SEO Rants and Resources

Creating a 60 second commercial

One of the things many starting sales people and entrepreneurs struggle with is communicating with others what they do and who they do it for. Until you can clearly communicate your message it is very difficult to generate word of mouth leads. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the networking groups spread out across the country.

 In a typical networking group you have the opportunity to stand up and introduce your self and your company. You have 60 seconds to deliver a message that is easy to remember and so clearly communicated that the people in the room can carry it with them. The goal is to have these people remember you when they are in front of a client or prospect and to be able to advise them on why they should talk to you.

 Years ago I was in a networking group where each week one member would stand up and say “ hi, my name is X and I am with Mary Kay. A good lead for me is anyone with skin”.  Need less to say she did not get many leads so she quit because the group and networking in general did not work for her.

 My good friend Patrick Peters of Senior B2B Networking, LLC taught me many years ago that there is a structured way to create an effective commercial.

1. Start      with the basics – What do you want to communicate?
   1. Name
   2. Location
   3. Services
   4. Profit/non-profit
   5. Credentials/cross training
   6. Staffing
   7. Philosophy       
2. What is important? What ever you want people to remember, give it to them last.
3. Always include a call to action: A good lead for me is….
4. Will they remember you? Use stories and experiences.
5. Use your tag line if you have one. (if you don’t get one) Your tag line should      follow your commercial and explains your product or service.

 Now put it all together.

 Hello, my name is__________.

Introduction and body of commercial.  Use your top 5 basics and include a story or experience if possible.

A good referral for me is ____________

Your tagline

As an option you can repeat your name and company name again, especially of there are new people in the room.

Follow this plan and keep on tweaking and practicing until the people you network with can clearly communicate to others what you do.

Google’s latest Round of Penalties

Over the past couple of weeks some popular and notable sites have taken a hit in the Google Page Rank pocket. I say pocket because these are sites that were selling links. Who got hit? Some very popular sites including Forbes.com, searchengineguide.com and problogger.com. So why the penalty? Google does not like sites that sell links to artificially inflate their link popularity.

After an initial round of penalties a lot of SEO companies were crying the blues because their client’s sites were penalized and lost Page Rank. Just when they were starting to think that the storm had passed Google slapped a penalty on another round of sites. This time Google went after sites that are involved in blog linking schemes.

This is what Google’s Webmaster Guidelines have to say about it.

“Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

So why do SEO companies put their client’s sites in harms way? Because buying links and doing massive blog posts are the fastest and easiest way to generate links.

The truth is that it takes time and effort to create a solid linking campaign. No site should be totally dependent on one or two sources for links. A mixture of blog posts, social bookmarks, articles, press releases, directories and even reciprocal links are a among a best practices plan for long term success.

Using Google to reach your Target Market

If all it took was a good idea to make a web site successful, millions of web sites would not fail in the first couple of years. 

In reality, the web site is a very important component in the marketing of a business. For most of us who are selling B2B it is not the only tool in our marketing toolbox.  However, most businesses are under utilizing this tool simply because they are not getting found by the people who are searching for the solutions they offer.

Most ad agencies and corporate marketing departments take the time to carefully plan who they are trying to reach and painstakingly craft what their message is. They detail why their company is the right choice to provide solutions to the potential client's challenges. Many have a good grasp on when they want the customer to act by creating a call to action such as downloading a white paper or scheduling a demonstration.

Where many miss the mark is in the How to reach their on-line target market.  They drive people to their sites from Trade Shows, mailings, trade publication advertising, public relations and other largely offline methods. Where many come up short is in getting the free traffic that is available to them from the search engines like Google.

Search engine optimization is the science/art of getting your site found on the search engine results pages when they search for the words that are related to you or your offerings. The search engines do not charge for this traffic.. Search engine marketing is buying ads on the search engine results pages IE: Google Ad Words to get listings.  The price for ranking is as low as $.10 per "click" but competitive terms can cost several dollars per "click". Many web sites have not been optimized and they are not utilizing the tools or making the adjustments to the site that allow the search engines to send them free traffic.

Below is a quick 6 step assessment to determine if your site could benefit from Search Engine Optimization.

1. When the content of the site was created, were the words and phrases that are important to be found by customers and prospects woven into the copy of the pages?              Yes  No
2. Does the URL of your web site contain one or more of the keywords that are important for your site to be found under? (IE: www.yourcompany.com)                                   Yes  No
3. When you look at the pages of your site do the words displayed in the title bar (blue bar across the very top of the page) accurately describe the topic of the page, and do they change from page to page?          Yes   No
4. Do you have an online press release optimization plan in place?          Yes   No
5. Can you find yourself in the top 3 pages for the five search terms, excluding your company name, that are most important to getting found by your potential customers?          Yes   No
6. Do you use a tool to measure where traffic came from and the behavior of site visitors including conversion?            Yes   No

0-3 Uh Oh, you need help and you need it now. The longer you wait the deeper your competitors - anyone who comes up higher than you do for your search terms, gets entrenched and takes more business from you.
3-4 There is a lot of room for improvement and your site can most certainly generate more leads by getting found by the people looking for your solutions.

If you scored 5+ Congratulations! Chances are that your company is doing very well and has a well thought out site that is keeping hr pipeline filled with quality leads.

About: PageViews, Inc. PageViews, Inc. is a professional search engine optimization and marketing SEO/SEM firm specializing in achieving high rankings for their clients on the Internet's major Search Engines. PageViews, Inc. has the search engine optimization experience and implements best practice methodologies to achieve top placements for client sites. PageViews, Inc. is based in Scottsdale, AZ.  For more information, visit http://www.pageviews.com or call 1-480-556-9752  inquiry@pageviews.com