• May022010

    The One Thing Most Small Business Websites Lack..

    Posted by Gene in Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

    TagcloudSometimes, as a professional web designer, you can bring up a topic with a client and almost literally watch their eyes glaze over. I suspect that some of this comes from the fact that those of us in the business like to use technical terms; another contributing factor could be the constant flow of new technologies — what seems great and special today is often out of style tomorrow.

    For that reason, it’s no surprise that so many small business owners overlook the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) when it comes to designing a new site. After all, so long as your site looks good and does what it’s supposed to, isn’t that good enough? Does it even matter where your business shows up in the listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

    Believe it or not, it really does. That’s because, if your site ranks well among some important keyword groups, you could be seeing twenty times as many visitors to your pages as you would if you didn’t. Think of how many dozens or hundreds of customers that could add up to — not to mention what they would mean to your bottom line. And best of all, they’d keep coming around the clock, from all over the world, at virtually no cost. I know from experience that a few of you are thinking: “That sounds great, but my business doesn’t get many orders from the web. In fact, most of my customers are local.” Would you still benefit from SEO in that case? The answer, once again, it was a resounding yes. There are two reasons you still want to be doing well with search engines. The first is that just because you aren’t getting business from outside of your own area now, doesn’t mean you couldn’t be later. There are very, very few companies — large or small – that can’t benefit from extending their reach a bit.

    But more importantly, you want to make it easy for your business to be found online by your existing customers. Think about it: if the people who are already buying from you can’t locate you online, who are they likely to find? Regardless of what industry you’re in, you can bet you have competitors in your industry who would love to eat your lunch.

    If you think your business is immune to this kind of threat, think again. I’ve seen situations where competing businesses have gone so far as to choose each other’s names as targeted keywords. In other words, if your customers aren’t finding you, you can be sure they’re finding somebody.

    Search engine optimization might seem like an important strategy for sites that are focused on e-commerce and online orders, and it is. But even if the majority of your business isn’t coming in over the Internet, it’s important that you have a strong presence on the major search engines. Because as great as your work or product might be, it’s hard to make money, online or elsewhere, when no one can find you.

  • Aug172009

    SEO Self Defense Tips

    Posted by Gene in Search Engine Marketing

    I’ve been asked about the SEO presentation I gave at May’s RefreshColumbia meeting, the post is available on that site as well, there’s some other cool stuff to learn from there as well, so make sure and check it out when you have time. So in the video above at about 45:20 in you can catch me on there. Jay kicks off the meeting with some really neat design pointers and there’s two other talks as a bonus that are truly informational and worth the time if you have it. I’ve linked up my slides after the jump as well. Enjoy…
    (more…)

  • Apr292009

    Twitter is a Search Engine

    Posted by Gene in Twitter, Search Engine Marketing

    I was talking with Jay the other day about Twitter possibly beginning to out perform Google in the search arena, specifically about searching at-the-moment relevant content. While doing research about search and twitter like i’m always doing I came across this quote about Twitter as a search engine service:

    “Twitter is a search engine that indexes conversations about content.” - Kevin Ryan

    I thought this just summed up the Twitter search experience very nicely.

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