UK Tabloid Daily Mirror is Thinking of Humans

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I love this story, mainly because it touches on the element that so many SEOs (and marketers) miss – connecting with people.  It’s actually a tabloid that has attracted attention for making sure their focus is more on people than on search engines.

It’s great as a reminder – marketing should always be about thinking of connecting with people, not just crunching numbers.  If you only think of figures (traffic numbers, PPC costs, number of unique visitors) then you’ll likely lose a lot.  If you keep your focus on the people who visit your site, chances are you’ll gain many more fans (and revenue).

More info available also from The Guardian.

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Social Media for Online Business

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Social media is the newest online wave of excitement.  Everyone is getting into it, and a lot of people are wondering – how can I make it work for business?  Well, there are several ways to do it, but not all of them are functional.

ZippyCart has put together a good list of specifics you can use to guide your business through Facebook, Twitter, and more.  Look through them to help improve your business social media.

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Highest Traffic Keywords Do Not Always Bring Profit

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It seems like the focus for a lot of internet marketers is finding that top trafficked keyword.  However, this can be a mistake by not focusing on the true marketing involved.  In some cases, the top traffic keyword is not one that will bring conversions.

Putting focus purely on the traffic numbers for keyword research is the reason many internet marketers are not able to pull the profit numbers many others do.  Making sure you focus on the consumer and their intent more than the pure traffic size is key.

This can be done more quickly using PPC, but at a price.  And in SEO, solid keyword research must be done to target proper keywords – a mistake here will cost a lot of time and money.

Evan LaPointe goes into a bit more detail about all of these factors at Search Engine Land.  At any rate, it’s good to remember that the focus should be on the human experience, not just the analytics numbers.

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Search Engine Optimization is a Changing Animal

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Nowadays the web is getting more and more attention.  People are realizing that businesses are made by being found online.  The methods of doing that are through creating good web pages, having an online presence through blogs, social media, online advertising.  And tied into almost all of this is search engine optimization.

If a business uses any of the other means (social media, blogging, site design), then it all comes down to wanting to be found online, to gain a presence.  And this ties into SEO.  Whether or not you realize it, if you have a Facebook account, you’re helping one site or another with search engine optimization.  Every link you post makes a difference.  On Twitter, any link posted can have an impact on visitors and the search engine listings.

Anything online will make a difference in SEO.  The key to doing good search engine optimization on purpose (as opposed to on accident, as a surprising number of sites have done) is to continue learning what changes impact the search engines.  As it is now, social media is starting to have an effect.  But that doesn’t mean you just need to put one post and you’ll shoot up three pages.  The trick is learning how it all ties together.

A good SEO stays educated on many aspects of the internet.  Just because you learn the basics doesn’t mean you’ll still be an expert SEO four years later (or even one year later).  The internet is a changing beast, and knowing these changes can make a big difference in your placement online.

And if you choose to hire someone else to do the search engine optimization for you, make sure that you’re happy with how educated they are on these changes.  Learning the basics of SEO is easy – but mastering it is more than just a few steps above that.

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How To Determine Quality of SEO Services

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Do you get phone calls for your business from people who say that’ll put you on page one for your keywords with their SEO services?  It can be difficult to determine which SEO companies can actually do the work they claim (and some of them make full-time SEOs like me just look bad).

Find out what their skills are before agreeing to anything.  If you can determine that a company really knows what they’re doing, it can be worth the price.  Good SEO is not cheap, but the revenue you get from solid listings on your primary keywords will more than make up for it.

I’ll say now from my own experience – anyone that guarantees position 1 (or even page one) listings in a set time period (or at all, really) is in all likelihood full of it.  SEO is part of an industry that is constantly changing.  To do it right, you have to keep track of how the search engines operate and adjust where necessary.  Bad SEO may work temporarily, but in all likelihood will eventually make your listings drop lower than ever (or even get you blacklisted).

Shannon Rogers with Web Advantage put together a good list of questions to ask SEOs who cold-call you.  If you can find SEOs who can answer these well, they may very well be worth the marketing investment.

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Great Example of Why SEO is Needed

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I just had to pass this one on. This is a real-life example of someone who was trying to find a hospital where a friend of his had been relocated, but couldn’t. All of his searching through Google wouldn’t let him find the right phone number.

In some cases, I can understand, but for a hospital?  This is one case where I do agree with him for sure – something should have been done.  It’s a great example of how not doing proper SEO will make it so that people trying to find you or your services will never be able to online.  In cases like that, the only way to pass on your site (and get traffic) is through offline marketing, be it on business cards or television commercials.  I think if you have a web site, it’s silly to have it sitting on the web without getting any natural traffic.  But that’s where SEO comes into play.

At any rate, if you want the full details on this crazy hospital example, check out Alan Bleiweiss’s SEO story.  It’s a doozy.

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SEO for BBC? It’s the Latest News

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Yes, even the BBC is starting to adjust to the new wave of internet marketing.  It appears that they’re starting to consider SEO when writing their news posts online.  And keep in mind for the BBC, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, not the silly search engine optimization we talk about.

Enough of their traffic comes from the web and search engines, so they are making changes.  It’s true!  I read it on the Guardian.

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Smaller Cities Moving Business Online

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It looks like smaller cities are starting to see their businesses move more online with web sites, online marketing and social networking.  This would not surprise me too much to see, as the demand here for Tulsa SEO has increased, as well as for Tulsa website design.  I’m willing to bet it’s very similar in other cities.

In this case, it appears that Columbus is definitely on the list of cities rising in their online presence, and it’s showing for several different types of markets.

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The Digital Revolution in Advertising

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I found a very interesting article today, through NPR.  It’s talking to Bob Garfield, and references to his book The Chaos Scenario.  Essentially, the article was covering the changes in marketing we’re seeing today.

The world as all advertisers knows it is changing.  Changing drastically.  Marketing is not dying – it’s being reborn.

Most people are moving online.  Using the internet for almost everything now.  I know that I can count myself in with this – if I’m looking for an address to meet with a business, where do I look?  The internet.  If I want to find out when the next showing of the new movie I wanted to see was out is going to be at, where do I look?  The internet.  If I want to BUY a ticket to said movie without worrying about waiting in line?  The internet.

Everything is becoming available online, so it is becoming apparent that everyONE is going to move online.  Newspapers are losing customers, magazines, even TV as we’ve known it.  (Ever heard of Hulu?)

For companies who advertise in any sort of fashion to keep up, they’ll have to go where the people go.  This means moving their marketing online.  This is also going to also mean a change in the people using online advertising, and the difficulty it will be to be seen in different markets.

As Bob stated in the article, the times, they are a’changin’.  If businesses don’t start changing with the times, then it’s only a matter of time until they go extinct next to the old forms of marketing.

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Free Internet Marketing Seminar

Yeah, it sounds spammy, but I really am putting up a free one-hour seminar.  I thought it might be good to get feedback from local businesses, see how interested they are in the information involved in full internet marketing.  So I’m going to do an hour at the Renaissance (at 71st & 169) this Wednesday at 1 PM, talk about web site design, SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social networking.

Since it’s an hour I can only cover so many details, but I’m going to try giving out good information.  Hopefully people will be able to take something good from it.  I haven’t done a seminar on my own before (only as part of group presentations, previously), so this will definitely be a learning experience.  It should be fun, and we’ll see how things go.

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