Yes being listed on the top of a search string is important but I ask why you would pay for this when with a little time and effort you can probably be organically on the top anyway!

For those that don’t know me very well, I’ve been working with clients since 1999 helping them optimise their sites for Google. Some of these have made millions, seriously millions from matching what people have searched and selling them a solution! One golf site I worked on helped golfers fix a slice with a step by step ebook guide, interesting reading but let’s be real if they weren’t number 1 in the world for six or seven major golfing search phrases would they have done so well? Now these guys paid for terms in googles ppc system and yes they made sales but selling a $29.95 ebook and a click cost $9.00 the margin was obviously reduced

So heres the rules broken down for you so you too can achieve great rankings

1. Research what people are searching for in Google. I highly recommend the Google key external keyword tool. Type that into Google and you will find it. Use this tool to work out phrases people type.
2. With these words make sure you have them within your content on your site/blog. This is essential as google first of all checks your header tag for phrases then the copy. Make sure these phrases are in both
3. Once google indexes your site (visit’s it) it will pick these terms up, remember google really is only trying to match what people are typing and what sites have within their pages. Is not that complex!
4. Now search engines know your chosen phrases you want to go for, now everyone is ranked on two criteria. Yes only two and here they are – traffic and how many links are inbound
5. So get as many inbound links as possible

There are other considerations and i will talk about these later, such as the duplicate content rule, adhering to the www.w3.org validation rules and others

But for now, i wanted to point out these basics. Why? Well for two reasons, firstly if you are a small business remember you have choices either pay google each time someone clicks on your ad or do basics so over time you will organically rank

The second reason was I believe there’s a mass conspiracy with advertising agencies, pushing businesses into PPC’s. Now I’m not a big scare monger type guy but i have seen time and time again agencies ripping off clients. Charging management fees or artificially hyping up PPC pricing. To understand this you need to understand the changes in the past year.

The average American now on a daily basis gets over 1800 ads, this has created a situation where people have switched off and they are no longer as affective. Hence the rise in google ads, facebook ads and the list goes on. What people don’t realise is that advertising agencies get a 20-30% kickback for all TV ads they place. So given that ads on TV are dropping at a alarming rate agencies have started to look for other revenue opportunities. At a later date i will talk more about this but at this stage be warned, some agencies are putting ridicules mark-ups on internet advertising. Why? Because they have huge staff numbers historical high overheads and are desperate to find revenue

So the purpose of this blog is to one point out the basics so you the consumer or business owner is educated enough to make a informed decision and secondly is a warning to watch out and be aware that due to TV and traditional advertising dropping the agencies and media buyers are out there trying desperately to generate new revenue sources

I have been involved with search engine optimisation since 1999, during the last 11 years I have seen the competitors throw their hands up in surrender, very commonly known yahoo even got Google for years to power their own engine.

Is Google going to take over and all the rest die? Well I for one would have said yes. Until this week!
Yes Google has opened the door, arguing with china. Standing behind its moral and social ethical rules. I’m one for having strong moral rules and standing up for what’s right, but remember business is business. If you go to china don’t bring American principles with you, if the guys at Google believe so much why not donate money to Chinese’s democracy causes!
So google out! Its been all over the news and this statement is nothing new, however the question is what is everyone else doing. Yahoo for one, they are in the country but are they cashing in on what i call googles mistake.

This is it, yahoo or bing now must follow the red party line to get market share. I came across i nice stat. There are now approximately 17 billion people online with 750 million in Asia (with a huge percentage in china). Heres the opportunity for yahoo or bing, go pick up those millions, build a strong base and make the fight for the biggest search engine a serious one.

Now there may be poisoning right as I speak from the two followers in asia, I for one would be looking at traffic and search stats over the next few months and the moment I saw any decent increase for anyone except google I for one will be selling google shares and pumping them into whoever gets the new Asian frontier.

So how can this help a average business owner, well one mistake business do often is base every offer in English and focus on the American market. Strange thinking given well over half the internet viewers are Asian based. There is basically a untouched market in Asia and advertising is cheap. Go log into yahoo and see what pay per click terms cost for China, Hong know or Taiwan I’ve noticed some phrases are under ½ the cost of advertising in America or Australia

Remember the world is now 100% global but there are political barriers in place. Work with them until they fall down, don’t be stupid and take these as ethical reasons not to do business.

www.webpartners.co.nz

Seth makes the point given a market is as complex as this then you have to be a purple cow, for those that haven’t read his books he says if you drive down a country road and see a normal cow do you even notice? Would some even raise a eye brow at a normal cow? But if you drove and saw a field of cows and one was purple would your stop or even look? He makes the point of course. Now I agree that you need to find your purple cow but sometimes I think too many business try to be cleaver and find a point of difference. I think accept it that it if you sell a widget and ten others sell the same except it’s the same widget! Now I believe if you get resigned to the notion that because every widget is the same why would you buy mine and give up your missing marketing 101. GET A COMPLETE SALES AND MARKETING PLAN
You have to think of your client (or potential client) and solve their biggest issues, then and only then work out how to get to them! In New Zealand theres a website www.trademe.co.nz a takeoff of ebay, I get pitched every month from someone wanting to create a takeoff trademe. None work! There’s lots of reasons why but one nice one was in trademe’s first five or so years every weekend they dropped flyers on cars in supermarkets! Our biggest website, now equating to 60% of all internet traffic in New Zeland had to get their customers to find out about them by dropping flyers (manually!!) on car windows!
They had no purple cow, no new amazing breakthrough in technology but good old fashion brains to realise they had to work out ways to go direct to their potential customers.
In my experience advertising clutter is getting horrible but theres a silver lining, I believe that this growing clutter is evening the playing field for all companies (there will always be a few this doesn’t work for, coke, nike etc). Now if you can think of a way to get to the end customers then most of the time your one up on the big guys. I can’t see ATNT or AMAZON doing flyer drops!
Your big advantage as a small company
Yes the worlds changing and for the small businesses this change will benefit you, if you’re smart. The best way now to cut the clutter is to enter the world of social networking. Stuff purple cows, get friends to buy your products. Be liberal with the term friends, in my mind anyone that wants to buy from me can be my friend. Hell give me enough money and come round for dinner!
I was amazed that I set up a twitter account and within a month I had over 2000 people following me, imagine the world were regardless of advertising budget I can get a daily message to them if I want. Everyone should check shitmydadsays in twitter, 500,000 people follow him! Amazing. Use facebook, twitter, bebo any social networking. The bets stratergy I believe is to get as many followers then sell your heart off! There is rules and tricks which I might talk about at a later date.

Hope people get value out of my blog, feel free to visit my website www.webpartners.co.nz

Yes that’s right; according to the latest hitwise results google has got 71% of all us internet searches. This isn’t any real major revelation I’ve seen google as high as 80% however the interesting thing is isn’t this suppose to be a resurgence of MSN (bing)
What’s gone wrong with bing? Or is it just too far behind google? For me I can’t understand bing, why would anyone use it. It’s basically the same as google, without the toys (maps, trends, analytics, free applications etc)
In my opinion Bing is just boring and has no point of difference to google, doesn’t supply search results any better and doesn’t have googles bag of free stuff. It’s just another case in marketing of a sick dwarf, destined to be deleted unless something drastic happens.
In traditional marketing if there’s a market leader of above 70% then a mixture of second followers, good marketers start to adobe a niche strategy. They turn the fight from one big war into smaller winnable battles.
Look at apple, for years apple was the darling of schools and the design industry. So is there a market bing could own? Well I think there’s a few, the first one is emerging markets. China for example controls searches and even though google is there (and a local engine exists), with microsofts power it could easily do a deal to become the major engine. But would it? I dare say the company probably wouldn’t like to be associated with a market/government were so much counterfeiting comes from. However in this age unless a company takes risks and adopts strategies that are out of convention it will slowly but surely wither away.
The other niches such as youth, education, main stream, elderly all seem entrenched with google.
The only other obvious niche is to rebrand again (yes again) and try to distance from the stale Microsoft image and reinvent as a cool new exciting brand, anyone remember the pepsi campaign ‘choice of a new generation’? I for one was 100% behind it, it divided drinkers into are you happy with the current (coke) or do you want to rebel. This revolution works well for new generations. I would love to know why pepsi changes track. It was working there market share at the time was growing well.
Anyway I will watch with interest with what happens to bing

Would you A) be more willing to buy from a site that you know? Say Ebay/amazon
B) A site that has a lot of testimonials, written and interviewed (movies)
Or C) a site that shows how unique the product is and wows you
For me this is an interesting question, and there seems little to no data on internet buying behaviour in this situation. Now sales alone should give an indication. With years of building and promoting sites a product on option A always seems to outdo the others. Why? Traffic for one is higher so hit rates seem better but more importantly I still believe the average consumer looks at the internet with some scepticism and distrust still. So if they have to choose atleast they know the change of getting ripped off with Amazon is a lot lower.

This still doesn’t help though is you are pushing a niche product or a product that is not traditionally sold on the above sites. Therefore since people haven’t heard about you the most important thing is not pushing how amazing your product is but to rather work on strategies of making people trust you.

You might be asking what these are; well I believe the simple things are the most important. The most important thing is to show the potential customer a contact address and phone number. I also recommend a link to a local directory or yellow pages. That way people can click and see that your number exists. This straight away lets people know you’re not some flash store front with a company based in the back of china/india

The next important thing is testimonials, hopefully with believable people. Celebrities definitely help here. Make their testimonials believable. I had a old boss years ago, multi millionaire that would continually say ‘remember people are most happiest buying from people’ so in a nut shell make people believe they are buying off you not some no faced company

My last tip is to join associations, direct marketing institutes, associations or anything that adds credibility.

Now I haven’t talked about USP much. I do acknowledge that for any product to stand out it has to have a advantage over others. This is still critical but it won’t get people to pass money to you if they think there’s a chance they will get ripped off

This is an opinion based blog, I would love feedback. Check out more at my company’s website http://www.webpartners.co.nz

But theres one trick that people get sucked in time and time again. For the link google spiders must index that link. Now just because you can see the link doesn’t mean google can! A trick I have often used is to swap links but to make sure google’s spiders can’t see that link. That way the link (or my link to you) doesn’t register and pull my site down.

How do you stop this? Firstly you must have google page rank (part of google tool bar), this tool shows if google indexes a page. This is a good start, now you need to see if that part of the page is been indexed. There’s two ways to do this. The easy (90% check) and the technical 100% check.

The easy way is to type that page url into google and then click cache, then text. If you can see the link mostly it will actually be picked up. The 100% method involves putting the site through a html validation tool. Ill definitely talk about that later.

So when link farming make sure that google sees the page your link to your site is going to be on

Hope this helps, any questions feel free to post.

From grant everiss, www.webpartners.co.nz

That being people only buy when they want to. I studied marketing at university and for me it was a mechanism to help sway people to buy your product, fasten the sale up or reduce after sales negative thoughts. It never really was to create a sale when the consumer doesn’t want a product. I know there’s a fine line here though. But as an example, would you buy a coke if you had just drunk a litre of water and had no thirst? I would suggest not.
If you have a new fridge and a better newer model came out that looks better would the majority of people consider buying it?

So this leads me to the fact that people buy when they are ready and need to. But and threes a big but, would a person in their life time buy another fridge? You bet! So why is it when people selling try to sell a product give up after two or three attempts? The key I think is for some relationship to be established and the odd communication should happen so when I’m ready to purchase yourl get the sale.

The reason I’m saying this is at the seminar the company talked about how a new website will generate sales for your company, it will increase your profile and they had tools to monitor it. Sounds great? Sounds fantastic, but without realising that because you have a great looking site, cool functionality doesn’t mean people will buy. You need to look deeper, don’t get sucked in to shallow promises and start building strategies to building up relationships so when people are ready to buy they will buy off you.

Some ideas are, email marketing, flyers, monthly drinks, give always, information sent out.

I would love to hear from other people other strategies to help increase customer /potential customer relationships

Also please remember to check out my website www.webpartners.co.nz

Cheers
Grant everiss