche selection is a tricky thing – a lot of people don’t talk about it per se (or if they do, they don’t discuss it as much as monetization strategies or link building). This is a shame because in my limited experience, I think this is where successful Internet marketers really have it over their competitors. This might also explain why this gets so little attention in various blogs etc.

When I went about picking my niche, I wanted to focus on a few elements that I thought were important:

1. Sufficient demand/traffic potential – At a dollar a click, I would need 500 clicks a month to meet my goal. At a conversion rate of 1%, you would need 50,000 visitors per month to meet that goal. I’m hoping for higher conversion and cpc rates, but still need to get some decent traffic to have any shot of hitting my numbers.
2. High CPC rates – If you’re getting a buck or less whenever someone clicks on your ad, it’s doubtful you’ll get enough traction to make enough money to justify the opportunity cost of this kind of project. For my niche, I ended up choosing a niche where AdWords bids are between $9 and $20. Still not sure how AdWords rates track to AdSense revenues, but it seems like a good target point.
3. Low Competition – In a case like this, the goal is get rankings and generate traffic as soon as possible as I can after launch. This makes it critical that whichever niche I select, I need to feel good about pushing the competition out of the way
4. Familiarity – Seeing as how I will be bootstrapping a lot of this project to start, I will probably be writing my own content. I need a topic I am familiar and comfortable with to make sure I can pump out content of sufficient quality as soon as possible.
5. Scalability – Don’t forget, our ultimate goal here is to build not just a site, but a process – we want something we can win on once and then duplicate dozens of times across a range of niches.

Keeping all these criteria in mind, I decided to go with a niche/theme focusing on regionalized mortgage searches. I think this will give me the demand and CPC values I’m looking for, plus, by focusing on regional queries, I can avoid a lot of the competition that exists at the national level. Even better, if we can get this to work, it is something that can be easily reproduced simply by targeting more niches.

After doing some digging at domaintools, and talking to my friends, I settled on a nice, easy to remember keyword-rich domain. The site isn’t live yet, so I am going to refrain from mentioning it just yet.

Interesting thing about this domain selection is that I may have already put this whole project in jeopardy; normally, I’d prefer to use an existing domain, but the economy being what it is, that just wasn’t in the cards. It’s going to be interesting to see how this project plays out and how much this project suffers from a potential lack of trust, especially when it’s launched.

More to come later.

According to Rand:

However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this.

I think what Rand really means is that he’s shocked by how many people in SEO and other industries don’t realize that Google’s link command is worthless.

Regardless, my question is the same – can you really call yourself an SEO in the first place if your’re using the Google link data?

Ok , maybe there are some valid uses for the operator, but by and large, its value is limited, and all pro SEOs should know that. After all, wouldn’t this be like calling yourself a doctor because you have an exacto knife and thread?

Rupert Murdoch kicked up this dust storm with his digital impression of a grumpy old man telling the neighboor’s kids to get off his lawn. Apparently he’s trying to rope Microsoft in as well. Now, Silicon Valley Watcher makes the case  search should be non-profit and site owners should block all commercial search engines.

Now, all this makes for interesting theater, but all this noise makes me worry that these people are serious and I wonder when they are going to wake up and realize that blocking Google is not the way to making the web better, or monetizing content.

The problem, as far as I can see it, is that the people who think they can robots.txt their way out of Google’s fundamentally misunderstand searchers and search’s place on the web. I seriously doubt any of these people have spent any meaningful time talking to searchers.

If they did, they’d understand a key underpinning of search’s success – that many searchers and many people who go online don’t distinguish between the Internet, their browser, and Google. They all blend into one single mass called the “web”, and like it or not, for many of these people, Google is the face of the web.

Think about it for a second – someone doesn’t care enough about your site enough to type its name in the address bar, you really think they’re going to give up their search engine for it? That would be like a store complaining about Ford, Chevy and the other car manufacturers because its customers drive to it.

What people like Murdoch aren’t realizing is that if they pull their content from Google, the likely reality is that they won’t be missed as much as Murdoch et al think they would. More than likely, they’ll create a de facto gold rush by other sites to fill the vacuum left by their departure.

Now that I think of it, the first step in the Adsense Project might be that you don’t talk about the Adsense Project. No, wait, that couldn’t be right could it?

All joking aside, the first step in this project, or any project for that matter, is to define an objective that you can hang the rest of your strategy on and gauge your progress against. If you go back to the original post, the strategy Doug laid out if that he is making $15,000 a month from about 30 websites. This breaks down to a monthly revenue per site of $500.

That sounds just about right for us, so we’ll set our target of $500 revenue in a single month.

Now, that begs the question, how do we get there? Using Doug’s post as an example, here is my battle plan:

1. Pick a niche
2. Keyword research
3. Build a site
4. Create at least one targeted article for each keyword identified in step 2
5. Push content online
6. Build links to our new site

Obviously, it’s safe to say no one is splitting atoms here, there isn’t much difference between this site plan and any other type of site plan. Where the real difference will come will be in the details and the execution of each step.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series where I select the niche I will be targeting.

While Google most certainly would have some objections to how Doug promotes his content, the recipe is fairly straightforward, and largely above board:

1. Identify fast-growing content niches with relatively small amounts of competition
2. Create a large amount of unique content focused on that theme
3. Build links to the site
4. Repeat process
5. Cash checks

Now that I have some time on my hands, I figured it might be a fun experiment to see if I can roughly follow Doug’s formula and duplicate his results. Obviously the money would be nice, but it would be a fun project to try and document via the Searchologie blog.

As a result, this is our first official ‘Adsense Project’ blog post. This will be a series of posts detailing our experiences and efforts with Doug’s Adsense strategy. As we complete the process, we’ll record our results here.

Stay tuned!

To answer that question, we sat down for a minute and thought about what the world does need:

• Longer lasting lightbulb
• Public option
• Love, sweet love (its the only thing that there’s just too little of)
• Duct tape
• Flying cars
• Kajagoogoo greatest hits CD
• Salary cap in major league baseball

It’s pretty obvious that ’seo blog’ is nowhere on that list. In fact for many, the idea of another SEO blog is probably about as appealing as making french toast with garlic bread.

So why do it?

Because we believe there is always room for a great SEO blog, not another site parroting Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, or any of the other rock stars. We know you heard it before, but this time it’s different. We’re launching because we want to explore this amazing industry we’re all tied to and do it in a way that’s irreverent and fun.

In short, to have a take and not suck (thanks to Jim Rome and the jungle).

If it works, we think we could have something great on our hands. If not, hopefully watching us crash and burn should be incredibly entertaining. Either way, stay tuned because it’s on.