There is a lot of chatter among search engine marketing professionals right now having to do with whether or not the basics of SEO, particularly on-page search engine optimization techniques, should be worthy of the attention it gets.
Just to recap: Jason Calcanis, formerly of AOL, has been quoted on more than one occasion as suggesting that SEO (search engine optimization) is B.S.
There are a number of folks in the industry who I read with some frequency who have weighed in including Shoemoney, Quadzilla of SEO Blackhat (Quadzilla), Michael Gray (AKA Graywolf) in his Jason Calcanis post, and many others.
Perhaps my favorite is from Danny Sullivan, the godfather of SEO at Search Engine Land.
Danny makes a great point: Those of us in the industry tend to think, out of long habit, about those things one must do as a cost of entry for SEO.
Most clients don’t.
Regardless of Mr. Calcanis’ suggestion that all one has to do is publish good content and wait, there really is a bare minimum cost of entry. At the basic level, it’s not rocket science. But, if you are busy running your business anything which distracts from your main mission may seem as though it is rocket science (or voodoo). It’s just like anything else, until you have a level of comfort it’s odd and scary.
For whatever reason I’m thinking about this today as I go about my other business and it reminds me of a great story of the Locomotive Consultant:
The train yard is at a dead stop, and commerce is hobbled when one of the giant freight locomotives breaks down blocking the main track.
The best and brightest in the rail yard aren’t able to get it started and it’s too heavy to push or lift off the tracks.
Finally, after days of effort with no success the railroad management decides to call in a locomotive consultant.
The consultant arrives, and on reviewing the scene proceeds to walk around the locomotive looking here and there as he goes. He gives it a couple rounds and goes back to his truck.
A few minutes later he returns with a ball-peen hammer, walks right up to the locomotive and gives it one good whack. He then turns to the railroad’s engineer and says “give it a try now”.
They do, it starts and everything is back on track (pun intended).
The locomotive consultant then presents the manager with a bill for $1000.00.
As subtle as a Ball-Peen Hammer
The manager is incredulous and asks the consultant to itemize the bill. It looks like this:
Hitting the locomotive with a hammer – $5.00
Knowing where to hit it – $995.00
I hope the point is clear. As Shoemoney says: “95% of SEO is super simple“. There is however one caveat.
You have to invest the time and energy to know that it’s simple and then to implement that knowledge.
The good news for the SEO community, and our clients, is that it is much more economical for most business managers to hire a locomotive consultant
. Sure, you’re paying something because we know where to hit the engine, but it is probably a lot less than the opportunity cost of your time spent in acquiring our knowledge and putting it to work.
I’m a little saddened to hear that Shoemoney is not renewing at webmasterradio.fm. For those of you who don’t know, Shoemoney became famous, some would say infamous, when he published a picture of himself with a very large AdSense check.
In a recent conversation between Shoe and Quadzilla on the show they were talking about SEO and Quadzilla made a comment which I found pretty heartening.
He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “that the basics of on-page SEO should have a lower price point than they do from most providers”. What he was suggesting was that on-page SEO should cost less than $5000.00.
So I’m thinking “holy cow $5000.00”? We do it for MUCH less than that. We must be the most economical SEO out there.
But, like the Ginsu knife commercial it just gets better. “But wait, there’s more”! We, Search Influence, don’t just do the SEO, in fact we don’t even focus on SEO as such.
It’s just part of our model.
Most of our clients don’t know what SEO is – even if we said “It’s an acronym” and then told them what for they’d just give us that look. You know the one, the look that says “OK, this is voodoo”.
This is why we tend to focus on “Internet Marketing” and “Website Promotion“. These are concepts that are easily approachable. Unlike “Search Engine Optimization” which really does seem like voodoo to a lot of small businesses.
So – whether it’s passe or not to these giants of the industry, economical SEO can be effective. Our clients get more traffic and make more money from they’re web sites and at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about.
So, Shoe – sad to see you go. I’m sure you’ll do something else just as giving. Thank you!
That’s right, I said “Search Engine Optimization Guaranteed“.
I’m constantly looking for new ways to energize our sales process at Search Influence. It seems like in most of my personal selling I find myself talking to larger clients – clients for whom there’s a good ROI in customized SEO and website promotion programs.
Whether it’s link-building or article marketing, there are always ways to promote a site – it’s sometimes just a matter of scale.
The jobs in which I have the greatest pride however are the smaller clients. The ones who take advantage of our introductory package and who get real value from it. And – here’s the crazy thing. They get guaranteed search engine optimization and promotion results. In other words, we can’t necessarily do that for the big guys. We make other guarantees. We guarantee placement sometimes or traffic, but for our introductory package if you fit the model we actually guarantee to double your traffic.
Why is this so important in the sales process? Well, if you know how many sales you’re getting today from your web site and we can double your traffic it stands to reason you’ll get nearly double the business.
So, the search engine optimization is guaranteed to bring you more traffic. We can’t guarantee more sales, but it does stand to reason.
Why don’t other marketing media guarantee traffic? What if the Yellow Pages guaranteed to double the number of calls you got? You’d probably buy a bigger ad woudn’t you?
So, economical SEO, a search engine optimization guarantee and you can’t lose. Plus, you get to be among those positioning themselves for the years to come when the search engines become even more critical.
It’s not here yet, but the time’s coming when search engines will get more references than Yellow Pages. (maybe then they’ll give a guarantee :))
Website promotion offers the only direct, un-fragmented advertising channel available.
I am a member of BNI where I go, as a small business owner, to promote my business and extend my network. BNI is responsible for a lot of good referrals for Search Influence and I advise it to anyone in a service or sales related business.
One of the great things about BNI is that it forces you to get up every week and give a 60 second “elevator pitch” style presentation about your business. If you’re not one who speaks comfortably in front of others its great practice – I’ve often heard the same about Toast Masters though never experienced it.
In any case, I have some experience with public speaking and presentation so I often (don’t tell my chapter members) wing it. I’m pretty good with extemporaneous (and shameless) self-promotion so all too often I decide what my 60 second commercial will be as I’m rising from my chair (and sometimes while I’m introducing myself).
On a recent occasion I found myself talking about advertising…
It used to be that you had 3 choices for television advertising with which you could own the market: ABC, CBS, NBC. Obviously this is no more. With hundreds of channels on cable and satellite and Tivo and other DVR systems your likelihood of hitting your target market with traditional media gets lower and lower every day.
So where’s the good news? Well, there are only 4 major search engines, one of which has the lion’s share of search traffic. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (in that order) command 95+% of the search market.
Here’s what that means to you – if you can figure out what people are searching for when your business or service would be a logical conclusion, all you have to do is be near the top of the major search engines when they’re doing their search and chances are you’ll get the call.
It’s interesting, and sometimes ironic, that the new media are re-focusing the potential to target your market. Website promotion, which is what Search Influence does, is what enables you to get to the top. First, you build a site; then, you make sure it’s saying what people are searching for; finally, you promote the heck out of it and soon enough you’ll be near the top where people are looking and instead of 1000 channels, you only have to worry about 4.
Our client Dr. Gordon Dubois let me know about a call he got last week which just makes me happy.
Dr. Dubois, owner of New Orleans Chiropractic got a call last week from a young service man who is on his way home.
The call was from Baghdad!
No, this is not common. But guess what: Dr. Dubois got the call because he’s number one in Google, Yahoo and MSN for a number of New Orleans Chiropractor related searches.
I’ll post more on this once I have more details, but here’s the thing… Dr. Dubois has only gotten a little more than our basic service package. In addition to our standard package, we have done a little advanced linking by way of a larger directory submission and a high-quality article submission, but he’s #1.
Dr. Dubois used to run the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic. Chalmette is still deep in the recovery from Hurricane Katrina and he’s rebuilding his practice in a more viable part of town. To that end, we built him a basic site, did a little promotion and he’s now number 1.
Aside from helping a service person coming back from Iraq to care for his spine, we’ve really helped Dr. Dubois and his New Orleans Chiropractic clinic begin its process of recovery.
I just had an interesting conversation in which I was reminded of how sad it must be to be a domain squatter.
It is true that you can more easily attain good ranking if you have a domain name which matches your key phrases, but what if you bought a domain a few years back and have been sitting on it because of some perceived value and you suddenly learn… it has none!
Sad, I tell you.
Everything is better with examples and here’s mine for this one:
We were building and promoting a site for a New Orleans chiropractor. We thought all the good domains would be taken, but amazingly they were not – we were able to get hold of neworleanschiropractic.net and neworleanschiropractor.net (note: these are not the ‘.com’).
While not the .com, they are incredibly key phrase relevant.
We did a a little key phrase research and determined that “new orleans chiropractic” was getting about 8x the search traffic of “new orleans chiropractor” and therefore deployed a site on neworleanschiropractic.net. Since the domain was such a good match for the phrase we were quickly ranking for our chosen search phrase. We were lagging for our second phrase “new orleans chiropractor” and decided to take some aggressive measures.
A lot of links, a few article submissions and a few months later I’m happy to say our website promotion efforts have paid off. www.neworleanschiropractic.net is #1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN for the phrases “new orleans chiropractor” and “new orleans chiropractic“. And, we’re starting to pick up traffic for variations on the theme as well.
Content, links and time are a surefire recipe for market domination by way of website promotion.
A great domain helps, but you definitely don’t need the .com to dominate. And, if you’re sitting on a bunch of them just hoping your day will come you may be sad when someone eats your lunch based on good ol’ fashioned content and links.
How do you plan to be found? If your business were on a deserted farm road in the middle of nowhere, how would you be found? Chances are, you wouldn’t be.
Your web site and the pages within are the same way. Just because you’ve published a web site doesn’t mean it will get found. And even if it has been, just because you have a page on your site doesn’t mean it will be too.
This is why it’s so important to have links, coming into your site and between the pages on your site. If you have a page to which nothing links, there is no way for the search engines to find it!
If you have a page which has important information about your business, make sure you have links pointing to it. If it’s really important, it should be linked from every page. This helps the search engines know how important it is.
A big part of the way a search engine decides how to give you a good response is by looking at how closely what you type in to their search box matches the words they have in their database of web sites.
For this reason, it’s critically important you use enough text on the page to assure your web site is seen as a reasonable match to those phrases people really type. And of course, it’s not just as simple as creating compelling copy on the page, you have to also be sure that when you describe items in the code of your pages such as links to other pages and images that they too have text versions for the search engines to adequately understand what they mean.
Finally, order matters. You may have noticed that many web sites have their navigation (inter-site links) either across the top of the page or down the left hand navigation. In early usability testing it was found that users responded better given our predilection to reading from top to bottom, left to right. Interestingly, this is what the search engines do too.
This is one of many places where human usability and search engine read-ability don’t usually coincide.
The problem for the search engines is this: if you have your left and top navigation loaded with non-descriptive navigational elements, this is what they will think you’re about. So instead of thinking you’re about “better ingredients, better pizza†a search engine might misunderstand and think you’re about “corporate guidelines†or “job searchâ€.
It’s a challenge, but whenever you can, make sure that your navigational elements reinforce your key phrase focus. If they don’t, put them on the far side of the text either right or bottom.
Perhaps THE most important part of any search engine marketing campaign is key phrase selection. You can have the most optimized, organized, accessible web site on the planet, but unless you can be found for the key phrases for which people are searching you’re out of luck.
In my opinion, for small and medium businesses the best way to develop key phrases for your web site is by brainstorming with your staff and customers – particularly those staff who are in direct contact with customers. Unless you know what language your customers use when talking about what you do you won’t be able to effectively get found.
You will need to be particularly careful if you are in a more “technical†field – the chances are your description and your customers’ are not the same.
There are a few very good keyword research tools available, and I’m personally a big fan of Keyword Discovery from Trellian.
One good quick tool you can use to see whether a phrase is being searched for is the Yahoo Search Marketing search term suggestion tool:
When you’re doing your keyword brainstorming be sure to do the occasional reality check – “blue boxer briefs†may perfectly describe what you’re selling, but may not be for what people are searching.
Once you have a good idea of how customers might find you and whether or not there’s any search traffic for those phrases you’ve chosen you’re on the road to getting found.
If you want to go to the next level in this analysis, take these phrases you’ve found and search for them in Google. If you want an accurate count of exact matches put your search phrase in quotes.
Using the number of searches from Yahoo, and the number of matches (occurrences) in Google, you can get a quick sense of how many people are searching for your phrases and how many other businesses might be talking about them.
In addition to being text deficient, a web site that relies too heavily on images or flash has another very serious problem to overcome.
There are billions of web sites on the Internet and the search engine spiders (the pieces of software that crawl the web in search of new information) only have so much time to spare.
In short, if your web site loads slowly when you are looking at it in a web browser, it probably loads that way for the search engine spiders. This means that in a world of limited resources you’ve used up much of yours before they even get to the important stuff your text-based content.
