Transcript: Colbow’s Concession Speech
March 14th, 2008Following is the transcript of Brad Colbow’s concession speech at the Applebees in Mentor Ohio from February 14th 2007.
Many months ago I entered into a gentleman’s bet with Mr Brendan Cullen, a Cleveland web design guru, that my website could get better return results on Google for the term “Cleveland Web Design” than his could. After months of hard battle and flip flopping positions it’s time for me to concede that Brendan has done a better job than I have, and has indeed won this friendly competition
(boos can be heard from the crowd)
Now Now, there are no hard feeling here. Brendan won by combining relevant content with good semantic html. For years firms in North East Ohio have been promising results by charging thousands of dollars a month and all they do is game Google by building up irrelevant back links that will one day be worthless as the search engine companies catch up to their tactics and tricks. Brendan and I know that the only long term strategy for search engine relevance is with well structured sites with good tags and content that people want to read. HTML tables and flash sites will just hold you down in the long run.
(crowd cheers)
To rise in the rankings we all know that you have to have sites linking back to your’s. You can spam…
(crowd boos loudly, a woman can be heard saying “why is that man blocking the Applebees?”)
…but that will come back and bite you. The only way to get ahead is to have a site that other sites, quality sites, want to link to. I congratulate Brendan on his achievement and wish him further success in his endeavors.
Josh Walsh
March 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pmYou are encouraging Google to rank him higher by linking to him in your changing content… You are essentially voting for him to win.
DJLitten
March 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm“For years firms in North East Ohio have been promising results by charging thousands of dollars a month and all they do is game Google by building up irrelevant back links that will one day be worthless as the search engine companies catch up to their tactics and tricks.”
Wow, talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Not all SEO firms are gaming the system.
Candis
March 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pmha ha! That’s awesome, however Brendan hasn’t updated his blog in over a month… not awesome.
brad
March 14th, 2008 at 1:02 pm@DJLitten, you’re right I did lump the good with the bad for the sake of humor. I’ll have to expand on my dislike of SEO/SEM companies in a future post. I know there are some (like FathomSEO) that have the resources to do the market research, planning, and do a thorough job updating sites as well as quality link building campaigns that it takes to do effective SEO/SEM. But you probably know better than I do that most of the firms out there who claim to offer this service don’t do a good job.
DJLitten
March 14th, 2008 at 1:10 pmLooking forward to that dislike expansion post. Trust me, I know they are plenty of shysters out there.
Nate Klaiber
March 14th, 2008 at 10:37 pm@DJLitten
So who do you deem as worthy when it comes to respectable firms in Cleveland? I would be interested to hear that – so far I haven’t seen too many.
brendan
March 15th, 2008 at 1:11 pm“boos can be heard from the crowd” – What?!
@Josh relevant outbound links count too
@Candis maybe this is Google’s way of telling me to shut up… I stop writing stuff, my ranking shoots up… hmm
brad
March 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pmThe crowd at Applebees was a little rough.
I should also point out now that I’ve lost I want to keep Brendan on top as long as possible. Hence the key word link to his site.
Nate Klaiber
March 17th, 2008 at 9:48 amI just searched ‘Cleveland Web Design’ and clicked on Brendan. wahoo.
Craig Minch
March 17th, 2008 at 1:54 pmHas anyone gotten any work from visitors searching that keyword combo, arriving at your site, contacting you and hiring you?
You’d have to have some goals or path analysis set up in your analytics to help track it back through the keywords. Or a point to ask “How did you find me?” when the phone rings.
I’m curious if there is anything out there that dispels my theory that the high traffic on those keywords is only from the folks checking their ranking on those words.
Brad C
March 17th, 2008 at 2:08 pm@Craig,
That question is a future blog post. The answer is a big NO, I have gotten nothing off that term. I track how people come to my site and I get the best returns on the words “Cleveland freelance design”. I have also gotten project inquiries from that term but no actual work.
For me Google is about as useful as being listed in the phonebook, you get inquiries but they are pretty low quality. I would imagine that is the case for most other businesses on the web as well. I personally don’t see SEO as having a good return on investment.
Craig Minch
March 17th, 2008 at 2:26 pm@Brad- Thanks for sharing. I look forward to that future post.
Brendan
March 17th, 2008 at 4:03 pm@Craig: I used to get a trickle of inquiries/work from that phrase, only recently (last few months) have I been getting about an email roughly every two days inquiring about work.
I always ask how they found me, and 9/10 times it’s along the lines of “I was searching for a web designer in my area.”
But, if you take a look at how my site is set up, it’s not organized to funnel leads, at all.
I’ve started writing up a ‘why I choose the phrase/how I got there’ dealy, and in the interest of keeping this comment short I’ll say that driving business was actually a secondary (or even tertiary) goal (remember, I wasn’t freelancing for the better part of last year).
In closing, you need a ‘Preview Comment’ button Brad
Brendan
March 17th, 2008 at 4:19 pmThat’s supposed to be every two weeks, not days. I’m not that popular
Craig Minch
March 19th, 2008 at 3:05 pmThanks for sharing Brendan.
+1 = Request for a Preview Button.