Outsmarting Google: SEO Secrets to Winning New Business

by Evan Bailyn, Bradley Bailyn (Contributor)

Never-before-revealed tactics for optimizing your web site for Google, from one of the world's most remarkable Google search experts

By a legendary SEO expert who attracted nearly 70,000,000 visitors to his own web properties last year, using only SEO and related organic tactics Brand-new tactics that work, not outdated approaches or SEO myths Packed with never-before-published case studies from the author's work with 200+ clients - from Mom and Pop businesses to enterprises to celebrities

With 65% of the Internet search market, Google plays an enormous role in global commerce, determining which sites will receive traffic and which won't. This entertaining, expert book shows entrepreneurs, marketers, and individuals how to tame the Google beast, and get more of that traffic. This isn't your typical guide to search engine optimization. It is written by Evan Bailyn, founder and CEO of First Page Sage, one of the world's leading SEO experts. Evan reveals the new secrets of SEO, and debunks long-held SEO myths that simply don't work. In plain English, he teaches techniques that reflect a deeply technical understanding of search engines and a broad psychological understanding of how and why people search. More than 20,000 marketers and entrepreneurs follow Bailyn's Twitter feed; more than 100,000 visit his web site; thousands more flock to his speaking engagements. This book brings together everything he's learned: what works now, and how to make the most of it.Coverage includes: " Today's five ingredients of successful SEO " The real art of choosing the right keywords " "Aging" web sites to gain trust " Using Google AdWords to complement SEO " Converting SEO results into paying customers " Optimizing for social media and other emerging trends

Genres: Business, Technology, Web

228 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

Reviews

[Kimberly Erskine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evan Bailyn’s Outsmarting Google is one of those books that have been on my “To Be Read” list for forever (which isn’t at all surprising if you look at that mile long list…). I actually got this book from a former co-worker when I worked for a digital marketing agency 2 or 3 years ago. After accepting an offer to work as an SEO Marketing Strategist for Becker’s School Supplies, I knew it was time to pick up the book and take it out of the “To Be Read” pile and move it along to the “Currently reading” pile.

I expected that much of this book would be things I already knew, and I was right. I worked for a digital marketing agency for nearly 3 years. I started as an inbound marketer working my way up to a social media marketer, assistant project manager, and later a digital marketing manager with an emphasis in social media. Since my main focus has always been social media, I’ve always just had working knowledge rather than expert level seo knowledge, but have always kept informed by reading blogs, news, and in the case of Outsmarting Google, books. I’d say I do have a lot of experience with SEO, but not as much as I do with writing or social media and I’m not sure I’d refer to myself as a “expert”, which is why I need more help from books like Bailyn’s.

I already knew that Title Tags and Meta Tags were important along with linkbuilding, so some of these chapter simply repeated what I already knew. There are some parts of the book I questioned and wasn’t sure how much of it I agreed with though. I felt like Bailyn’s really discredited the importance of having strong content on your website. He seems to operate more on the idea that on-site content doesn’t really matter at all for SEO. He does emphasize the importance of having a well-designed website which I agree with — but I don’t think that’s enough. If your website is beautiful but has little to no content or poorly written or outdated content, why would anyone want to go to it? Maybe you’ll see obtain website traffic and great rankings in Google, but your conversions may suffer and your bounce rate may be high, neither of which will do your website or business any justice.

In contrast, I feel like Bailyn over-emphasizes the importance of linkbuilding. Yes, it is important. I know that this is one of the most important ranking factors for Google. However, I question Bailyn’s methods. I wonder how strong his linkbuilding is and whether or not much of it is just spam. I also really don’t agree with the way he thinks and advises readers to simply ask webmasters, bloggers, etc. for a link. He makes it sound like the easiest thing in the world to do. Go ahead and try it, I guarantee you’ll receive one of these responses:

1. Who are you and why should I link to you?
2. That will be (insert price here, often more than $100)
3.Google considers that spam and will issue my website a penalty if I do that, so no.
4. No.

Or simply no response at all. Approaching bloggers and other quality website owners/media members for a link is definitely a much more difficult and more thought out process than simply shooting a completely transparent email asking for it. I learned that the hard way from my agency days, trust me.

Also, some of the links just didn’t seem that good. Bailyn seems to think if a website is anywhere somewhat (but not really) close to being in your industry, a link on that site is good enough. He also recommends linking all of your websites together. So, say you have a website about pizza, a website about leather, and a third website about pets. Bailyn thinks you could link them all together. I suppose it could work. Maybe you want to write on your pizza website an article on leather pizza fashions or a pizza shirt or a piece of pizza your pet is wearing/eating. It’s hard, but not impossible. But I don’t think this is always going to work and I’m not sure I would push for it as much as Bailyn seems to.

Another thing that bothers me with this book is the way the author, Evan Bailyn is constantly bragging about his success and referencing his business, First Page Sage, and yet when you try to look it up and even Google it, there’s nothing too spectacular about it. For example, on page 28 of this book, Bailyn uses First Page Sage as an example to show how his website is ranking #1 on Google for the term “expert Google optimization”. I just typed that in to Google and he’s not on page 1. He’s actually all the way on page 5…the very bottom of page 5, almost page 6.


Looking at Bailyn’s website, it’s not hard to see why he isn’t ranking better. Some pages such as the homepage and the “About Us” page are great. But other pages, well it’s obvious Bailyn is putting into practice his belief that on-site content isn’t important. The pages for “Our Culture”, “Careers”, “Blog” and “Contact” pages are all without meta descriptions. The blog also isn’t updated as much as you’d expect. On average, it only gets updated around once a month. Maybe this is what’s hurting his rankings?

Of course, it might not have anything to do with Bailyn’s on site content. This book was published in 2011, maybe he just changed his keywords, or even his whole focus of his business, which seems to be exactly what he did. I did some keyword research and analzyzed his website and it looks like “thought leadership” and “thought leadership marketing” is more of what he’s focusing on now, so I googled that as well. He’s number 8 for “thought leadership”:

And he’s #2 for “thought leadership marketing”:


I’m not sure how I feel about this information. “Thought leadership” is a whole different concept and completely different keyword to target. Why the sudden change? Is it because he failed at SEO marketing so he decided to become a thought leader instead? #2 for thought leadership marketing is more reassuring, but it’s still not #1 and it’s for a whole new concept. I’m just not sure how much I trust his word as an “SEO expert”.

Bailyn’s social media presence was also disappointing to me. He has over 100,000 followers on Facebook, but he hasn’t updated his page since January — that I know is not good practice. He only has 243 followers on LinkedIn and I believe no posts. His Twitter also hasn’t been updated in over 2 months. It just make it hard to trust this guy and any of the advice he gives on digital marketing…

There are still some points that Bailyn made that I liked and learned from though. I especially enjoyed the sections on PPC and Google Adwords. I don’t have much hands-on experience with PPC advertising at all, so I’m always trying to learn more about it. I like how he explained what makes it different from SEO and the advantages/disadvantages of both. The information on display URL, negative match, and negative keywords were all things I didn’t know about previously. Having this knowledge now I think will be very beneficial for me if I work with PPC advertising in the future.

The highlight of Bailyn’s book for me was the last part where he wrote about his predictions for Google in the future. This book was published back in 2011…5 years ago, but he was on the right track for most of these predictions. I thought it was interesting how much of a threat he thought Facebook was to Google. I have to say I do agree with this ideology. He’s right in saying that Facebook is much more of a threat than say Bing or Yahoo. The social search was an interesting concept because of how unexpected that prediction was for me. I don’t think it will ever actually happen though because I think that would make it like Facebook 2.0. It seems pointless. Facebook and Google may want to compete, but they should still exist as separate properties with their own unique features, not mere copies of each other.

Bailyn also predicted that Google would launch a social network and that it wouldn’t be well received. Spot on. Google tried with Google+, but it definitely isn’t a huge threat to Facebook by any means and many have predicted over the years that Google will kill it off. Bailyn’s book was published in March of 2011. Google+ was launched in June.

I think that he’s also right with how much he stressed how important localized search will become. Google has been releasing more and more options and features for local businesses to help them with their SEO especially lately. There’s never been a better time to be a local business interested in SEO marketing. I think he’s also right on Google trying to encourage people to use their phone’s more and releasing features that lets people know where they are or when they visit a certain place. It sounds slightly creepy to read about it in Bailyn’s book, but we’re already pretty much there with apps like FourSquare and the ability to check in places on Facebook and Instagram. Will this really be any different from that? I can see that being a success. However, the reviews probably won’t be as big of a deal as Bailyn thinks. Let’s face it: people are lazy. Most people don’t want to take the time to leave a review unless their service is really bad and they need to vent. Overall, think that Google reviews will pretty much stay the same over the next few years.

Evan Bailyn’s Outsmarting Google wasn’t a terrible book; I still learned a few things from it. However, it wasn’t as good as I thought it would be; it was just okay. It’s worth just 3 our of 5 stars from me.

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outsmarting Google is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not about tricking Google into giving your site a high page rank. In other words, you won’t hear useless advice like keyword stuffing or hiding that will get your site black marked. Instead, this book is much more practical, seeking to teach us the things that will help build trust with Google which in turn will make our website appear earlier in key search engine results.

Although people are becoming more aware that quality content is key to bringing potential customers to their sites, there is still quite a lot of misunderstandings about the significance of page rankings. Many will still do anything to get their rank up. To this end, they plant links on link farms which inevitably backfires. Next, they try to optimize keywords in their site content. When they go overboard, of course, Google freezes them out.

Building trust with Google takes time. Yes, there are ways and means to help that process along. Outsmarting Google even provides a lot of good advice for doing so. However, the best advice this book provides is to create a website that provides quality content for potential customers.

[Dedrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually didn't read all of this, since I had read another SEO book that pretty much exhausted all of the traditional SEO standards. However, this book has a very specific viewpoint on Google that I don't think is out there and provides more detailed info about link strategy.

There were some observations from the author that seemed odd or even ignorant. For example, the author thinks it's "arbitrary" that Google decided to make the title metadata so important (p.27). It makes perfect sense to me why this metadata is so important, but hey, there's always room for another opinion.

[Jasmine Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this book for work and I found that it was very interesting and informative. Evan definitely wrote it specifically for people who aren't very tech savvy. He uses a lot of analogies and examples to which most people can relate and that makes these difficult concepts a lot easier to understand. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to improve their SEO skills, which is a valuable 21st century skill.

[Thamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

a must have for anyone who has a site and wants more traffic from search engines. though some content about yahoo is outdated since there was a partnership with bing.

[Naren.bhanushali]

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[Bill Tran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book introducing me to the way google works . I learnt alot from this book