SEO - EO - EO

SEO, or search engine optimization has become a hot term and a concept that has recently filtered down to the public. The concept simply acknowledges the importance of search engines in today's internet. With billions of sites online, getting noticed on the net has become a big business.

"If you build it, they will come" is not an online business plan. They WON'T come unless they either know about you, or can find you. Finding you is the major concept behind search engines.

Therefore a good online marketing plan has to include SEO in the mix. But how much and where is part of the voodoo. To achieve proper results you have to come up with realistic goals. Start by answering the following questions.

What is my business?
Where am I located?
Who is my target audience?
What makes me unique?

The basis of SEO is 'keywords'. Keywords are words that answer the previous questions and more. These days, keywords should be included in site text as well as a site's 'metatags'. Metatags are keywords that are part of your website but are not visible. They are kind of the washing instructions in the pants of your site.

Metatags aren't as important as they used to be as google and others have begun actually reading the site TEXT for relevent keywords and putting less weight on metatags. This is a great reason to blog on your site as it lets you cram relevant keywords into your text without having to splash them all over your home page.

Of growing importance is linking your site. Google in particular 'weighs' your site importance based on the 'web' of links your site belongs to. The more links to and from your site, the more relevant you must be.

Over the weekend I heard what is a growing refrain from someone elses client. I won't name names but this business owner was proudly telling me that his new web designer ensured that he would always pop up first on the search engines.

Folks, this is a bit of a snake oil sale. Lets follow the logic on this. Lets say you sell baseball cards, and your name is Card Land and you operate out of Smalltown, MI. As a web developer I can pretty much assure you that when someone types 'Card Land Smalltown MI' into a search engine that you are going to pop up! WOO HOO! That 50 bucks a month is working!

Or is it? Fact is if someone searches on your name and you are the only game in town for what you sell you are going to pop up first page REGARDLESS of whether you do any SEO or not.

Proper SEO is going to help you show up in search results when someone DOESN'T necessarily know your name, or your town name, or searches on 'baseball cards' and gets the 150 million search results with 'baseball cards' in it.

Keep in mind that everyone else is trying SEO as well including the companies who MAKE the baseball cards and you can quickly see that the blanket promise of 'Top of the Search Results' is pretty untenable.

Here's what I tell my clients. Set realistic goals. Pick the keywords you KNOW will rank you top, then pick the keywords you WANT to rank top in. THAT is where you focus your SEO effort.

New iShop Product only 899!

Around the NFC offices, we're always thinking of new ways to offer our clients cool new features and leading edge products while holding down costs in this tough economic climate. Now, we've done it again!

We have recently unveiled our iShop product. iShop is a full featured, fully secure e-commerce website with all the bells and whistles that the other guys will charge you thousands of dollars for. With a jaw-dropping list of features that rival the best sites out there, our iShop can get you up and selling in a matter of DAYS, not months.

And we are offering it at the insanely low price of $899!

See the full list of features HERE, there's just too much included to list them all in this blog.

Then go see our demo site HERE, or see our friends at Flufferella.com for a live site.

How DO we do it? We are small and fast and highly skilled. We have an efficient workflow. And we do this out of love of the craft. Noone's getting rich here, but we love what we do and we love helping our client's succeed!

So check out our iShop product today. 899 gets you the full site with only 9.99 per month hosting!

Heatin up the new year

So here we are in the dead of winter. Little Traverse Bay is frozen over, I look over it through the windows of my new office space. Business is picking up rapidly as people realize the quality and value of our combined approach to web design and online marketing.

To further heat things up in this cold northern winter, we have introduced two new products. iSite and iShop represent the culmination of alot of work to provide a platform of feature rich web products at an unheard of value.

iSite is aimed at the traditional static HTML site market where users want a site with some info on them, contact information, maybe a map or photo album, but that's about it. iSite however, integrates an extremely easy to use CMS (Content Management System) that allows the users to log in and actually edit their own text and info right on the page. In fact, they can add images, video and additional pages as they like!

All this functionality and we have priced it at 99 bucks, with 4.99 a month hosting. That is unheard of for the amount of features this site offers.

Feel free to check it out at www.newfocuscreative.com/~isite.

Website as product testing

One of the things that I find remarkable about the whole 'Web 2.0' movement is the way that the web has changed from becoming a one way medium to a two way conduit. More and more people are finding ways to interact online. We can now video conference with people half a world away or IM the guy in the next room. With facebook, myspace and myriad other online applications we can keep in touch with friends and family like never before.

My stepson routinely plays CounterStrike Source online with his 'clan' or team of players. This is a collaborative game of teams battling other teams online in a World War II setting. His clan members are from down the street, across the country, and even one member from England. With an online game he has made global friends, many whom he would never encounter were it not for this online experience. They even routinely chat online outside the game. This has exposed him to a world of diverse cultures and ideas that used to require lengthy and expensive travel, all from the safety of his bedroom.

We used to think that the greatest thing about the web was access to information. Truly the greatest thing about Web 2.0 is access to PEOPLE.

So my thought process has recently been on using this access to people, this conversation, to make business better. And after recently hearing Clay Shirkly's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo I realized that businesses can actually utilize what he refers to as "the Principle of Participation" to connect and get feedback from their customers.

Anyone who has spent time in the local megamall has come across the smiling people with the clipboard wanting to offer you a nice coupon for participating in a research survey. Depending on my mood and/or amount of free time; I will either avoid them like the plague, participate to get the free coupon, or for fun participate and tell them the opposite of what they want to hear.

Now with these new forms of interaction on the web, you can build this kind of market research RIGHT INTO YOUR WEBSITE.

Use the power of the Feedback, the Customer Review, the Poll, to allow your customers to talk to you. Make your website a CONVERSATION with the customers. Make it APPARENT, in many locations, the OPPORTUNITY for them to TELL YOU WHAT THEY THINK.

I will go a step further. Don't offer them a reward. If you say, "Fill out this survey to get a free coupon" what you are going to get is alot of randomness simply to get the free coupon! Simply, OFFER THEM AN OPPORTUNITY TO PARTICIPATE. Give them the tools to tell you what they like and don't like about your product, your site, your whatever. Then LISTEN. Listen publicly. Respond to their comments online. Talk BACK to them. Take the info that they give you the same as the info that you got from that expensive marketing study you paid for, the one that sent those smiling clipboard people to the megamall.

I am willing to bet that if you are persistent, if you honestly and wholeheartedly participate in this dialog with your customers; your customers will be happier with you and you will have a better product because of it!

Get on the Cluetrain

From Cluetrain.com:

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Online Markets...

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

What does this mean for your company? It means a few things, some so apparent you may have missed them.

1. The average consumer has access to more information on you and your products than at any time in history. They can see not just your marketing material but read your interviews, read your competitors info, read reviews of your products not just by traditional organizations but by average users. Know your products and for gods sake make sure your sales people know your products because your customers, with a little research, will know more then them!

2. Connect with your customer online. Don't throw up a generic template site and call it good. Interact with your customers online as you do day to day. Use your site to hold conversations with them, as you would in your office or home town. Start a blog, make a myspace page, interact with the web. Let your users post questions, answer them. Post pictures of your cat. Marketing is about making a connection. Use the power of the web to let all those potential customers see that there are real, caring people behind your products. People who want to make their lives better through your products.

3. Become sticky. The benefit to giving your customers a channel to talk to you is that it gives you a channel to talk to them. Invite them to register with you. Send them updates, new product or listings info, press releases, special offers. Anything you can do to keep yourself in their brains. One day they will be thinking they need a new whatever and your email will pop up and they will go 'eureka!' I will order from these guys now! Email specials and newsletters are more effective than regular mailings if you target the customers who have opted for them and they don't even cost a stamp!

4. Become transparent. Let the customer TELL you what they want. Use the conduit you have developed to do market research. READ your product reviews. Ask your customers what can be better, what features they would like and what they don't use. If you fail, if widget X bombs, bomb spectacularly! Say 'sorry folks, that one was a real turkey! What can we do better with the next one?' Again, 5 minutes with google and the potential customer KNOWS your product. The age of honesty is at hand.

Why do you do it?

Marketing consultant and all around guru Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void talks about the term "Purpose-Idea".  P.I. is a term coined by Mark Earls in his marketing book "Welcome to the Creative Age".  In this thesis, he discusses the meaninglessness of "The Brand" and instead promotes the P.I.

The P.I., Mark says, is the reason we all get up out of bed in the morning and go to work instead of roll over and wait for the waffle fairy to bring us hot breakfast.  What is it that drives us as individuals, as entrepreneurs, as a company.

Are we really all in this just to bring home a paycheck, to get that corner office, or to maintain an x% profit margin?  Or is there something deeper, something that speaks to our core, a higher meaning.

He goes on to argue that it is more fun and interesting and even profitable for a company to find and share in this P.I., this ideal that it believes in.  That this ideal needs to be articulated, and that it provides a shared basis for the 'Brand'

This is a neat concept and one that I wholeheartedly agree with.  I did not start my own business on a tagline.  I did not set a "Mission Statement".  I founded it upon the following core ideas that make up New Focus Creative's "Purpose-Idea"

1. Websites should MAKE and not just COST money.

2. Websites should be EASILY NAVIGABLE and UNDERSTANDABLE to the viewer.

3. Websites should SAY SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR COMPANY.

4. We are here to help our clients navigate this new world of online marketing.

5. We will have a BEER FRIDGE and be able to have a beer WHENEVER WE WANT.

So there is my P.I.  The reason I get up at 5:30 and work all day and at night and weekends and on vacation.  Because good web design is my passion.  Because there is too much sheer ugliness and incompetence on the web that must be corrected.  Because my clients, and their customers, deserve the best online experience that can be delivered.  Because I never again want to work anywhere where someone else gets to make ANY of this not happen for convenience or profit.

So what is YOUR P.I.?  Why do you do it?  What is your companies P.I.?  Why, in essence, do you exist?

It's good pondering material, and can lead to a clearer objective idea about what your "Core Values" really are.

Hey man, You should try __________!

Here is something that should surprise noone if you really stop and think about it.

"86.6% of online users would actually follow recommendation links/advice sent to them by their friends and peers."      source - Evgenii Prussakov 'Online Shopping Through Consumers' Eyes'

This reinforces previous studies that continue to show the influence of the people around us on our views and decisions and is an important concept to grasp in your marketing campaigns.

For some time, marketers have used customer testimonials to influence people to purchase your products or services.  The effects of this are waning though as an increasingly jaded and wary public increasingly look on these as scripted responses delivered by actors.

Enter the humble 'review'.  Co Opted from the blog comment movement, this allows real people (you) who have purchased something to post a review on the product in question.

Here are some stunning numbers:

77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)

63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)

86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend's recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketSherpa)

Look at that last one, that says that online shoppers will trust the words of TOTAL STRANGERS over famous talking head so-and-so.  Now THAT is a shift in traditional marketing!

And the studies also show that even Negative reviews do not discourage consumers.  The thought is that consumers don't expect products to be perfect and actually appreciate the honesty.

Honesty, now THERE is a refreshing marketing message!