SEOUtahBlog

“So… what do you?”

“Oh, I’m a writer at an SEO company.”

“A what-e-oh company?”

“SEO. It means: Search Engine Optimization. We develop your web presence by increasing your rankings on the search engines, and…”

“Oh. So… what do you do?”

Explaining SEO to civilians is, not surprisingly, a difficult prospect at best. The real problem, though, is that even describing it to a business owner can prove to be a bit challenging. And since these are the people who really should understand how SEO can benefit their company, this can prove to be a true problem.

Where do you start? How do you show them that SEO processes do have relevance to their company? Is there a simple way to distinguish SEO from other forms of Internet advertising that they may be more familiar with – such as banners and Pay-Per-Click?

Try this: ask a person to find their own website through a search engine, but put a couple rules on the exercise. First, they cannot use their company’s name, or the the unique brand name of the product they are offering. Second, they only have a certain amount of time to locate their business website.

Recently, Main10 attended an Expo in Salt Lake City and was able to try this exercise with many different companies, with interesting results.

Most companies gave up on the search before too long. Others were clearly disappointed that they didn’t turn up on the search engine results pages for keywords that they had basically just assumed they would automatically rank well. After all, why wouldn’t the largest widget company in Utah rank well for “widgets in Utah.” The idea that it might take a little work to make that happen had never occurred to them, and we could see that a little more understanding of the benefits of SEO began to creep into their minds.

Of course, most companies will still need a more thorough explanation than this, and that shouldn’t be surprising either. But a physical example like this could possibly be one of the best ways to open the doors of understanding far enough to get your foot in.

Once you’re there, that’s when you can start to delve the depths of natural vs. paid rankings, and search engine algorithms, and link recruiting tactics… all the real meaty stuff of SEO that we love so much. But the first step has got to be a foundational education on a level that companies, or even civilians, are more likely to understand.

… and is it practical?

I recently read a good article over at SEO Theory, entitled “Principles of Advanced Search Engine Optimization” that I thought was quite insightful and wanted to delve into some of those principles he mentioned there.

The article is a comparison between what a certain course defines as advanced SEO, and what definition he would give for it. In short the course lists the five topics as their foundation:

1.Advanced Keyword Research
2.SEO Diagnostic & Audit
3.Advanced Link Building
4.Editing & Optimizing Pages
5.Reporting & Analytics

The article goes on to explain why he felt that these foundations are really just intermediate SEO, and he goes on to list his own definition of advanced search engine optimization.

1.Advanced SEO plans for a minimum of 12 months (or 4 seasons)
2.Advanced SEO is driven by query trend analysis (rather than keyword analysis)
3.Advanced SEO focuses on building resources (rather than building links or content)
4.Advanced SEO shapes Web sites (rather than optimizing them) to achieve specific results
5.Advanced SEO pays equal attention to all the major search engines, not just Google
6.Advanced SEO prefers custom-designed tools and tool sets to the stuff you find on the Web
7.Advanced SEO uses metrics that have not yet been implemented in analytics software

I liked this second list a lot better, for a couple of reasons.

The first: as an old Philosophy graduate, there are some things… some semantical things that will, without even trying or putting forth serious effort, drive me absolutely crazy. When you study Philosophy you immediately learn to discount any argument that employs words like “clearly” or “it goes without saying” because obviously, if you have to say it, it didn’t go without saying, nor was it apparently all that clear.

That first list had the same vacuous feeling as I read it. Gee, Advanced SEO would include something like Advanced Keyword Research or even Advanced Link Building. What a novel – and informationally vacuous – statement.

The second problem with that first list is simply that there really is nothing, other than the word “Advanced” that is, in fact, advanced. Now here I must step back and put in my disclaimers that I have not taken the course that the list is describing, and I am simply analyzing the lists as a definition of advanced SEO. Having said that, that first list seems, to me, to describe basic, standardized SEO practices. In today’s search engine marketing environment, that is the least that needs to be done.

Now the second list I liked for a couple other reasons. The first: The terms he uses are specific and then well defined. Not once is the term “clearly” or “it goes without saying” employed… or implied. For a simple list of seven items, it provides an impressive amount of information and solid and well founded arguments.

I say “arguments” because of the second reason I liked his list – it has a very interesting… theoretical feel to it.

You could almost call the list Ideal SEO, rather than Advanced SEO. And this is where the practicality comes into question.

The first item is the dead give-away. Planning for 12 months is idea. SEO takes time… there’s simply no way around it. But trying to explain to your clients that if they want search engine marketing done, and done right, they’re going to have to be in it for at least a year… and watch their expressions change.

The second give-away is the last item. How do you sell your clients on the value of metrics that no one else uses? Or maybe metrics that no one else understands?

But it is exactly these nebulous ideas that constitute Advanced SEO. They are a tough sell. Not many people have the ability to use them. And they may be nebulous… but they are not informationally vacuous. (Except maybe number three. Building resources rather than links could mean any number of things.) These are nebulous ideas because the possibility of using them is within reach, and the possibilities of what it could do for your search engine marketing is quite impressive.

So clearly, it goes without saying, that Advanced SEO, as defined here, is a list that constitutes a range of ideal marketing principles… that will likely be a tough sell to clients from a practicality standpoint… but just imaging what this kind of “real” Advanced SEO could achieve.

Remember when Virtual Reality was going to be the future of online interaction? Or when the Information Superhighway was the speedy road to success? We’ve been through Cyberspace, where all the previously-named Virtual [blanks] became Cyber [blanks], and then we landed in the middle of Dot Com. At first it was the Dot Com Industry, and then the Dot Com Craze. And now it’s forced to reside in the Land of Failed Business Models as the Dot Com Bubble or Dot Bomb. These were all the best new ways to describe the best new thing. But was it something new, or was it just a new label? Was it a better product or a better buzzword?

Where are we now? We’re still getting used to the newest word: Web 2.0. Nothing says “new and improved” like “2.0”. Of course, the Internet isn’t really “new and improved”. No one has sat down and designed a brand new World Wide Web. But the name is perfect. It’s perfect for a fresh start and a second chance. Investors get a little twitchy when things like “bubbles” go and “burst”. “New and Improved” is the perfect way to get them to come back.

But no one really seems to be sure what Web 2.0 actually applies to. There is no massive, all-encompassing upgrade to the Internet. No change in underlying technology. The phrase seems to apply to those newcomers that involve customer interaction. What are they called? You know, those things that allow users to post their opinions on literally anything they want… and in an environment where users can respond with their own opinions. What are they called? BBSes? No, wait – Homepages? Oh, right. Blogs. That’s it. They’re blogs now. Of course. Silly me.

And since we haven’t been able to clearly define what Web2.0 encompasses, we begin to develop new buzzwords to describe our first buzzwords. It’s a vicious cycle. We’ve created phrases like “social networking,” the “semantic web,” and – like the cyber- and virtual- days before it – we’ve started tagging a precious “2.0” to the back of all our other industry titles. When I see an advertisement for Lawn Care 2.0 I’m walking away from my marketing job and never coming back.

There is another problem with this particular buzzword, and that is the question whether or not it actually describes anything new and different at all. Is it really all that impressive that people are using a world wide network to… network?

Sure, we’re delivering information at more phenomenal rates than ever before, which allows us to change some of the mediums that carry that information… but other than that, the only thing that seems to have changed is the venture capitalist willingness to throw money and Internet companies again.

And who wouldn’t want to? After all, social networking and other web applications have made billions… if, of course, they happen to get purchased by Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.

I’ve been a writer for years. I also have the potential to make millions of dollars from a book. After all, a bunch of other authors have done so. I think I’m a pretty good author, and I could probably tell a story that is a lot like those million dollar books. And yet, no one has thrown a lot of venture capitol my way. There must be something wrong with them.

Maybe I just need more buzzwords.

Novel 2.0!

Now the bleeding edge of literature doesn’t have to involve paper cuts. And you can be part of it for a mere 100k investment!

Who could refuse? Novels will be the wave of literary future. Surely if J.K. Rowling can sell eight and a half million copies in a single day, surely a book that looks a lot like it but adds a couple new features will make almost as much money?

It’s not going to happen. A lot of similar books will hit the shelves, but it will never be the same. Historically, it never works. But history has never had much to do with the prevailing business mentality that people will only buy the same thing over and over again.

But somehow, in the online world, all it takes is a few well placed buzzwords to convince investors that they are worth bucket-fulls of money. Somehow we’re sure that a slightly tweaked use of old technology will garner the attention of Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.

Is it because of the power of the almighty buzzword?

Do you realize that “buzzword” is, in fact, a buzzword? (There’s that vicious cycle again.)

Writers can do a lot with buzzwords, and it doesn’t matter if the current preference is for Information Superhighways or Dot Coms or Web 2.0s, we can make something of it. Sometimes we can make millions of dollars of it.

During the Dot Com Craze we had convinced ourselves that we were on the cusp of a revolution. People were ready to throw money at Internet businesses rather than business models. Who needs a model when you’ve got the Internet… and a pocket-full of buzzwords? The Dot Com revolution was going to be amazing. It was going to revolutionize the way we interacted with each other, the way we shopped, the way we advertised, the way we learned, the way we accessed information.

It didn’t really happen.

Luckily, now we’ve got Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is going to revolutionize the way we interact with each other, the way we shop, the way we advertise, the way we learn, and the way we access information.

Whew. Finally!

So until it’s time for the next big thing to describe the same old thing, as writers we’ll hold onto our buzzwords like secret, mystical words that, when put in the right order, will create magic. Or, if we’re really lucky, money.

But what about the Art? No one chooses writing as a career without at least a little desire to create – a need to make something with a little quality.

Are we ruining that by succumbing to the convenience of the buzzword? Do we sell out just a little bit every time we leverage the synergy of optimized word usage?

Maybe.

But what can we do about it? Wait for the current bubble to burst and then be the first to name the next trend?

Maybe.

It’s not exactly Art, but there is definitely an art to it. Shifting Paradigms and Revolutionizing Outside the Box can only be used in certain ways. The right way means a catchy phrase and intellectual influence. A true Masterpiece. The wrong way means a words that are hollow and completely devoid of meaning. The wrong way is a cheap fake… from a dot matrix printer… printed on tattered, sun-faded construction paper.

There’s nothing wrong with big, trendy words. In fact, they’re usually fun to play around with. We just have to remember to use them for good rather than evil. We can obfuscate or we can enlighten. The choice is ours.

What do you think of when you hear the word “marketing”? Television commercials? Billboards or magazine ads? Obnoxious advertising created and calculated to get in your mind and stay there? If you include the Internet in your definition, do you only think of banner ads and pop-ups or pop-behinds?

These are all part of a marketing campaign (hopefully without the obnoxious part) but none of them, alone, are sufficient to reach the largest possible portion of your target market. The most efficient and effective way to reach your potential clients, whether online or off, is to use a complete and unified marketing campaign.

As you spread your message (or product or service) to the world at large, you need to deliver a strong, clear, and powerful message. The following ten points are aspects of a marketing campaign that are necessary to do just that.

1. Branding
Branding can include everything from logo development to corporate image definition, to audience targeting. Your brand is your company, and it’s important to manage it well and keep it in front of your customers.

2. Design
It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for print design, web design, or a business identity package, the right design firm can help you present an image that is classy, professional, and memorable. They always say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and in today’s fast-paced world the time for that first chance has gotten significantly smaller. A great design will help you catch their attention and keep it.

3. Development
In the online market it’s not always about a fancy-schmancy website. Sometimes you need to offer something more. Client-server applications, web applications, and databases are all useful elements in today’s business world, and you may need to include them in your marketing campaign.

4. Internet Marketing
The Internet has opened the doors to countless potential customers. An Internet marketing campaign can help you reach them by employing PPC, SEO, conversion rate optimization, and even email campaigns.

5. Multimedia
There’s more than one way to reach your clients these days. And a presentation that uses more than just words is a lot more likely to draw them in. Audio, video, animation, and interactivity are all valid ways to present yourself to them.

6. Public Relations
PR is a useful way to spread the word about your company or product. You can express your corporate image in a positive way without “selling them” on your offering. PR can include press releases, events, sponsorships, publicity, and more.

7. Project Management
You can plan and strategize all you want, but until you implement and follow through with your marketing campaign, it’s all for nothing. You need good project management to see it through. Project management starts with a needs analysis and specifications planning and follows through to resource allocation and progress oversight and reporting.

8. Research and Analysis
Generalities and theories can’t really help your marketing campaign. Your strategy needs to be based on strong research and analysis in order to discover your target market’s behavior and begin tapping into markets that you might otherwise be missing.

9. Web Management
A strong Internet presence is a must for a successful marketing campaign, but it has to be done right. Web architecture, analytics and tracking, content creation, management and optimization are all necessary components of strong web management.

10. Unification
The best way to maintain a strong marketing campaign is to bring all these elements together into a single strategy or use a single marketing company. If you find yourself outsourcing your marketing needs to ten different companies, your brand and your image can start to spread too thin. Your PR firm might want to go one direction and your Internet marketing company might have completely different ideas. But if you can take care of all these elements under a single roof, your marketing campaign will have the greatest chance for success.

Take only pictures, leave only footprints. Take care of your environment and it will take care of you. We’ve heard them all before, and many of us are tired of hearing statements like that, but in the new environment of search engine marketing we can reapply all the warnings, metaphors, and euphemisms and possibly create a new understanding in the industry.

The search engine environment is built on indexing and ranking algorithms, and as long as we work within the environmental constraints, both will survive, and even thrive, for a very long time.

Just as with other environments, as the search engine marketing industry continues to grow the level of pollution also also begins to rise. And as we optimize more and more, it becomes more and more difficult to find natural results. Which is not to say that you are finding bad or wrong results, just results that were built around helping you find them, not necessarily helping you find the information you want.

Pollution isn’t good for anyone or anything. In the natural environment, pollution is a side effect of industrial growth. In SEM, however, pollution is often propagated as a means to grow an industry. And when pollution is intentional, and indeed the foundation of marketing strategies, it’s going to be next to impossible to clean up.

As pollution builds it becomes harder to breath, your eyes start to sting, the trees begin to die, and the entire ecosystem or biosphere (or blogosphere) begin to degrade and collapse in on themselves.

And in both the search engine marketing and natural environments, pollution has a tendency to build on itself and fester in areas of apathy where no one acts quick enough to get things cleaned up.

Consider the hole in the ozone layer. This allows harmful UV rays to penetrate to the earth’s surface. As certain detrimental gases build up in the atmosphere they continue to eat more of the ozone, creating bigger holes and letting in even more harmful rays.

SEO has had a comparatively long and varied career. There are appropriate ways to use it and inappropriate way as well. Those questionable activities do nothing but leave strange gases behind that only open up wider holes for other dangerous and harmful rays to sneak through. And once they’ve gotten through, the damage has been done.

Search engines are constantly working to block these holes and protect their environment. The harmful SEO practices, however, sneak as much through while they can, and spend their time and efforts trying to find or open the next hole when one of them gets blocked.

This is not healthy behavior.

If the environment is damaged seriously enough, we might not be able to repair it.

So we’ve covered the ozone holes – the things that let undesirables in – it’s time to discuss the greenhouse gases – the things that keep undesirables from leaving.

Sometimes certain procedures and techniques work their way into the search engine marketing environment that may have been useful at some point but are now just clunky relics that are clogging up the system and building up high levels of pollution or the equivalent of global warming.

I know, I know. We’re all tired of hearing about global warming everywhere we turn, but we’re using it in a a different context here. If the search engine marketing environment gets too bogged down in old practices and surrounded by pollutants, the chances that new, innovative, clear and natural practices will climb to the top and help people find what they actually want become very small.

Environmentalism is a tough sell in the online world or the real world because it requires a certain level of personal responsibility. It also means that the industry profits will either be lower than one might hope, or simply take longer to achieve the desired results. It’s hard to ignore profits in the present for the loft concept of a cleaner future.

And this, however, brings us to the biggest difference between search engine and real life environmentalism. The ideal Internet experience is a lot easier for the average user to grasp. They know when something is right and when something is wrong. And they will react accordingly. It’s harder for a person who lives in Backwoods, Nowhere to worry about the ozone layer or GHGs when they’ve never actually experienced its effects. Bad Internet practices, however, are something they might deal with on a daily basis.

Take only pictures, leave only tracks. Work with the environment to help them encourage natural growth and powerful indexing and we might be able to create an environment conducive to truly natural results.

Facebook. All the cool kids are doing it. Are you?

For advertisers, it’s a hard market to pass up. So many people in one place at one time. Marketers see something like this and it’s as if their dreams have come true. It’s got that glowing, shiny exterior that seems to say: come to us. We have numbers.

Numbers are important in a marketing campaign. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. However, in the Facebook world some of those numbers have gotten them in trouble. The reason being that in recent times Facebook introduced a new advertising platform. A platform that gathered numbers that not everyone was comfortable parting with.

Numbers and demographics. Demographics tell advertisers who and where their potential customers are. When millions upon millions of users register their personal information on a social site, all of the sudden demographic research becomes far easier than it has ever been before.

But fail to notify your users or give them an opportunity to completely opt out of the platform, and there will be a huge backlash of opinion. In the space of a month the site can go from “have you tried that out yet” to “remember when everyone liked it?”.

Online advertising propels online development. We all understand this, and, to a point, we all we’ve come to accept this. So much so that we barely even notice it anymore.

Here’s a quick thought experiment. Did you check your email this morning? Do you check it everyday? It’s a fairly common practice. Were you aware that there were advertisements all around your message? We all know they’re there. Flashing, pretty colors or creative titles in bold text. They’re always nearby… just in the periphery of our vision.

Now, do you remember a single one? Do you even remember what they were selling?

My guess is that you probably don’t.

Online advertising is the epitome of the in-the-moment selling. If the pretty colors or particular text catch your eye then and there, you might just click on it. But that means the truth is there’s as much reliance on pure impulse as there is on demographics.

Facebook is the latest in a line of platforms that are trying to deliver the opportunity to receive targeted advertising. Isn’t that nice of them? We’re going to use your personal information to deliver targeted advertising, because we have to advertise, so it might as well be for things you’ve given us hints that you actually like. Oh, and we might sell your information to others, so they can share in this opportunity.

But at least we’ve been given the opportunity to receive ads we want to see.

Wait. Ads we want to see?

Personal information being used to determine out likes and dislikes?

Let’s face it. No one wants advertisements. And rolling out an advertising platform and touting it as something beneficial to a user base didn’t fool anyone. And in the wake of the backlash from this platform, Facebook changed some of its policies and made it easier to opt in or out of the program.

So what about regular online advertising in social mediums like this? Is it effective? Do the demographics reduce the dependence on impulse? Or are the users of social sites so intent on the content that advertising doesn’t even register with them?

Studies have shown that the tendencies of the common user lean toward that last option. Click rates per page views on Facebook (and other social sites) are extremely low.

It seems people are too busy with socializing to even give into impulse clicks.

Does that mean you don’t need to consider social media in your online advertising campaign?

Not at all. While there are arguments flying around about the staying power of Web 2.0 applications and whether we’re on the verge of another bubble bursting, that is irrelevant to the current discussion.

In the here and now community works. Advertisements may not, but advertising isn’t your only option on these networks.

Community works because users feel like you have their interests in mind, rather than just your own. Community is about communication, and that might be the best advertising you could hope for.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the optimization of content used on your website, which includes: links – both internal and incoming, meta data, titles, text, keywords, etc. By doing this, your website will gain higher Search Rankings for the targeted keywords that are most relevant to your website and your business.

SEO will benefit you on every search engine used online today. Without SEO, your site will not naturally gain rankings except on a few obvious, company-specific keywords that are very limited in scope; and even then you might be surprised at how poorly those keywords perform for you. Simply having a website today is not enough, there must be strict content maintenance and research as well as weekly, or even daily, management of all optimization aspects. To take full advantage of SEO, experience is necessary.

Why is Ethical SEO Important

A worthwhile SEO campaign takes time. Given the sheer magnitude of websites on the Internet today, Search Engines take their time before trusting a website. However, sometimes the wait for that trust can seem too long. Herein lies the opportunity for ‘Black-hat’ SEO firms who promise a quick climb in the rankings, countless new leads, and, of course, increased revenue. Of these you must be very careful, as most of those tactics can get your website banned from the Search Engines; obviously a scenario that can take a long time to rectify. Search Engines like SEO done their way, and they are not friendly with websites that attempt to exploit loopholes in their systems.

Main10 utilizes only trusted, ethical, and proven SEO practices that will keep gradually building natural rankings for the long term, not fly-by-night techniques that will risk your websites’ rankings in any way. You can trust your website with Main10.

Why Main10 for your SEO?

Main10, Inc. has collected a talented group of individuals that are highly skilled in specific areas of SEO – from keyword research to content creation, graphic design to database construction. Together they form a market-competitive team where the sky is the limit on the services you need. Main10 also researches the most current trends in SEO, since the Search Engines themselves are constantly upgrading and changing the algorithms used to determine rankings. Some methods that worked last year won’t work today.

Main10 has a fantastic track record with its previous and current SEO clients, ranging from online dating to the financial world, handling all aspects of SEO campaigns and even site management and creation.

Main10 has all the tools necessary to build, promote and market a successful website in today’s highly competitive Internet World. By having all three major development processes in-house (Website Development, Website Design & Management, Internet Marketing), Main10 can efficiently implement every needed aspect of a successful website.