Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

There was no commercial internet in the 80′s, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t reach into the recesses of our past to see that, everything we know now about SEO, we already knew back then. How? From the greatest, most magical music of all time: 80′s hair band glam rock!

They just don’t make music like this anymore, and it’s a shame. The sweet sound of rock’n'roll has never tasted better. All it takes is a reflective look at some of these song titles to realize that these guys knew their online marketing! (Though I’m sure they were all too wasted to even know it!)

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Operating an online business has a lot of advantages over brick and mortar shops. But, contrary to what many believe, being online is not the holy grail of business success. Brick and mortar stores have been successful, to varying degrees, for millennia. Comparatively, the web is barely a twinkly in Al Gore’s eye.

Unfortunately, many would-be business owners plunge ahead in this new marketplace as if it were some magic beans that will suddenly grow into a giant money tree. To be fair… for some, it has. But for the most part, these online business successes are rooted in the old-school business brick and mortar business philosophies. What has changed are the methods of marketing and advertising used to generate new and repeat business.

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I’ve never really been an algorithm chaser. As an SEO, I understand the need to keep up with what’s going on with the major search engines as a prerequisite to being able to perform solid optimization strategies. However, there is a point where you start getting diminishing returns from chasing every nuance in the search engine algorithms vs. building a solid, well-optimized website that performs well for both search engines and visitors coming through search.

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Over the last dozen plus years, unscrupulous SEO’s have given the entire search engine optimization industry a bad rep. It seems like every few months some high profile person in the Internet world says something about how SEO is snake oil, sending ripples throughout the SEO community.

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

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SEO used to be all about getting top search engine rankings. While that is still a primary function of an SEO provider, that’s not all there is to it anymore. Or, at least… it shouldn’t be.

If you’re in the market for a (quality) SEO, you’re going to find providers that go well beyond services aimed at achieving top search engine rankings. In fact, if your SEO only knows how to throw keywords you want to rank for onto your site pages, I can tell you that you’re NOT getting your money’s worth (even if you are only paying a few hundred dollars a month).

SEO, in today’s world, is much more about online marketing than it is about manipulating a site to achieve top rankings for a few keywords. Here are some key components to a well-rounded optimization campaign:

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Michael Schwartz from Vertical Measures, an SEO Marketing Company in Phoenix, Arizona.

One of the best parts about the Internet is that whenever you think of a tool that could improve your site it’s likely that tool has already been created by somebody else in the form of a plugin.

Why waste time building a script or hiring somebody to build one when you can download a plugin from WordPress and have it up and running on your site in a matter of minutes?

Plugins can solve many of your website functionality issues, particularly when it comes to on-site SEO improvement, be it through helping you set up your title tags and descriptions or sending your XML sitemaps to Google.

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In business, sometimes image is all we have. Many companies survive on their image alone. Sure, they had to work hard to build that image, but it’s the image they have built that lets them thrive.

Two quick examples: Nike would never be able to sell sneakers for $120 a pop if they slapped on a Wal-Mart logo. Same shoe, same manufacturer, same quality, but the Nike swoosh makes all the difference. I’ve heard stories of popular authors releasing books under a different name only to find that it was their name that sells their books, not their writing. As long as the quality that got them popular is (mostly) maintained, their image does the rest (*coughJohnGrishamcough*).

I’m sure you could think of a dozen companies that are kept alive mostly due to their image. Change the name, and they have to build an image all over again. But once you got it, you gotta do what you can to hold onto it.

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Most business owners start with a pretty good idea of who they are competing against before they even set up shop. This is valuable information that can help you overcome a deficit of knowledge that you may not even know you have. Just as competitor knowledge is valuable for offline businesses, a business owner must also have intimate knowledge of those who they are competing against online as well.

You need to know who is the leader in your industry, and then do what you can to find out how they achieved it.

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Your competition should play an important role in your research before you move forward with any SEO, PPC, or online marketing campaign. In fact, it’s generally a good idea to do a fair amount of competitive research before you build a website or even decide what industry or niche to focus your efforts on.

Competitor knowledge isn’t the most important aspect of building a successful online business. You still have to be a good manager, know your product or service, and be able to sell, sell, sell! But, gaining competitive knowledge early on can help you guide your online marketing efforts into the most effective direction.

Do You Know What I Know?

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Every once in a great while, someone comes up with a stellar marketing idea. And, it’s not long until that idea is copied, tweaked, washed, rinsed, and repeated. Even now, over a decade later, we still see ripoffs of the “Got Milk?” campaign. Slogans such as “Got Sand?”, “Got Jesus?”, “Got Fruit?”, and “Got Laughs?”, are still found on vehicle bumpers as they speed by us on the highway.

I recently finished a book call Pull: Marketing Secrets The Fortune 100 Use that talks about how new ideas quickly go from remarkable to unremarkable. “Got Milk?” was remarkable… until it got copied. Then it became unremarkable. Ordinary. Everyday. Old news.

That’s the danger many businesses find themselves in. They are unremarkable. They started out remarkable then, due to time and familiarity, became unremarkable. That doesn’t mean they aren’t clever, or good at what they do… only that unless they are providing something new, it’s just more of the same.

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