Archive for the ‘Search Engine Guide’ Category

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I’m not trying to coin a new phrase here, just looking at SEO from a different perspective. See, I never really liked the term Search Engine Optimization. That seems like the job of the math geeks behind the search engine algorithms. Its their job to optimize the search engine, not mine.

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

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I’m hopeful that Malcolm Gladwell is right. In The Tipping Point Gladwell talks about how certain trends began or changed once the affecting factors in society reached a point that the previous way of doing things could no longer be sustained. I’m hoping to see a tipping point come to the Internet’s vast amount of free, crappy content.

I’d love nothing more to see a backlash over the vast amounts of free crap available online and the sites that provide it. Searchers and internet users would begin to demand quality and search engines wouldn’t reward those sites with the greatest amounts of crap over those with smaller amounts of quality content.

I love that the Internet is free and there is tons of free content available at my finger tips. Sites such Search Engine Guide provide a lot of free content to their readers and make their money by selling ad space. The idea is this: the higher quality of content, the more traffic the site will receive, the more visitors will click on ads, the more ad space can be sold for, the more money can be made.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Enter MFA sites.

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Ever see one of those movies where some secret government agency has a super high-tech office in an old, dilapidated building in some rundown part of town? The camera starts on the outside, looking over a ghetto as it moves down the street. It zeros in on a rundown building that a squatter would be embarrassed to live in. Then, as the camera moves inside we are shown a state-of-the art facility worthy of a Manhattan high-rise office in the 22nd century.

Sometimes SEO is just like that, but the opposite. A lot of time and energy is spent on the “exterior” (search engine rankings) while ignoring the interior (building a great website.)

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Over the past few months I’ve been working on a personal hobby site. I have to say, it’s been a lot of work. It’s been a while since I’ve built a new site, I’ve spent most of my time over the years working on my main business site and already-built client sites. Even when we are brought in for consulting in new site planning, it’s someone else that does the work, not me.

After spending dozens of my free-time hours just getting this new site set-up, I can totally see why people would just rather pay someone else to do it for them.

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I don’t consider myself a real blogger. To me, real bloggers don’t have jobs, they just get paid for writing about their opinions. Kinda like journalists.

I’m just a small business owner that happens to blog on a few times a week. But since my source of income is my business blogging takes a back seat to business needs. Most small businesses can’t afford to hire a full-time blogger or ghost writer so they have to work blogging into their many business-owner duties. And because those duties are so heavy on the business owner, blogging generally falls by the wayside as more pressing matters are attended to.

Many small business owners are out there thinking “Blogging? That’s just one more thing to add to my already over-booked work schedule. No thanks.” I feel you.

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Whenever a new medium emerges and becomes the “it” thing. Everyone flocks to it until the next shiny thing comes around and then that becomes the new “it.” Inevitably, those on the cutting edge of “it” always decry the downfall of the previous “it” which then becomes “that”. “That” is obsolete. “That” doesn’t have long-term value. You need to give “that” up and put your money in “it.”

But “that” doesn’t always go away no matter how much “it” gains in popularity.

Remember radio? Of course you do. We still listen to radio. Sometimes even listen to it on old fashioned radio tuners instead of over the internet or via satellite. But didn’t you hear? Radio is dead. Radio “died” with the invention of the TV.

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One of the things I like to tell my clients when I’m trying to get them involved in the SEO process is that they know their business better than I do. This is true. What do I know about flow meters, motorcycle batteries, baby diapers, ski jackets or cost segregation?

An argument can be made that as soon as I take on these clients I need to learn everything I can about their industry so I can market it properly. This is also true. But no matter what, I’ll never be an expert at cost segregation. Nor do I believe my clients want me to be. They want me to be an expert in SEO and that takes enough of my time as it is.

And this is why clients need to be involved. I can do the keyword research, weed out the junk, and help them organize them into strongly optimization groups. But I still need the client’s help telling me what’s good and what’s not. How am I to know that “net present value equation” is a good keyword while “net present value annuity” isn’t. The client, that’s how.

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Once a site has been fully optimized, there is still a lot work still to be done. The first pass at keyword optimization isn’t always the best, making further edits necessary. After making the big, site-wide optimization edits to your site its often beneficial to go back and review things on a more granular level. You can find the areas that are up against more competition than others and explore further improvements that will be needed for even more improved success.

Unfortunately you can’t know how well your SEO’d title tags will perform until you make the edits, wait for the search engine to index the page, and check the results. Depending on how deep your site is and the frequency of the search spiders coming back, even the most basic changes can take several days to a week to show in the search results.

When dealing with ecommerce sites you don’t often get the luxury of making changes on a page by page level because everything is pulled from a database into templates. Generally it is counter productive to implement site-wide changes until you know how those changes will work. The last thing you want is for all your pages to drop in rankings at one time because you tweeked the global template for a new title or description.

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Many small businesses are at a financial disadvantage when it comes to marketing their website. Too often they don’t have the funds, time, or resources needed to engage in as much marketing as they would like. Unlike larger businesses with deep pockets, small business often have to rely on do-it-yourself strategies built upon free advice gathered from blogs, forums, and social networking sites.

This gives them a lot to worry about, making sure they are doing it right and that the results will be all they had hoped for. And hoping it doesn’t break their budget in the process.

Every small business owner wants to get the most value for the money they spend on their marketing efforts. Simply put, the ROI must be there. But even with a good SEO and a good campaign outline, you can still break your budget–or render your SEO campaign ineffective–when you let your worries get the best of you. Worrying about smart things is smart. Worrying about the other stuff, well, that just sets you up for failure.

Here are five things you should stop worrying about if you don’t want to blow your SEO budget over the top:

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Small businesses are often seen fumbling around in the dark when it comes to figuring out which SEO strategies really work and which don’t. There is an onslaught of information freely available online, much of it contradictory or confusing. Small business owners who attempt to perform SEO for themselves don’t often know which strategies are more important than others, which are worthwhile and which are worthless, or how do you tell the difference.

Slogging through SEO forums, blogs and article sites can provide a great deal of good information, but it can also leave the small business owner confused on what—or what not—to do.

Those that choose to hire an SEO provider can push some of their SEO decision-making burdens off onto someone else, but some then open the door to a whole new set of worries that can circumvent their online success, even with a successful SEO working for them.

Spending nights worrying about your SEO campaign can eat up a lot of energy that is better applied to other, more important matters. While every business owner needs to be fully aware of the progress being made by their SEO’s efforts, they also need to trust that the SEO knows what is needed for them to succeed. For that to happen, here are a few things the business owner need to stop worry about. Failure to do so can kill an SEO campaign in its tracks.

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