The power of the volunteer Search Marketing

This post is primarily a beginning guide to doing volunteer search engine marketing for nonprofit organizations based on my experience, but it is also an effort to convince more companies to donate time and resources to charities. Companies that do so may find significant SEO benefits for their own site, as explained in what follows.
Over the last several years, I've had a few chances to volunteer with a fine charity that takes innocent refugees from areas of danger, relocates them throughout the world, and helps them to begin new lives. While collecting and gathering donated furniture was fulfilling, I wondered if I could make a bigger difference.
I began to see that the charity was restrained by a lack of resources and capital, as I'm sure most not-for-profit organizations do. It's a double-gilts sword with charities: if they spend no money on fund raising, they have no funds to distribute. If they spend too much on fund raising, a lower percentage (in greater quantities) of the money goes to the cause, which can hurt a charity's ratings.
What if there was a way that I could increase the charity's visibility long-term without them having to pay for expensive fund raising and marketing services? This was my motivation for learning SEO. I hope you will help out, and what follows is a guide to how and why.
Getting The Orgs On The SERPS
When I do nonprofit SEO, I try to target keywords and phrases where I won't feel bad about taking traffic from the top two or three results. I feel that some charities deserve top spots more than others, and even the charity space is full of spammy blogs, AdSense farms, affiliate sites, and other non-covered sites that you can de-throne.
On-Page SEO
Just get over the fact that your chosen charity's site will be horrible for SEO. It might make you cry when you see almost a PR 6 + page with a title like "Home." See it as an excellent opportunity and make the on-page suggestion. Don't take it personally when no one thanks you, or even understands why you're trying to mess with their site. You'll probably have to sell thoroughly explain the benefit of the trade, as the non-commercial sphere is typically less savvy on the internet marketing front.
Leverage The Cause
People are much more open to charitable organizations when a link is requested. You can often get links from organizations which, in the for-profit sphere, would be considered biased or even direct competitors.
No. luck sending emails? Consider a popular selling strategy, which becomes even more effective when you're not "selling" anything. I saw the ancient computers that my favorite charity was using, so I hit up a few locally owned stores to see if they could donate any of their older models. I did secure a few new machines, but I was largely never. I had expected this, so after putting the pressure on for a big favor, store owners were relieved when I made my next request.
I asked the owner of the store whether he would mind placing a link on his site to the charity. It didn't cost the store anything, and it actually made them look better. The final text was something along the links of "(Store) is proud to promote the efforts of (site) in (cause)". The cause was a deep link with targeted anchor text. They didn't give us a portion of the sales, but even the link was support. Search queries aside, we received a large amount of quality traffic.
Build Relationships
Spamming blog networks is not the way to build solid long-term authority. This is good advice for any marketing or SEO campaign, but it is especially true in SEO for nonprofits. Where else can you ask for someone to send some volunteers and expect them to link to you for doing so? People love to show off their good deeds, and we usually like to hear about them. Rankings go up, the charity's visibility rises, and everyone wins!
Take advantage of the fact that you're not just trying to enrich yourself (debate). That alone gives you instant credibility in the eyes of business owners and large companies. If you're willing to organize an event, you can work with college departments and clubs to win some sexy .edu links.
Accreditation And Google Grants
Depending on your role as a volunteer, you can either suggest or push for approval and ratings from a number of charity watchdogs and oversight groups. These pages are usually authoritative and relevant — not just in the eyes of Google, but in the eyes of users.
Being accredited, approved, etc helps when applying for other types of assistance. You might be surprised how often Google approves Google Grants, which come in the form of free AdWords credits. Grants are definitely worth taking the time to apply for. Oh, and did I mention that you could get a Google link when they give you assistance?
Organize The Masses
When you plan your charity or large events or volunteer operations, you can earn some serious blog love. Speak with local businesses, news outlets, and more regarding coverage. If they're already covering the event, you can even help them target anchor text to the right pages. The people who talk about you are usually willing to help, so don't be shy about giving them detailed instructions on how they can.
I may be a skeptic, but I honestly believe that most people are generous and empathetic if you can give them a reason to care.
What's In It For You?
What, you mean warm fuzzy feelings aren't ain't enough? Honestly, though: never underestimate the impact that this can have on morale, especially if you achieve results for a cause that employees believe in.
Requesting Links To Your Site
I know that this is being read by a group of experienced SEOs, and the first thought is probably that you can earn links from high-authority charities. This is true, but please request links with tact. You'll probably get better results and avoid shaming the industry of search engine optimization if links are given freely.
What I beg you not to do is approach charities with anything that sounds like "I will do SEO for you if you give a me link." This is essentially a paid link, and if I have my way it will also get you reported to the BBB, Google, and every consumer watchdog imaginable. Besides, it's just bad social conduct.
Public Relations
Aside from the nonprofit site, you can get some serious love from the media. Good PR is a part of smart SEO, and no company is too large or too small to benefit from the press. Submit a press release explaining some of the work you have done and are going to do for the nonprofit - with their permission, of course.
You can feel good about the PR in that it will benefit the nonprofit's SEO campaign and market visibility, in addition to your own. If done correctly, the press release can trigger interest from additional media sources.
If you have additional questions or tips, please drop them in the comments. I'm always open to learning more. Note that I have left out the charity that I keep referring to per their request. If you would like more information on this charity, or if you would like suggestions on local and national charities, feel free to send a me private message.

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How And Why Google Uses The Meta Description

Post author are entirely his own (other than the possibility of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc..
I have given some frustration in Q & A lately with how Google handles extracts the search and META descriptions. You've seen a schizophrenic search result that looked something like this:

Site owners are naturally frustrated when they see descriptions of META, they have worked on that get carelessly discarded cancelled. True, when excerpts come from, and is there something, you can do to stay in control?
In General, excerpts from research comes from 1 to 3 places (and extracts the base, we are talking about right here, not rich like links extracts):
CopyOpen descriptionsOn-page META data Directory Project (ODP)
In the example above, Google is from my query ("11 January") and by drawing the page content which the algorithm considers relevant. Given that this copy is really fair dates and fragments, I finished by with a bizarre mash-up of copy on the page.
Then y thing you can do Google bend to your will and always use your META descriptions? Unfortunately, the answer is "no". Like many SEO, however, there are a few ways to shift to Google in the right direction:
Say that, for any reason whatsoever, we really wanted this post blog for SEOmoz rank for "on 19 January. One solution is to make sure that this phrase appears in our META description for the page. If Google can find the corresponding copy in your description, they are more likely to use the tag. It is also just a good exercise – determine what your base target keywords and their targeting naturally in your META description (Don't just make it a list of keywords, well understood) will help you focus your SEO efforts overall on the page.
In some cases, double-having too many pages with title tags or META Description can lead Google to rank the wrong page or filter this META description. De-duplicating your titles and meta descriptions is a good practice anyway, but by ensuring that each page has its own description relevant and unique can also help ensure that Google sees the value in these descriptions.
If you believe that your research snippet comes from the Open Directory Project (it would be more frequent on the homepage as deeper pages and long tail queries), you can block Google using your DTP list with the following META tag:

This problem is not common as formerly, but he always pop up from time to time.
There is an another, much more serious META tag that you can use to block your passage entirely:

This directive deletes your extract fully, however, so use with caution. It can also perform caching. In General, would only use this option if Google is taking liberties with the extracts that could impair your brand or cause legal problems. In General, these questions would be better heard in your content on the page directly.
Attempts by Google to match queries extracts still do not work the way you want, but in general they are a good thing. Implementation matching keywords bold lead click throughs, and people rarely read the full text of an extract. Don't worry if it's just a couple of requests from the long tail, about it.

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How To Get Links To Your Fansites

Whatever your site's topic, whether you are very niche gold broad, B2C or B2B, a retailer or a publisher - there are likely to be independent fan sites that overlap with the subjects on your site.
By fan site, I mean fan clubs, unofficial sites, etc - these types of sites are typically run by people who are very passionate about their particular topic. They often serve as a very rich source of information and news about their subject - and are often very keen to link to any appropriate information that gives value to their visitors.
I'll give a quick introduction to identifying the niches to target and finding appropriate sites to talk to, and then give some tips about how you could get them to link to you.
SEOmoz members are a hugely diverse bunch, so I'll just give a couple of examples to illustrate how this can work. In reality, this is where a bit of brainstorming and 'thinking outside the box' could help you identify some potentially useful types of company & website.
So, by way of examples (and I'm just looking out of my window here for ideas of companies, don't read anything into this list):
An online store that sells second hand books: This type of retailer has it pretty easy: aim to find the fan sites of particular authors or series of books, Don 't just go after the biggest names either — there are definitely some more 'cult' authors that aren' t as well know purpose have strong online followings.The website of an auto mechanic: Approach the fan sites of particular car models, Aim to target fan sites on the subject of any particular repair expertise you have as well, such as classic cars gold four wheel drives.A chain of hotels: This company could look towards the fan pages of the particular cities they have in properties, They should also consider anything that makes a particular hotel unique. is it near a sports stadium, or in a particular style of architecture?
You'll find out soon enough that there are fan sites for almost every niche you could ever imagine. Don't worry about getting a bit abstract in your thinking here.
Of course, some sites won't have to look too far to find topics that have gained a fandom. For example: if you're a radio station, then there may be fan sites for your station or for your presenters. If there can be a website explicitly for fans of Ikea in Ohio, then really - anything is possible.
Honestly, there's only a little advice that I can give here, beyond 'google is your friend'.
As with almost every proactive LFE tactic - and with this kind of outreach in particular - we'll have most success when we offer something to a site that earns us a link from them.
With that in mind, here's my five favorite tactics for getting links from this type of site: Look out for opportunities to organize or to be involved with special events. In the finding form, use this as an opportunity to meet some of the enthusiast that you're trying to get to know; If you want to meet petrolheads, then go to an auto show. You could sponsor some kind of 'social-media-meet-up' or 'bloggers drinks party' at these sort of events if you want to put yourself out in front of the right people.Some businesses have the opportunity to add value to some events; for example, when Stephanie Myers announced her plans to do a junket for fan sies (see May 17, 2010), any hotels, bars or restaurants in her area could have offered to host the event for her and some fans. This should have received at least a few really valuable links from the attendees' write ups.Similarly, every TV station really should plan ahead by taking their list of forthcoming talk show guests, and inviting members from every fan site of those guests to watch the recordings. It would be fair to ask them to write about it in return for the tickets, and they'd be encouraged to link to the show's webpage from that article.I've written before about link building by running competitions, but it's worth mentioning again here. If you pick an appropriate prize, fan sites should be particularly keen to link to this kind of giveaway. Ideally, see if you can aim for some kind of ' money-can 't - buy' prize.For example: you're running a night club, and Fatboy Slim is DJing one evening - so you get him to sign a turntable slip mat. You can then give them away via your website, and it's a great chance to contact every fan site for Fatboy Slim, breakbeat music, etc.In many cases, you might find there's a whole bunch of fan sites for one particular topic; for example, there are more than a few Twilight Saga fan sites - and I imagine there's some rivalry, particularly amongst the top dozen or so largest sites. Alternatively, you might use this tactic where a rivalry already exists, such as between college football teams - and by proxy, their individual fan sites.You could create some kind of competitive feature, such as a survey or quiz that will rank the sites' members against each other. For example: "which pac - 10 Team has the most comitted fans?" or "Harry Potter Trivia: Which fan site's members are the most knowledgeable?"Create these features in a way that will encourage the sites to refer visitors to you by linking, and then make sure to let them all know about it.LocateTV have an awesome embeddable widget that can be customized to appeal to fan sites. (Eg: visit a show and click 'add to my site' page.) You can see the embed in action on fan sites such as ElvisPresleyScrapbook.co.uk.) This high-quality type of widget can be used by savvy editors of fan pages, and gives a good quality link back to LocateTV.Of race, an embed can be much simpler - even a simple image could do the trick, which could be updated as often as necessary. For example: an entertainment news website could create images such as "Latest Britney Spears News: Release date for new album announced"-and then invites every one of the celeb's fan sites to embed the linked image pointing to the category page for that person on the news site.You might choose to engage with fan sites, perhaps to feature them in a list that you publish (e.g.: "The Top 10 Fan Sites of Renaissance Composers") or to interview that site in particular (eg: "Interview: Superbowl predictions with Larry from PackerChatters.com".)You could at least get the featured sites to mention you, but approached in the right way, this kind of content could be very linkworthy and social media friendly. for example, Education Portal's "Top Shakespeare blogs" post was well tweeted by those in the list as well as other Shakespeare fans.
Remember: fan sites are pretty special, particularly since they tend to be keen to link to good quality content about their subject. Just don't abuse it: they generally have savvy webmasters who can spot if they're being taken advantage of.
When you start thinking about fan sites, you'll realize quite quickly that there's lots more opportunities that are specific to your site, beyond those I've outlined here.
It's always fun to talk to people who are truly passionate about something (whether that happens to be Elgar gold Ikea), so go ahead and enjoy putting some of these ideas into action.

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How organized Spam is of taking control of Google search results

In the past few months, I have been watching a very unsettling trend unfold in very competitive ecommerce search results on Google. It appears that huge amounts of money are put into place to systematically and successfully manipulate highly competitive search terms in order to sell fake merchandise of almost every bigger brand out there. Some of these sites even solely exist to steal people's money and don't ship anything at all.
Rest assured that I am not talking about some people doing good linkbuilding or about people buying a lot of links. These operations I talk about are much, much bigger and in all cases almost certainly run by criminal organizations of some sort. They not only greatly affect US search results but are also very present in at least UK, France and Germany.
In this article, I will show you several examples of where Google’s search is absolutely broken (and by broken, I mean that 10 out of 10 page one search results are entirely fraud). I will also show you exactly how these rankings are achieved and take a look at what the impact on consumer’s may very possibly be. Last but not least, I’ll try to help you recognize these kinds of websites so you can avoid them as they become increasingly difficult to identify.
Exhibit A (“nfl jerseys”)
Let’s get started with [nfl jerseys] as our first keyword to be examined. If you take a look at the US search results on google.com with personal search disabled (add &pws=0 to any search URL), you will get a list of websites which claim to sell said wear and merchandise at a significantly discounted price. Such huge discounts can be found on pretty much any of these fake shops, many ranging up to 75% in “savings”.
Here’s the search engine results page as of 01/04/2011:

(Note: I’m not trying to “out” any particular site, so I removed any domain names in question from the screenshots)
As you can easily see, all of these sites feature ridiculous keyword stuffing in their root page titles as well as the term “jersey” within their domain name. This is both very common among them. Result #5 even contains Chinese letters.
As of this writing, the entire first results page is composed of fraudulent websites. In other words, Google’s organic results have become entirely useless for this search phrase.
Exhibit B (“pandora jewelry”)
Next, [pandora jewelry], also a very popular and well-respected brand. Positions 3, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are fraud, which results in a 60% share of useless results.

1. 

Exhibit C (“thomas sabo”)
Looking at [thomas sabo] SERPs, they feel like a déjà-vu. Another jewelry brand, another wave of artificially boosted shops shipping either replica ware or just nothing at all: results 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 should not be listed there at all in the first place (70%).

All of these sites try to appear as legit and official as possible.
See for yourself
Before diving into the details, I urge you to take a look at Google’s results for these queries yourself. Try searching for other brands, too. Almost every popular brand is affected by this growing issue.
How they do it
Now that I’ve shown you how seriously broken Google is, let’s take a look at why Google is ranking these sites so well. Since these are no legit shops after all, it’s obvious that there is no kind of “branding bonus” or boost through actual social media activity at hand. There’s only one thing that leads to these rankings. You’ve guessed it: keyworded anchor-text heavy links.
The interesting question is though: where do these sites get their (anchor-text rich) links?
I have taken a look at many of these sites and found out that their link profiles are basically comprised of two kinds of links: automated forum and blog spam along with some hacked websites.
Let’s take a look at the anchor text variation of result #1 for “nfl jerseys”:

This site also has a page authority of 64 and a domain authority of 57, according to Open Site Explorer.
Google's best guess for "pandora jewelry" looks similar:

And the #1 "thomas sabo" result:

You might be surprised to see plain-old forum spam work this well, but let me get one thing straight: it’s not like Google is not penalizing or de-indexing any of these sites. I see them come and go on a daily basis (although some actually seem to stick for weeks or even months).
However, these people (or rather organizations) push such huge amounts of these sites into the web that Google - obviously - is having quite a hard time catching up.
In some way, and this is my personal opinion, this might be related to the Caffeine update - Google is now crawling and ranking sites a lot faster than ever before, but it appears overall search quality has suffered dramatically in the past 6 months or so.
Furthermore, link placements on hacked websites are very difficult to spot algorithmically. Granted, many of those links are not visible to the human eye and that should raise some flags since Google is capable of rendering any page, but overall it’s not comparable to catching automated posts on tens of thousands of web forums.
What really should have set Google's alarm off, though, are the link growth patterns. Let's take a look at the "nfl jerseys" top 3:

Two of these sites started spamming back in April 2010 and are still ranking in January 2011. Go figure.
Same goes for "pandora jewelry" and "thomas sabo":

You get the picture.
What Google needs to do about it
Rand talked about it already, and his advice is instantly applicable to this issue: Google needs to greatly lower the value of keyword-rich anchor texts.
Think about it: if Google had not at all taken anchor text into account for these sites, none of them would probably rank anywhere near the top 10 results. Their links come from very different sources, and almost none of those sources is even remotely related to what their pretending to be selling.
As long as anchor text links outrank links from actually related websites, this is not going away anytime soon. Same goes for exact match keyword domains, by the way.
I do realize that anchor text is very important, but its abuse has reached a point where it’s no longer a ranking signal to be trusted as much as it currently is. Heck, I've actually seen websites rank #3 for these terms with one single sentence on the page: "seized by Department of Homeland Security".
What it means for SEO
Google has a serious problem, and I’m sure that they have been working on it relentlessly for quite some time now.
What it means for SEO is that whatever is working for the sites mentioned in this article - it will probably stop working soon. I would not be surprised to see Google shift even more ranking signal power from anchor-text heavy links to relevant social media “chatter”. I have a feeling that it’s gaining more traction as we speak.
Of course, tweets and status updates can be spammed, bought and faked, too. But at least it will buy Google some time.
This fight is never over nor ever "won" by anyone. Ever.
How to identify these sites as a consumer
Since I don’t want any of you to order from these guys and receive either fake goods or nothing at all, here’s some advice to identify them:
Most of these sites:
offer unrealistic discounts (>=50% are pretty much everywhere)have no actual postal addresssupply only a contact form orsupply only a GMail/Hotmail email address to contact themfeature way too many “trusted logos” in their footerare written in poor English
Considering that most of the sites I talked about earlier already ranked well while all the holiday shopping took place, I can only imagine the damage done to thousands of families and individuals.
Please be cautious and remember that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it very probably is.
Since this is my first article for SEOmoz, please let me know in the comments if you liked this article and give me a “thumbs up” if you did. In case you’ve even been affected by this kind of fraud personally, I’d love to hear from you, too.
- Rouven Balci, SEO at Toms Gutscheine
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How To Do A Market Buzz Analysis

Search engines can be of tremendous help when you are researching the market a certain product. And the feedback on the market is just a tiny part of the useful info that you can gather with the help of Google, Yahoo and MSN. Believe me, there’s a lot more you can see about the “psychology,” development and potential of the product if you know WHAT to investigate and HOW to investigate.
In this blog post I would like to show you:
- how to gather the search demand “intelligence” to see the trends on the market about a given product;
- how to gather the feedback and analyze it;
- how to use this info for your SEO battle plan, in case you are an affiliate for this product.
The screenshot from Google Insights below highlights an interesting nuance in the development of SocialAdr.com. At the beginning it was more popular as a product which used to be “Social Adr” (two different words), and if you do the search in Google you can still find some publications that refer to the product like “SocialAdr”
But eventually the product started to be recognized by the market and referred to by the domain name way of calling the product – like this “SocialAdr” – two words blended into one word.
This transition from the product to the domain name did not happen quickly, you can see on the Google Insights screenshot that it was only in June 2010 that the search trend of “SocialAdr” has won the battle over search trend of “Social Adr.” But since then the domanish look of the product has a bigger demand.

I assume that this psychological shift in the search trends proves that for a certain group of people the product has become the part of their daily routine. And that is why the site/domain name search has won over the product name search. After 8 months (since Oct 2009 till June 2010) people got enough facts to see how it works and to start using the tool on a regular basis. They already come to the web site, they no longer need to be convinced about the product.
By the way, Alexa rank that shows traffic growth for SocialAdr.com …

… is partially proving this history of development. The product did not get popular overnight. It was a gradual building of trust between the users of the product and product developers. Slowly, step-by-step, the site started to grow, having reached very nice traffic at the moment. If you know Alexa ranking system, then you know how hard it is to get to the top 10,000 traffic sites of the planet. And SocialAdr.com got there.
So, the way uphill wasn’t quick. But it was stable in its growth. And I think it speaks into favor of the quality of the product.
When gathering the feedback it is important not only to read what people are saying about the product, but also to try understanding WHO was writing this. Was it an affiliate of the product? Was it a p*ssed off competitor? Was it just another “nay” sayer? All these things help to evaluate how objective and unbiased this feedback is.
So, keeping these things in mind I did a research for 2 pages (1st and 2nd page in search results in Google, Yahoo and MSN for keyword ’socialadr’) and these are the things that I’ve noticed in the search results and feedback.
(1) Affiliates started to work, and we can see lots of reviews.
In the next section of this post I will show you how to easily “bypass” these affiliates with SEO. Surely the affiliates are promoting the product, and this might compromise their unbiased approach, though some reviews that I have seen have been very detailed and well-thought. But I think the fact that affiliates started to work is a good sign that the product is gaining trust.
(2) Forum posts.
I love to see forum posts as a source of discussion, because this is where you have great chances to get realistic feedback about the product. For example, the forum post that I found in Google search results on page 2. And I liked the general way of the discussion, because when some forum member with nice forum reputation – without any blatant and stupid promo “tricks” are sharing their experience – this helps to understand the real value of the product. Yahoo showed 2 forum discussions from Warrior Forum (which is a very popular forum with lots of Internet marketing and SEO folks inside). The discussion where real, with different points of views, with people saying that they like and don’t like about SocialAdr.com
The general tone of the discussions is favorable towards the product. The comments about pros and cons of the product make sense, and they really show what people think about SocialAdr.com
(3) Media created by SocialAdr.com
SocialAdr.com team also did not waste its time and started to create info that is aimed to rank high for their product name in search results. You can see Twitter accounts, you can see their official blog, YouTube videos. I even think that some of the articles that I saw in search results and published on top article directories belong to the team or the people who are very closely related to the team (though, this is just an assumption).
Surely we can’t expect super unbiased approach from the creators of the product.  But, people who are smart enough to play the media games with blogs, videos and other things are very likely to be smart in other things that they are doing. So, as the source of unbiased info this is not the best example. But as a sign of product owners to know what they are doing – yes, this is a positive sign.
The general problem about affiliates who want to make money from recommending a product is that they choose tough keywords, the keywords that will require lots of resources to get page 1. And if you are not on page 1 – then where will you get the traffic from?
So, if you are an affiliate of SocialAdr.com or want to become an affiliate, please don’t use keywords like: SocialAdr, Social Adr, SocialAdr.com These keywords are already “taken” by other people and you will need to build lots of backlinks to rank high for them.
Instead, use longtail keywords with small link building competition. I’ve already done the research for you and found the keywords that:
- have direct relation to the product;
- have search demand;
- have small link building competition.
Below you will see the list of the products and their allinanchor (allinanchor shows direct link building competitors – the web pages that are also “fighting” for the same keyword and building backlinks for it):
- socialadr cost – 0 sites in allinanchor (”fighting” for the same keyword)
- does socialadr work – 0 sites allinanchor
- socialadr coupon code – 5 sites in allinanchor
- socialadr coupon – 33 sites in allinanchor
- socialadr review – 171 in allinanchor
Important: I was suggesting ONLY the keywords that have already gained search demands and you can see them popping up in the suggestions when you do search in Google like this…

Of course, you can use the text versions of these keywords like “socialadr reviews”, instead of “socialadr review” and other versions. But my point was to show only the keywords that at this moment have search demand recorded by Google.

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IS SEO Wrong?

Curious Quorites want to know:
SEO is immoral?
Seek us relevance through the search engine. Learning SEO makes it more likely that you are going on a target that is not relevant, manipulating the system to achieve its objective. Thus, wasting time and resources from the user. It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result.
Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare?
Normally, I got permission just answered on Q + A in the site itself, but in this case, I felt that the topic warranted a wider coverage. Let's start by the points of the question of dissection, and then tackle the theme.
"Learning and manipulating the system to achieve its objective, SEO makes it more likely that you are going on a target that is not relevant."
This statement seems to me as fundamentally false. SEO, like all forms of influence humans can have on the other, can be used for good or evil. In particular, much of the SEO is that use it to promote non-relevant results is, generally speaking, a popular race of fool. I will illustrate why:

SEO is almost never applied to render non-relevant results to queries unrelated rank. And, I would go further, by arguing that if the white hat SEO did exist, millions of search results much worse, as less high quality, relevant outcomes would make their content accessible to search engines and well targeted towards applications.
SEO complain this way seems akin to complain about demographics in advertising of the brand. It can annoy you replay Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, clever advertisers have thought that you appreciate the cheesiness of Cheetos ® snacks * delicious, salty and thus interrupt witty banter from Jon with images and sounds on their product. However, a world without ratings metrics, profiling and advertiser savvy would almost certainly be you show much less attractive advertisements.
The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) attracts billions of dollars of investment and massive amounts of energies of the marketers to achieve three key objectives:
Determine seeking individuals and create content which serves as them a wellMake sites, pages and material accessible to the search engines, so they can display when relevant searches are performedImprove ranking of pages already accessible so that they draw in greater quantity of visitors
The beauty is that in an open market, trade, those who do the best job of creating useful content and creative ways marketing earn links and references that lead to higher rankings and more traffic.
"It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result."
Seems a very clever statement and has a lot of logic to reverse. Search results are advertisements, you can display ignore them or engage with them. They require much less time / energy than traditional brand advertising but they also carry any more weight or special impact. They are simply opportunities to click and discover if you found something useful + relevant.
I also like the analogy of advertising because in SEO, as with publicity, the objective is simply to show advertising, is to inspire action. A terrible advertisement for a great product is just as useless as a great advertising for a (possibly worse) terrible product. Thus, showing irrelevant results or attract clicks do convert or measures is futile. Advertising works only if the product may enter the transaction.
"Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare."
If SEO is misleading, it is any other form of influence and marketing (and in many cases, as well as other SEO). Human beings humans, who were born in the 20th and 21st century recognize marketing and what it means, how it works and that it serves. I had a good discussion of Twitter with Paul Martin of epiphany about it today:

Everyone's doing it Web marketing, that is. Building an online presence is vital to your business, and if you're looking for Web marketing real-world experiences, look no farther than Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies.
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ClickBank Market Research

This research has much info and screenshots inside and, obviously, it will take some time to read it all. But, if you are really interested to make good money on Clickbank – then please read it till the bottom.
No matter if you are a Clickbank affiliate, or inventor of Clickbank tools/scripts/software, or if you are a vendor on Clickbank – this research will help you to navigate your business on the Clickbank market.

The rising search trend for ‘Clickbank’ and the declining search trends for ‘Commission Junction’ and ‘Linkshare’ (the most famous alternatives of Clickbank) vividly explain the status of things on the market – Clickbank has won the battle, most of the market comes to them.
But, that doesn’t mean that the game is over. If you look on the search trends of ‘Commission Junction’ and ‘Linkshare’, you will see that their search trends have almost stopped to fall. The process of declining goes on, but very-very slowly. I can assume that we can talk about a certain level where they will stop dropping. A level where the alternatives of Clickbank can nicely harvest the money. And though this money will not be as big as CB has, but this is still “enough” – so, if you are launching a CB alternative, don’t give up, there is enough food on the plate for you.

When you are checking search demand for Clickbank, you instantly see that the rising related searches about about money: how to make money with Clickbank, making money with Clickbank, etc.
The “money making” element is a vital part of Clickbank culture. That is why products that explain how to make $$$ and how to make $$$ with Clickbank are in high demand.
And now look what countries are the top “demanders” of info about how to make money with CB …

… India, USA, Canada, UK and Australia – these are highly paying markets, and they are ready to spend their money.
Keep this info in mind when you are creating a new product for Clickbank
No wonder that when you get to Clickbank market place and sort all the products to show at the top the most successful products (with highest CB gravity) – you will see money making products like this one at the top of the list. So, the search trends coincide with what is sold best of all on CB.
And a final example of money making products to dominate Clickbank – when you type ‘clickbank’ into Google, it starts showing you different suggestions. And in that suggestions I saw only 2 products. These products…

… and if you check both Clickbank Pirate and Clickbank Wealth Formula – you will see that they are playing with a big dollar of “making money with Clickbank” (I am not giving a link to Clickbank Wealth Formula, because when I click to pay on their official site, I get to the page saying “This product is no longer for sale or has been disabled due to a terms of service violation” – looks like the guys have problems with CB at the moment, but no matter what – 2 money making products make top of the list with Google suggestions and it speaks for itself).

The trend for the keyword ‘Clickbank scam’ is rising. What is the reason for it? Does it mean that CB is a scam?
My personal explanation is the following: lots of products on Clickbank, in all sorts of niches. Definitely not all products can be good. Obviously some products are just a lovely looking junk. So – people want to know what they are buying.
And this opens a huge niche for the creators of product reviews. All you need is to choose a rising product, put up a nice review of it, then push this web page for keyword ‘product name + clickbank scam‘ – and you are monetizing the fear market.
But when doing it, please remember that you will build up your reputation of a reviewer only if you tell the truth. Always remember that in your hunt for a big dollar.

This niche was a discovery during the research. The demand for it isn’t high yet, so this is not something where you can make tons of $$$ quickly. But you can see the evident growth of demand.
My personal investigation of CB marketplace for the products in this niche show that nearly NO ONE is monetizing it! Surely CB has lots of keyword solutions like Micro Niche Finder, but these solutions don’t focus their attention on Clickbank, they help you with keywords in general.
The only 2 products that are more-or-less related to this topic are CB Cash Clouds and CB Elite. However with my due respect to the products, I do not think that they represent the idea of the niche I am talking about. CB Cash Clouds helps to automate the creation of tag clouds and putting of your affiliate links there (which is great, but not the niche I mean). And CB Elite helps to find products based on research and put all data (like gravity, commissions level, etc.) into one form – but this is not the niche that I mean.
This is what people need…

… and if you go through this list attentively and then will check CB marketplace – you will see that this niche is VACANT. That is why if you have great ideas for this niche and have enough “guts” to create a product on it, then you will be the first to monetize it.

When writing “tough case” in the headline of this section, I meant the following…
As you can see yourself from the search trend, the demand is not growing – it is stable.
Having stable demand is great, but if you take into account that more and more CB scripts, programs, software and tools are being created, then it becomes obvious that competition grows as well. And demand isn’t growing.
Of course, a great idea implemented into a great script/software/program will find its place under the sun. But keep in mind that just creating a script will not open a treasure box for you. Based on the results of this research I can say that this script should be about making money (you saw how huge the demand is for this niche), or it must help people about rising niches (for example, the keyword niche).

One of the things I could not fail to mention in the research is the rising trend for FREE stuff in Clickbank. As you can see, the demand is increasing, slowly but in a very stable way.
And a quick look on the Google suggestions about ‘free clickbank’ clarifies what exactly they want to be free…

This information nicely matches up to the previous section about scripts, software and programs.
Whereas the niche of Clickbank scripts, software and programs does not grow in demand, the sub-niches of free scripts, free software and free programs are growing. So, if you are thinking about creating and selling CB scripts/software, then please think over the possibility of a free version. This can be a smart marketing move for your product.

By saying “don’t hurry up” I meant the same thing as with the niche of CB scripts, software and programs.
The search demand is big, but it has stabilized. And tons of products already created in this niche. Which, logically, drives to the conclusion that this niche is over-saturated and competition on it is very tough.
But if you want to stick to this niche, then you need to go to sub-niches. I did a quick research for “clickbank affiliate” in CB marketplace and saw that top products are going into the sub-niches. For example, this product helps to create sites for affiliates with ads from CB, eBay, Amazon – the niche of turnkey sites for affiliates. Or this product which is positioning itself as a management system used by lots of CB affiliates.
They are making sales. Learn from them. This is how you can go into sub-niches and succeed in a super competitive CB affiliate marketing niche.

By “helping hand” products in this research I called everything that helps people in the routine of CB pages/sites creation like templates, layouts, landing pages, etc.
The real surprised (and I swear I did not plan it) was the fact that Clickank SEO is increasing in its demand. Currently we can’t speak of any huge jumps in the demand, but if you look at the screenshot above, you will see that Clickbank SEO has nearly reached the level of Clickbank sites’ creation. And it is one of the few trends that keep adding to their power.
For all those who are running SEO services – this is great news, because you don’t need to invent anything new. SEO for Clickbank site is the same as SEO for any other site

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