SoloSEO

Content is Forever

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 24th, 2008

Although I’ve known it all along, these three words sunk into my mind during a business meeting last night: “Content is Forever“. I thought of all the investments you can make in SEO, your site design, site organization, links, etc. Those things can change and “die”, but your content can live forever.

Content is such a personal and sensitive aspect of your interaction with your customer because IT IS your interaction. The difference between so-so content and great content is HUGE. Yes, you can write your own content. From our experience in web content writing, great content comes from talented writers. Seeing what our writers can put out in a matter of hours compared to my own writing is night and day.

With content you pay for it once and then its done. Compare that to link building, where if you are buying links you may pay every month for those links and if you don’t, they go away.

Your content is what sells your product, your service. Your content is what engages your customer, keeps their eyes and mouse on your site. Your content is what defines you and your company.

And content is one of the only SEO investments that can live forever.

Add comment Visited 154 times April 24th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Don’t be a Victim of Online Fraud

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 24th, 2008

Due to all the mortgage fraud around here, and throughout the country, there have been public service announcements popping up, to better “educate” us about the dangers of fraud. Fraud seems to be a part of life, with new ploys being developed all the time to take advantage of trusting individuals. The last comment of one of the public service announcements heard frequently around here states: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” We all have heard this comment before, and frankly it is a good piece of advice. Due to blatant greed, we all need to be suspect of almost everything, if not everything. I can promise you there is no money locked in a secret US bank account, which only you can get out to help a banished Prince of Nigerian royal decent, and for your efforts the good Prince won’t be giving you a few million as a commission either.

In online business the same goes, I am sad to hear of stories of people who put out their hard-earned money on some hyped-up trick to increase traffic to their site. These programs might in fact increase traffic a bit, but it isn’t quality traffic, it isn’t qualified traffic, so it isn’t worth what was paid.

Then there are the “online marketing experts” who are willing to open their secret treasure trove of online selling secrets for a nominal fee. These are the secrets that have “made them millions” and they are going to hand them out to you for only $29.95. Oh, but that’s not all, you can also get a special bonus of the super-duper extra secret online marketing magic techniques for just another $19.99, but you have to do it before that 60 second timer ticks off to zero… hurry!!! Please…

I am also tired of hearing of the many SEO scams, and then dealing with the fallout these scams put on the SEO industry. These SEO scammers are the people who ask you to pay a relatively small fee up front, then monthly fees thereafter for their masterful “SEO services.” All of which can’t be audited or proven, while you are being assured by the scammer they are working hard on your site, and you sense they are sitting in their underwear, and you swear you can hear Halo 3 being played in the background. I am sure there have been many occasions when all these SEO guys have done is sign our sites up for that traffic-pusher scam system mentioned earlier, and then they just sit back and claim the new increase in traffic is from their relentless SEO efforts. Total scam.

In the world of Internet marketing, let’s just agree on this… If it sounds to good to be true, it MOST DEFINITELY IS NOT TRUE. Please do not fall for any of these and a myriad of other online scams, there is not easy money out there, not legally anyway.

Making a site a success is like anything else in life, it takes work. SEO is work, it takes time to build links, create content, research keywords, all of which are important in SEO efforts. There are tools you can use to make the process of SEO more manageable, but the work has to be done by someone, somehow, somewhere, in order for a site to really improve its performance. You can use a system like SoloSEO to help you keep track of all your progress and provide you with tools and training to do it yourself, but it does take time and effort. Or you can hire a reputable SEO firm, one that will be a bit pricey, but they will tell you what they are doing, and show you reports of the progress they have made, and you will see an increase in qualified traffic, and ultimately sales. Good SEO efforts drive real potential clients to your site because they already know what you are offering and it is what they are searching for, that is the type of pre-qualified clients we all want browsing our product pages.

At SoloSEO we are working to make the tools and processing of SEO easier to use, as well as more educational. We not only want our clients to see their sites improving the right way, we want them to know how SEO works and to understand what the tools and processes are doing, and why the positive results are happening. Understanding the concepts behind SEO allow us to better understand our online marketplace, and helps us quickly determine the different online tactics be employed by our competitors, so we can better compete. Learning and doing are both important in SEO, as it is with many other worthwhile endeavors.

In short, please be careful when purchasing SEO services, make sure the providers will be accountable, make sure they give you some benchmarks on what they will accomplish over the term of the contract. Not so much in terms of traffic, traffic will come if the SEO is done right, instead make sure they give you a timeline on when the keyword research will be done, how much time they will spend building links, and how they build links, (hopefully they avoid purchasing links), and how much time will be spent on content, etc. Pin them down, and make them commit to a defined time-line. This is the way business is typically done in the offline world, we should demand and expect the same level of responsibility from the online world. Don’t be intimidated by their perceived expertise, you know more about other stuff than they do, I assure you. Speak with confidence, and expect them to stand by their performance.

If you have any questions on whether a SEO service provider is a good one or not, ask them to provide you a few URLs they have worked on and talk to the owners of those sites, see how past clients have felt they were treated. You could also use our SEO tools to analyze these sites and see if they have addressed basic SEO principles required to improve a site for the long haul.

Ultimately, just be wary, money can make good people do some pretty dumb/dishonest things. We unfortunately had $20K stolen from us last year by a family friend. This someone we allowed in our home as one of the family and we mistakenly trusted, so it can happen easily, anywhere, anytime, even to the most untrusting among us.

One final note on fraud, pay attention to all the political campaigning going on right now. Some of the very best scammers in all the world are now running for President of the United States, it is fascinating to watch. Let us all remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, even ( or especially) in politics.

4 comments Visited 924 times January 24th, 2008 Aaron R Stewart

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7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours

Posted by Michael D Jensen on November 26th, 2007

Most SEO’s will advise you to buy an existing site/domain (lots of age benefit), but there are times when you need to start from scratch with a fresh domain. It can sometimes take a couple of weeks to get a new domain indexed by Google (even longer to start ranking!). In order to speed up the process of getting your site indexed quickly, even in 24 hours, follow the steps outlined below:

1) Create 5 pages of content
Skip the “under construction” page and write several pages of real content, at least a few paragraphs.

2) Create Internal Links to your Pages
Put the content in a template with a menu structure to make this step easier. You can find free templates at oswd.org and other places, at least to get started. Link to the content through the menu, and if you have a major landing page, link to it from the content of a page or two.

3) Tag on Social Bookmarking Sites
After just a few minutes to create an account with these sites you can submit a link to your site. This gives you an instant way for Google and other search engines to find your site because these social bookmarking sites get visited by the search engine bots (like the Googlebot) quite regularly. A few bookmarking sites to recommend: Del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon.com, and Furl. Make sure you tag them with common words, like those you find on their tag clouds (BlinkList has a good one, just scroll down on the page to see it).

4) Comment on popular and recent blogs (with your link)
Find 5 blogs that are fairly popular, relevant to your site, and have a recent blog post (last day or two). Read the post and add a comment that contributes to the discussion, including a link to your site in the URL field.

5) Create, Submit, and Ping your XML Sitemap
You can create a free XML sitemap here then upload the file to your site (just save it as sitemap.xml). Then ping Google with your sitemap by typing in the following URL in your browser, replacing the domain name with your own:

http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Next, create an account with Google Webmaster Central, add your site, and submit your XML sitemap.

6) Install Google Analytics
Add Google Analytics (free) to your site. Don’t forget to verify your site with them to get the data collection started.

7) Run some Google Ads
Create an account with Google Adwords and start running some ads, even if its just for the domain name, company name, or some long tail keywords. Google has to go to your site because of their quality score, which includes “your landing page quality”. Just spend a couple of bucks and it can help jumpstart the indexing.

With these steps, you should see your site indexed fairly quickly. I can’t guarantee the 24 hours, but it is possible. At the very least it will speed up the indexing significantly (from weeks to days). Look for the “googlebot” to visit in your site analytics. Then look for your site to show up with Google by doing a search with the site: operator (for example, site:sphinn.com). Enjoy!

35 comments Visited 4503 times November 26th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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How To Profit From Site Images

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on November 8th, 2007

The other day we were leaving a soccer game for my 6 year old boy. My 2 year old wasn’t quite happy with her perceived lack of playground time, and she expressed her upset quite loudly, while she thrashed around. I calmly (kind of) chased her down, picked her up and lovingly wrestled her into her car seat. She reacted to her entrapment with unrelenting, ear-pearcing screams. Over this outburst, I couldn’t hear myself think, let alone my car’s reverse alarm, and we subsequently backed straight into a light pole. The bone-jarring thud caused instant silence, which was quite nice, but I dreaded getting out to view the damage. I slowly walked to the back of the car, and to my complete surprise and extreme delight I had hid that poorly positioned pole dead center. The only damage was to my trailer hitch cover, it was completely shattered, but it costs less than $100 so I was happy. I went from total dejection to total elation in just a few seconds. What a relief.

Now I really love that trailer hitch cover, and in honor of its fine protection, I wanted to replace it with a new one. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember where I purchased it, I knew it was online somewhere, but it was over a year ago and I can’t even remember my kids names from day to day. So I went to Google and searched “Jeep Trailer Hitch Cover,” which seemed to be a pretty good description. But, while I love search, and I love the amazing supply of products online, I do get a bit frustrated with all the information we get back in the SERPs, it can be way too much. With so many of the sites just being unhelpful noise, much of which is caused by all this Adsense craziness. It makes efficient searching more difficult, and the SERP I was looking at was too much. Fortunately, because I knew what I was looking for, I just clicked on the Images link at the top of the page, and was happy to find an image of the hitch cover I was looking for at uhaul.com

I went to the page, determined the formal name for the product, and searched again, to find other suppliers of the hitch cover. I quickly figured out the best deal, which happened to be at uhaul.com anyway. But going through all this, I became curious as to why U-Haul’s image of the product showed upon the first image SERP, but the image from the other online stores did not. I assumed it was due to U-Haul wisely naming their image well, and using the description tag to inform the search engines about the image, but I was wrong. It turns out U-Haul needs to thank Google for this particular sale. U-Haul’s images are actually served up from a image database, and no image names or descriptions are passed through to the product page, leaving the image without direct description. However, Google knew there was an image on the page, and wisely assumed it was related to the first 3 words on the U-Haul product page, namely “Jeep Hitch Cover,” so Google decided to return this page with my query. People can bang on Google all they want, but in this situation, they performed well.

So what could the other online stores done better to insure they are being found more readily through image search? First let’s look at stores which use the same product image as U-Haul, and see what how they named their images:

1. Jep_hitchstep.jpg
2. 10903_step_jeep.jpg

First, neither store used the image description tag, so it would be very difficult for any search engine to match my particular query by virtue of the image name alone. Both pages were also full of content, obviously trying to show their authority on the topic Jeep accessories, but Google couldn’t seem to figure out what they were selling in their text. Now if both stores were to name their images a bit more descriptively and add “Jeep Trailer Hitch Cover that is also a step” or something similar in the description tag, they will do better in the future for queries similar to mine. It is very important for us to think about what our customers will type in the search engine, which combination of keywords they will use to find us, and make sure our product images are labeled accordingly. The search engines are smart, but they are looking for some sort of relevance, and if we provide them this information, we will be rewarded with qualified traffic.

One final note, due to the shear volume of web pages being added each day, Image search will continue become more important. Image search allows us to narrow some searches more quickly, to find what we need more efficiently. I use the Image search function quite a bit, if I know what I am looking for, or I am not familiar with an online store for a particular product type. How important is image search to you? How often do you search via images?

Oh, and as a note, my daughter did stop crying… eventually.

4 comments Visited 1332 times November 8th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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IndexRank - A New SEO Metric of Indexing Rate

Posted by Michael D Jensen on November 5th, 2007

How do you measure the success of your content strategy? How do you compare your website’s growth with your competitors?

Enter, IndexRank. IndexRank is a new metric to summarize the indexing rate of your site. If you constantly add content to your site, big or small, your IndexRank will be higher. If you only periodically add content to your site, your IndexRank will be lower. The metric is based on an algorithm that makes use of time specific indexing data from Google to indicate (on a 0-10 scale) the indexing rate of a website. Hat tip to Aaron Wall for a great post about the value of this data.

Below is a snapshot of the IndexRank of several sites. Read on for an analysis of each site, and why their IndexRank is where it is.

Sites such as TechCrunch that create lots of content will of course be indexed more by the search engines, and this is reflected in the IndexRank. ColbertNation.com is a fan blog of Stephen Colbert, and content is added on a daily basis, although not to the same levels as TechCrunch. Bill Slawski has a great SEO blog, but with only him contributing to his blog every couple of days, he doesn’t get indexed as much as sites above him in IndexRank. A newer site, such as Gooruze.com has a lower IndexRank because it is new, but as it continues to create more content on a consistent basis, its IndexRank will continue to climb. Paul Allen (not the Microsoft guy) has a great blog, but only posts to his blog every now and then.

How to Use IndexRank

One of the best uses of IndexRank is to compare yourself with other sites, like your competitors. First, visit the Check Your IndexRank page and enter your domain name in the first text box. Then find a few competitors and enter their domain names in adjacent text boxes. (To find a quick list of competitors, search with your top keywords and select the top few domains that rank well.) The IndexRank of all of the domains will give you an idea for how your website is positioned with your competitors in terms of content growth. Remember, IndexRank must be acted upon to be useful, don’t just stare at it, improve it with action.

How Can I Improve My IndexRank?

If you find yourself lacking in IndexRank, the best place to start is by creating content. Start a blog and motivate yourself to write every day. Write articles, news, tutorials, or informational pages and post them on your site. Pay for content to be written for your site on a consistent basis (2-3 articles a week is a great place to start).

21 comments Visited 3371 times November 5th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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The Fate of the Keywords Meta Tag: Misspellings

Posted by Michael D Jensen on October 31st, 2007

Meta Tags were once a major player in SEO. With the advancement of search engine algorithms, meta tags become less and less significant. The description meta tag is still used for your search engine snippets, but the keywords meta tag has been disregarded by all the major search engines.

In my SEO blog reading yesterday, I first found a post by Danny Sullivan about meta tags. Then just this morning I read a post by Matt McGee also about meta tags and he makes the same point:

The Keywords meta tag is useless, except for misspellings.

If your page has a product, service, or keyword that can be misspelled, instead of intentionally misspelling the word in your text, use your keywords meta tag. It won’t get you page 1 placement necessarily, but it definitely makes a difference.

If I had say in the Googlerithm, I would tie the spelling functions with the search functions, and if a page ranked well for a certain phrase, but the user misspelled the phrase, I would certainly give more relevance to a page that had the misspelling on it (albeit in a keyword meta tag).

With that said, I would certainly not focus much time at all working on the keywords meta tag, but while you’re under the hood making changes to your site, it wouldn’t hurt.

6 comments Visited 1354 times October 31st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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In SEO - Be A Tortoise, Forget the Hare.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on October 30th, 2007

On Aaron Wall’s site www.seobook.com, Aaron Wall makes a statement which makes me chuckle every time I read it, not because it isn’t somewhat true, but because I can imagine how it must drive others crazy. Aaron states,

“SEO is not hard, Anyone can be successful at it with the right information.”

While I agree that anyone can be successful through SEO, if they have the right information and the right tools, I don’t think SEO is “easy” for everyone, not even for most people. I personally have only met Aaron once, and have heard him present on a few occasions, and just based on those observations I can see why Aaron would see SEO as easy, I think for him SEO is easy. But for the rest of us, the average humans, SEO is tough work. It is especially difficult for those who are running more traditional/non-technical businesses. There is so much to do as a small business owner, and the entire organization relies on you and your efforts. Quite frankly you don’t have the time to sit down and work with site optimization all day, or dedicate enough time to learn how to make the required changes to web site pages in just a day or two. It is going to take more time than that. How much time really depends on not only your available time, but also on how good your information and tools are.

With accurate information, like from Aaron’s SEOBook, and excellent SEO tools, like we have developed here at SoloSEO, the SEO process can become more manageable, that much is true. But please never let anyone convince you SEO will be easy, unless you are a technological genius, and there are more than few using SEO as a profession. This hard work revelation probably isn’t what anyone with aspirations of quickly making it big online wants to hear, but I wouldn’t feel good about giving the impression SEO is some magic online wand, which when waved, instantly delivers more traffic and orders than a site can handle. It just doesn’t work that way. I am sure there are many out there who have heard and believed the claims of this “SEO ease,” then got in, got to work, and became quickly disenchanted with the SEO process, perhaps even felt frustrated at their inability to quickly grasp the “simpleness of SEO.” If you have felt this way, you are not alone, it is common, it is okay.

As perhaps some of you have done, I have spent my life as a very average person, not overly smart, not overly quick, not overly fun, not overly funny, not overly thin, just not overly impressive in almost everything. Fortunately I came to grips with my total averageness a few years ago, and I realized my only chance to get ahead in this world, was just to work harder than the naturally talented and smarter people were willing to. I can’t compete with the “blessed ones” one on one, hour to hour, but if I only sleep 4 hours, and they sleep 10, then I have picked up 6 hours a day on them, and my chances are better. I have no problem seeing myself as a tortoise, and I have always loved that story. I think most my fellow slower folks have too.

I think most entrepreneurs, who have created and succeeded in their own business, have either worked harder, or are “blessed.” For most of us it is simply a matter of out-working the competition, we may never be the biggest, or grow the fastest, but we can be successful, and live a comfortable life by out-working the others. And if we work harder, using the best tools and information, we can not only increase our chances of success, but shorten the time required. The same is true with SEO.

To me SEO is similar to the process of digging for gold. There are many technologies we can use to find gold now, and those technologies get better all the time. With today’s technology we simply don’t have to head out with a shovel and start digging hither and thither until we find something shiny, there are better ways. But even with all the modern tools and technology, when it comes right down to it, getting the gold out of the ground is going to take work. We can dig with a shovel, we can dynamite, we can use large equipment, and we can hire an army of miners, but it is all work and it is required to reap the eventual reward. No way around it.

There is no doubt SEO can be worth much to a company looking to increase sales, it can take a struggling company trying to make any sale at all, and turn that company into an online success story. Where they once wondered if they would convince anyone to buy at all, they now they struggle with cash flow, barely having enough cash on hand to pay vendors, so they can barely stay ahead of the orders onslaught. But to experience this kind of transformation in online sales, the SEO work must happen. We are going to need to focus on our site’s Keywords, Content, Links and effort must be spent to put it all in place. No way around it. We can use all kinds of great tools, and have the latest information to make our efforts as efficient and effective as possible. We can even hire others to do our SEO for us, but SEO is the price for long-term online rewards. SEO isn’t easy for most people, it isn’t a get rich quick scheme, there is nothing magic or extraordinary about it, but if the SEO work is done well, then success is more than likely, if not virtually assured. I like that about SEO, we can work harder at it than others do, and see success for our efforts. And as for all the other tortoises out there, I know you will like that about SEO too.

4 comments Visited 1051 times October 30th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Instant Testimonial Page, Just Add Blog Post

Posted by Michael D Jensen on October 22nd, 2007

Recently I noticed a few backlinks to our blog coming from HitTail, a long tail keyword tool. Instead of being some spammer that puts up a temporary post that pings our blog, HitTail is collecting “testimonials” about their service from virtually any blog (that pings it), and delivering this list in a nice clean way. Even a link in the comments will trigger an “entry” into the HitTail quotes and testimonials page.

I love the idea to automatically collect who talks about your site, and then to post it as a quotes and testimonials page. I track what people say about SoloSEO using Google Alerts, but maybe this is a great way to not only track it but also share it!

This is also a great way to create “user generated content” without users having to directly interact with your site!

The only downside is they are essentially giving away a free link from a PageRank 4 page.

Update: Although it appears to still be very automated, there is definitely someone weeding out the entries that get on the page.

3 comments Visited 1120 times October 22nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Learn SEO Basics: Long Tail Keywords

Posted by Michael D Jensen on October 18th, 2007

As you’re learning about search marketing and SEO, you will definitely run into the phrase “the long tail”. Let’s turn this odd term into a familiar one by looking into long tail keywords.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

When you are identifying keywords for your internet marketing (both SEO and PPC), the metric used most to compare keywords is its popularity. If you put all the keywords that “exist” into a graph, it would look something like this:

The y-axis is the popularity and the x-axis are the keywords themselves. On the left hand side we have the most popular keywords, which are also highly competitive. Because these are the “opposite” of our main topic, long tail keywords, we call these just “keywords” or for fun, “short tail keywords”.

On the right hand side of the graph are the long tail keywords (looks like a tail doesn’t it?). Despite these keywords being less popular, they are still used every day by searchers around the world. And the exciting part is, they are (1) less competitive and (2) easier to rank well for without a ton of work!

Recently a company shared their long tail vs short tail keyword data, and they showed that almost 70% of their search engine traffic came from the long tail. This company is not alone, long tail keywords can be powerful sources of search engine traffic for any site!

Is it a Keyword or a Long Tail Keyword?

Separating out short and long tail keywords is best done by counting the number of words, although there can easily be overlap between the two. Short tail keywords are often 1-2 words in length, sometimes 3 words. Long tail keywords are typically 3-6 words in length, but they could be even longer than that!

How Can I Find Long Tail Keywords?

Finding keywords is pretty easy, there are lots of tools available, from Google Adwords to WordTracker to our own tools that aggregates several of these keyword databases (free trial). But before you get too excited, there is one important thing to know:

YOU WILL NEVER IDENTIFY ALL THE LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

Why is that? The main reason is that new searches happen every day, a lot more than you would think. Google has said that 20-25% of searches haven’t ever been seen before. That is amazing! What that really means is that there are tons of opportunities for you to get traffic, and with keywords that aren’t highly competitive!

How Can I Capitalize on Long Tail Keywords?

Let’s make this one into a step-by-step process:

1) Today’s Long Tail Keywords - Start figuring out what long tail keywords people are using right now to find your site. I recommend HitTail. They have both free and paid services that track who hits your site. You can do it with Google Analytics too, but I like HitTail’s interface and focus on just the long tail.

2) Tomorrow’s Long Tail Keywords - (a) Brain storm by yourself, with co-workers, friends, and family for long tail keywords. Email a bunch of people you know asking for 10 searches they would use to find your product or service. (b) Use keyword search tools (like ours) to find keywords that are 3-6 words in length. Start with a popular keyword and see what comes up. Add it to your list of keywords but mark them in some way that they are “new”.

3) Unique Content - You’ll find it rather tough to rank for a long tail keyword without actually using that keyword in your content. Either write or pay someone to write content (like one of our companies) based on each of your keywords, one per page. I suggest doing no less than 250 words, and 350 words is probably better. I wouldn’t worry about keyword density, but have it in there 3 or so times, as well as in the title and header (h1) tag.

4) Internal Linking - The easiest links are internal links! Of course they don’t count the same as external links (backlinks), but they are useful and make a difference. Make sure you link to your new content in some organized way (Read about theming by siloing), preferably more than just one link on one page to your content. Site-wide links should probably be reserved for your “short tail keywords”.

5) New, Fresh Content - After getting content for your site with your “new” list of long tail keywords, you need to stay on top of your game by constantly adding fresh, new, unique content. We started our content company, Applied Content, two years ago for just this reason. If you can’t afford to buy new articles weekly (we recommend 3-5 new articles per week), there are other options. Starting a company blog is a great way to do it, and you can share the writing between yourself and other employees. Have a set day to post so everyone knows to have a post ready. If you don’t want a company blog, then just write articles and expand your site. The point is to have new content with new phrases and potential long tail keywords.

Armed with the steps to capitalize on long tail keywords for your site, you can be well on your way to realizing the hidden potential of long tail keywords!

For an advanced look at the topic of short and long tail keywords, look at my post about Links vs Content.

18 comments Visited 3546 times October 18th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Image Isn’t Everything, But It Is Something.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on October 11th, 2007

Taking a look at the corporate logs in the image to the left, how do you feel about those brands? Do you feel anything? Much in marketing is focused on influencing the public’s perception of our companies, our products and our brand. We want others to think our products/services are high in quality, a good value, safe, reliable, fun, entertaining, satisfying, or simply the best. So how is this done online, is it different when compared to more traditional ad mediums? For, example in TV commercials we have just about seen it all, from diet cola commercials, which appeal to our hip and healthy side, to luxury cars like Lexus, BMW and Mercedes, which tout their extreme quality, and attempt to impress us with their prestige. All this presentation created simply to influence our perception toward these brands. And with TV being so visual, the advertiser can use all sorts of techniques to spin their products in a very positive light. Many are now wondering if TV advertising is as effective as it use to be? I’ll bet there are a million or two Tivo owners who will tell you it probably isn’t, but that is a discussion for another day, but does suggest a need to come up with other methods to improve our corporate image.

We all know TV ads aren’t real life, and although I doubt there is any girl that choose to hang out with a guy because of the type of diet cola he drank, at least I hope not, we all know some people drink certain brands of soda or diet soda because they believe they are being perceived by others to be cool, sophisticated, wealthy, discerning, or concerned with their health, etc. Many choose to use these brands because of the brand image they have in their own head, will hopefully be identified by others as the product is consumed. My wife loves Diet Coke, and I mean LOVES it. She says it tastes better than all the other diet beverage choices out there, without question. I personally disagree, I think Diet Coke tastes like licking dirt off a pitching wedge. She also thinks Diet Coke portrays a certain image, say of an attractive blonde girl cruising along a beach-side path on roller skates, bopping to the music as she enjoys her Diet Coke. But while I like the commercial quite a bit, and it matches the image of my wife well, I personally still see Diet Coke as the drink of choice for attendees of a 1929 high school reunion, held last weekend, and not the drink of anyone remotely hip. So this ad, although excellent in my opinion, has not changed my perception of Diet Coke one it, or its brand, it is still yuck, but many others feel differently. So when we work on our brand, we attempt to positively influence as many as we can, knowing full well we can’t change everyone’s perception, and that is ok.

Online we obviously don’t have the ability to visually create an image as well as a TV commercial can, although with YouTube and others we are getting closer. So we instead have to rely on other marketing opportunities to influence potential clients. In search marketing, our prestige and our perceived value are currently tied to how well we do in the SERPs. Many of us know that being on page 1 of a SERP isn’t necessarily the best way to determine if the particular product or company is the best (no offense to Google and Yahoo). And we know a high ranking it is not a guarantee of a good quality product or of excellent customer service either, but there is no doubt we notice the sites on page 1 more quickly, and we take a look at sites on page 1 more often than potentially better products and sites buried on subsequent SERP pages. So in a sense, the work of SEO directly influences the perception potential clients and the public will have on our businesses, at least initially. If we are ranking well on the results page, then we will be perceived as being market leaders, the most popular, the most cutting-edge, the highest quality, whatever, whether it is reality or not. The better we do on the SERPs, the better we will be initially perceived, and they more clients will visit our site. Then it is up to us to make sure our sites are designed well enough to deliver what client needs. We need to ensure visitors can easily find the information they need, that they feel comfortable with us, and we need to be sure they can easily order when it is time to purchase. Online, SEO should be seen as our ability to influence the initial perception of searching clients. SEO can be online marketing and online PR, all wrapped up into process, and really our opportunity to make a better first impression.

When considering the benefits of SEO, we need to remember that through the SEO process, we are improving the perception of our companies to potential clients. It isn’t just a matter of gaining more traffic to our sites, it is a matter of promoting and influencing the long-term image of our company and products. If we can make them initially believe we are great, then prove it to them with our site, products and customer service, then we have won a tough online battle.

Add comment Visited 973 times October 11th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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