Reading the marketing and advertising trade journal Advertising Age, I was struck by how the comments made by AdAge’s Guest Columnist, Beau Fraser, the managing director of ad firm Gate Worldwide, which were directed at big clients and the advertising and marketing mega-firms and boutiques that serve them apply in some ways to small businesses and their online marketing people. The piece is a bit of rant, really . . . and maybe justifiably so, but I know next-to-nothing of the Madison Avenue-world of advertising. What Mr. Fraser says about advertising at its best, however, - “Advertising provokes thought, differentiates commodity products and helps consumers make better-informed decisions.” - rings true for the product and client services produced by the search engine optimization and online marketing specialists I work for.

Mr. Fraser’s guest column suggesta there are four points that will help big clients allow their big-firm advertising shops serve their maketing interests better. (If any of my bosses’ clients happen to read this, these comments are not directed at you - so don’t take offense. Nor do I think Beau Fraser intended offense for anyone, merely hard-won constructive criticism, all in the name of putting out a better product, and creating a more invigorated climate for both client and ad agency.)

Here are Mr. Fraser’s points transposed, I suppose, with a view to how working with small business SEO amd online marketing specialists can boost the profile, revenue and productivity of small, mid-size and growing businesses lthat rely increasingly on the cyber-traffic to their web pages as well asthe foot-traffic past their storefronts:

1. Avoid treating online marketing “as a pit stop, not as a profession”. - I’m new to this on-line marketing business, formerly having been a lawyer. Yet, even with the staggering amount of reading that was necessary in that racket (yes, racket!) to keep abreast of not only my area of specialization, but the state of the law in general, I am blown away by the amount of information my bosses have to absorb in order to keep abreast with and tap into the best practices in this ever-evolving field. When undertaking online marketing oneself, or when working with your consultants or contractors, I think its essential to treat a business’ online storefront as every bit as important as a retail storefront. Its gotta be clean, persuasive, inviting and intriguing to attract digital foot-traffic and keep them around long enough so you can make your sales pitch and let the person who found your site decide they want the products or services you are offering, Cleaning up a derelict storefront, opening up a new neighbourhood boutique or creating an online presence takes time and effort. Time in the pits optimizing the appearance and efficiency of your site is not time that is spent off the race track where you are competing for positioning and sales. Nobody is going to lap you while you clean up your digital storefront. Quite the contrary.
2. Do Not “Lack Courage” - Change is, or always can be, intimidating - and the pace of change in online marketing is blistering . . . and increasing. (See point 1, above, regarding how much time my bosses have to spend keeping abreast of online technology’s ever-burgeoning possibilities.) Mr. Fraser makes the valid point that clients can have a tendency to “make decisions based on sacred cows, those rules, standards or formulas that are blindly followed because ‘that’s the way its always been done.” Trust in the ‘pros from Dover’ you’ve hired to help you enter the online marketing stream and foster the ’stick-to-it-iveness’ to wait for organic, growing results, some of which may have what is referred to as a long-tail. While there are plenty of fly-by-night SEO operators who can deliver a quick boost to the top of Google’s rankings through quick-fix, questionable means, ranking consistently on the top pages of the search engines requires both short and longer-term efforts to build the web site configurations, content and connectivity. And some of these efforts may seem counterintuitive to how a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ storefront builds traffic and generates sales revenue. It takes courage to take the leap and perseverance to see past the quick fix to the end of the long-tail results.
3. “Get Aligned” with Your SEO Team - To produce optimal results in the search engine optimization game, there has to be a mutuality of interest, where client and provider share the mutual goal of creating a digital footprint that will stand out. Trusting in each other, and having a shared goal and belief in the process, product and progress of results is essential.
4. Make Sure ‘Decision Makers’ are In Touch - For the quick response to changing markets and marketing conditions its critical that a small business’ ultimate decision-makers on matters of site performance, optimization and functionality are in touch with the vision and plan of the SEO, online marketing ‘decision maker’ who is handling your work. In fast-changing times, fast action is most often called for. You don’t want to be sidelined, or have your site sidelined, while waiting for site changes and functions to be approved and then revised pages uploaded through your host server. As technologies emerge evermore quickly and evolve evermore rapidly with new online, internet marketing tools being deployed on a daily or near daily basis, and with emerging new paradigms in business-to-business and business-to-client communications, not only a shared vision but also a fast-action client/marketer response is required.

If you are just entering the online stream, so to speak, don’t hesitate to get your feet wet. Take it from a ‘newbie’ - it’s invigorating. But get with experienced, knowledgable and adaptive specialists who will not only be able tooptimize your site, but will be able to keep you abreast of online marketing developments and the latest internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques as they emerge, whatever these may be this week - or . . . more importantly . . . next week.

May 12, 2008 - Internet marketing sites are “a-Twitter” - forgive the pun - with talk of recent moves by Facebook, MySpace, and now Google, that will enable small business websites to tap into the potential for online marketing through the social networking media. Online marketing advantages that were formerly enjoyed by only the largest of sites with reams of resources and technical expertise are poised to become features that savvy small businesses, growth companies and mid-size players can easily tap into.

Today, Google announced it is rolling out a new Google FriendConnect feature that will easily allow small business web sites to let their clients and customers interact right on their web site without ever leaving their page. According to David Glazer, Google’s Director of Engineering, “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other.”

The potential for small business marketing online through building customer loyalty, brand marketing and driving revenue is fantastic. Imagine the potential for a local wedding planner to enable bride, groom, families and friends to interact online, sharing their ideas with each other to maximize what they would like to experience at an upcoming wedding -and being able to purchase the products and services online, onsite to realize those ideas - all without leaving the planners site. As potential customers interact in brainstorming ideas for one upcoming wedding, they will be able to invite their family and friends onto the site to discuss and get feedback on their own upcoming events. Fantastic ‘long-tail’ prospects await entrepeneurial small businesses that tap into the emerging new technical capabilities Google, Yahoo!, Facebook etc. are letting the little guy into!

Google will preview its new features s that will allow them to make the Web 2.0 world of “any app, any site, any friends” a reality for website owners at its Campfire One, Googleplex.

My new boss is now officially as jaded as the lawyer I used to be. . . . On my way out yesterday, I poked my head in his office and asked him to look over an article I’d posted on eZine.com for a client, to see if I’d gotten the right mix of keywords – not too many, not too few – in the article’s content. He opened the article and looked up at me with “You’ve got to be kidding me!” written all over him. “To be honest,” he said, “I look at this and all I see is blah, blah, blah . . . link!” “Wow,” jaded, I thought. The article, its content and length was more than he was used to seeing in SEO land, apparently.

And that seems to be the critical balance in SEO copywriting. Yes, we all want to get content up there on the web that has the all-important incoming link to our site, but how to best achieve this while getting the double-boost of attracting readers to the site, blog or social media space you are writing for? After all, in the short-term link building gets the page ranking boost you and/or your clients are looking for – but it’s short-lived. I think my bosses and I agree, and we wouldn’t be the only ones in the industry, that social media marketing – MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, dig etc. – is the next wave to ride. But how best to ride it and turn it into a strategy that pays for itself and for our clients? After all, almost by definition users on social media sites - perhaps with the exception of the SEO-types I now rub shoulders with, but I know( or at least hope), that they too tap into what is out there on the internet for fun and frolic) – do not want to be bothered with in your face, blatant marketing content. What’s a poor hack to do?

I think the answer must lie with almost the very first thing I heard about SEO when I first interviewed for this gig. “Content is King!” With Google still trying to figure out how to monetize its social marketing phenomenon - YouTube, all of us seem to be focusing on how we can utilize social marketing media to boost the page ranking on the search engines. What we seem to forget, as I see it as an admitted SEO newbie, is that the blogs like this that we publish are already social media. Readers come to them not only for the information that they want, but to be informed by it. That’s communication, an inherent social medium.

As I write articles for the directories, content for web pages and blog blurbs like this one, I try to keep in mind that their is an end user out there who will, I hope (Are you out there?) read what it is I am writing and feel motivated to take some action as a result . . . post a comment, link to the site, return to see what is new in a week or two’s time, link to my client’s site. That is how the internet grew, and I feel that all of us in SEO should bear that in mind while we’re trying to make a buck or two for ourselves and our clients.

Google faces a great challenge in figuring out how to turn a buck, or bigger buck, on YouTube. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was candid about that during his recent interview on CNBC. Ultimately, however, if you want to put readers eyes in front of the advertising, products or services you are marketing on line, whether for clients or through affiliate marketing, you’d best be assuring that the product that is going to capture their eye is also going to capture their imagination. Down in the caverns of Google Labs and Google Research, I’m sure they have this uppermost in mind. Good thing they have the cash to back up the imaginative ways they will undoubtedly come up with for marketing their products, ads and services through YouTube, which is becoming greater asset for them every day, if they can only figure out how to capitalize on its social marketing potential. I for one will be keeping an eye on how that plays out how to do the same on a smaller scale in the social marketing milieu the rest of us small fry swim in.

Chris Silver Smith at Search Engine Land put out a great piece on May 5th regarding what seems to be a disconnect between Google’s current page ranking method for local search terms outside of the major markets and what is, essentially, Google’s basic business model. If the internet is, as I understand it to be, a user-driven, ‘digital democracy’ – that is, the end-users (you, us) will migrate to using the hardware platforms and software programs that best enable them to get the information that they want, be it product information, entertainment, news, how-to tips, or whatever with the least effort and hassle – then Google and the other search engine players have a vested interest in ensuring that the person entering their search query, using the words they think will in fact get them the information they are seeking, the information that is most relevant to them.

Curious then, isn’t it, that the typical page rankings that come out of Google when you type in a specific place name for a locale that is not one of the major urban centres still come out in a most arbitrary fashion? As Mr. Silversmith observes in his Search Engine Land article, punch in the name of a town, smaller city or suburban area where most of us live after all, and Google will typically spit out what it sees as being most relevant to that locale in the following order: Local/CityGovernment websites, Chamber of Commerce/Local tourist bureau/visitors’ bureau, local Wikipedia articles, local newspaper websites, etc. This order of page rankings or search results really doesn’t seem to have much to do with what information most users are likely to be searching for. It’s arbitrary, as Mr. Silver Smith says.

Optimizing a website for the search engines - SEO at its best and most effective - is really all about ensuring that Google’s web crawling “spider” program finds your website and indexes the website and its content as being relevant to end-users who type in certain specific search queries. At its best, your website and its content will help your targeted audience self-select your web pages with the help of the search engines. The job of Google, Yahoo! MSN and the others is to figure out how to monetize this process, so that they can make money while helping your potential customers find you.

Mr. Silver Smith suggests overriding Google’s current arbitrary system for ranking locale-specific search terms by doing an end-around and posting material that will get Google to override the priority of local search terms in favour of universal search terms. Probably “grey hat”, but it seems to be effective. He suggests that an interim strategy which will help you get around the current glitch or arbitrariness in Google’s local search page ranking methodology, and get your local business site optimum ranking for a locale-specific query, is to put up a YouTube piece that for whatever Google-logic it deems to be more relevant than its current default ranking according to dry Gov’t websites, Chamber of Commerce websites etc. (Could it be that one of Google’s current top priorities according to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his recent sit-down interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiroma, is figuring out how to best monetize the surging popularity of its YouTube subsidiary ?)

While this is a good short-term fix – it will work for now – you can bet that in the not-too short term Google will be rolling out local search and mobile search products that will fill in this gap and it will be back to SEO 101 – making sure that your website has the content and links to the information, products and service that your local customer is searching for with his laptop or, increasingly, her mobile phone.

After all, Dr. Schmidt noted how great it was when he was on the road in a major centre and he wanted a cup of coffee to be able to pull out his phone, key in “Starbucks” and have Google Maps show him the nearest outlet where he could get his Grande Sumatran bold, double non-fat latte or Chai tea. You can be sure that Google’s CEO would quickly recognize a lost opportunity and be miffed if he googled in “Starbucks” in Ottomwa, Iowa instead of Ottawa, Orlando or Osaka (should he ever find himself in Radar O’Reilly’s hometown on business) and all he got was a bunch of local Government web sites and Chamber of Commerce balderdash instead of convenient Google Map directions to a hot cup of joe!