Over the last 2 months I’ve been working on a guest writing project with Ina Steiner and the great folks over at auctionbytes.com that I’d like to share here on my home blog.

The article got a bit long, as some of my articles tend to do, and so it is broken into 2-parts.

In this series I talk aobut a few key ways that small merchants, particularly those on auction sites and online marketplaces can utilize basic SEO techniques to improve their business. Enjoy!

Four Ways to Apply Big Brand SEO to Small Merchants, Part 1 – Published January 24th

Part 1 focuses on keyword research and content creation.

Four Ways to Apply Big Brand SEO to Small Merchants, Part 2 – Published February 5th

Par 2 focuses on link building and competitive research.

Doing SEO, I hear a lot of questions that I can give practical answers to. Questions like:

How do I know which keywords to target? How can I build links to my site? How can I use social media to promote my business? What can I change on my site to make it rank better.

I’ve got answers for those questions. I like those questions; those are productive, forward thinking questions which indicate a willingness to put in the work.

Oh and the short answers are: research, content, build relationships, and probably a lot.

And then there are the other kinds of questions. The questions that have helped flatten my forehead as a result of head butting my desk.

How long will it take until my site ranks #1? When can I stop building links? How long do I have to do this SEO stuff? I changed my title tags, why aren’t my rankings better?

See, these questions represent a short-cut mentality. These questions indicate someone looking for a fast answer, and in SEO, there just isn’t any. So the answers to these questions look more like; Maybe never, definitely never, for ever and …seriously?

Silver Bullets are for Werewolves…and beer.

Search engine optimization is not a one-shot deal. It’s never going to be. Anyone who tells you that you can make a one time investment and never again think about SEO is lying to you. It’s never going to be as simple as “Build 1,000 links overnight and rank forever.” Or “Order this report for $5,000 and your website will rank #1!” I’m sorry if I blew up anybody’s sales pitch here, but it’s just not real.

Search engine Optimization is defined by Wikipedia, dictionary.com, entrepreneur.com and hundreds of other reliable sources as “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results”. All of the definitions are similar with the main commonality being the use of the word “process”. Now the definition of a “process” is a systematic series of actions directed to some end. A “series of actions” plural, implying, several, and repeated. There’s a reason for that.

A good SEO strategy is an ever evolving “process” which will require constant monitoring, updating, re-shaping and growth. If an SEO program is not growing, it is stagnating.

Starting an SEO campaign means a commitment from both the site owners and their internet marketer. No one can promise you a magical solution that will permanently propel you to the top of the rankings for any phrase, not for lack of talent or trying, but because nothing is permanent in the world of search.

Double, Double Dot Com Bubble, Learn the Lessons, Skip the Trouble.

The practice of making a site rank doesn’t involve sorcery, but what IS magic is the relationship between an SEO and a client. When both sides are invested and committed to collaboration, creativity can abound and anything is possible.

But it won’t be quick. Writing a check to your SEO isn’t like ripping off the band-aid and waiting for the sting to die down, it’s an investment in your future.

This is why it’s so important to find the right person, company, or method of promoting a website. Finding the perfect blend of passion and knowledge in an SEO is hard. Finding the right synergy between SEO and client is even harder. But when it happens you have a relationship that can be inspiring and profitable on both sides.

Good SEOs continually re-define themselves. Like hundreds of tiny little Madonnas running around in cone bras with English accents. We study, we learn, we re-learn what we thought we already knew. We test, we study, we cry at the results, ask questions and we test some more. With a mentality that is constantly striving for longevity in a world which prefers that hot fires burn out quickly. A good SEO campaign must have the same spirit. It must be fluid and in a constant state of motion.

If the growth of the internet has taught us anything it is that inertia, and adaptability are what breed a long life on line. Rigidity and resistance will only lead to web-death, which is an inglorious dissolution into obscurity for most, or for the lucky ones, immortality as a punch line. Just ask the original Pets.com, not the one powered by PetSmart, the one with the dog puppet from 99’.

Engaging in online marketing is no longer an option for businesses, but doing so must be viewed for what it is, a constant, a new way for a business to breathe. Sure, some parts will be simple; re-writing a title tag, changing some internal anchor text, adding a blog to your website technically won’t take very long. But it’s ongoing keyword research and monitoring rankings, or maintaining a successful blog that will begin to peel away the hours of your business day like layers of an onion.

No matter how you see search engines as a part of your business, they are a channel, which offer unparalleled opportunities for exposure. For any business ready to attempt to capitalize on that potential, there are no easy answers and there is no short cut. The only element of SEO for which speed should be a factor, is a web site’s load time. But, that’s about it. As for the rest, prepare for the long haul, or be prepared to be left in the dust.

In short, here are the figures tracking the annual progression of online spending since 2005.  Each figure is tracked and linked to its source.  Scroll down for a year by year breakdown of spending amounts.

At the end of the year it’s always fulfilling to reflect on what has passed. In the last 5 years there is one force which has so intrinsically changed all of our collective lives that as a civilization, we will never be the same. That force is of course, the internet.

Because the internet has changed everything from how we get news to how we connect with friends, it’s possible to look at the growth of social media, and the exponential growth of websites in existence, because it’s The Holiday season and the economy has been such a prevalent part of conversations everywhere, as we begin the second decade of the 21^st century let us reflect on the growth of online spending over the last 5 years.

2005

In 2005, online spending hit a new high, reaching 82.3 Billion (excluding travel). This was a 24% increase over 2004.  Making up 24% of that amount was holiday spending which was 19.6 billion.

2006

In 2006 non-travel online sales broke the $100 billion mark, settling at $102.1 billion dollars which was a full 24% increase over 2005. Holiday spending increased by 24% from 2005 and accounted for $24.6 billion of the year’s overall total.

2007

In 2007, online retail sales once again hit a new high, reaching $122 billion dollars. This amount represented a 20% increase over 2007, with just over $29 billion of those sales happening during the holiday shopping season.

2008

2008, was a record year for online retail spending. That’s right, 2008 holds the record for the smallest increase in spending over the previous year since 2001. Online sales topped out at just over $131 billion, a mere 6% increase over 2007. Holiday spending remained on par with the previous season, at approximately $29 billion.

2009

As we bring this decade to a close, early forecasts predict that online spending will reach $156 billion dollars in 2009. If this number proves on target, it will mean an 11% increase in online sales from 2008. Early estimates have online holiday sales at just shy of $20 billion as of December, 11^th.

What this says about the future:

• Online spending has continued to increase every year, so there is a good chance that trend will continue.

• Holiday spending will most likely continue to make up a significant potion of annual online sales.

• E commerce will probably continue to grow and thrive in spite of the world’s economic struggle.

• It is more vital now than ever to create and market an online presence in order to remain competitive for the next 5 years and beyond.

If the last 5 years are any indication, online shopping is not a temporary fad, but in fact the business of the future. Though the rapid growth of e-commerce may have slowed in the last few years; that may simply be attributed to the world’s diminishing economy, combined with some level of market saturation.

As a new decade dawns, it finds a civilization in transition. Today, we struggle to find balance in a world of ever shifting political and financial power. We are a society of increased connectivity, where information spreads with a deafening speed and social media forces us into a new reality of fellowship and voyeurism.  This, is a world where the lines between the “real-world” and “cyber-world” will only continue to blur, and those who do not rise up to claim their place in it will only be left behind.

Yeah, I know analogies are tired. But I love them… so they may happen here a lot. Just a heads up.

Anyway, welcome to a new year, where everyone resolves to have more career success and get in shape. Ok, so resolutions are notoriously short lived, but for those who don’t revert back to Twinkies and covert games of  solitaire at work by February 1st here are some ideas that apply to both resolutions.

If you want to increase your business or your career credit, try turning up the volume of your online business.  How? A good SEO campaign of course! If SEO is a vital part of overall online business health, and exercise is an essential element of a healthy lifestyle,then  it’s easy to imagine why some advice applies to both SEO and working out.

Commit to the process

Deciding to start SEO is like deciding to start a workout routine or going to the gym. Once you begin doing it consistently and commit to the process you get better at it, it becomes easier and you see significant results.

If you go sporadically, or give up after a couple of visits, you probably won’t gain much benefit from it. Making one or 2 changes on your site and expecting to rank #1 for competitive phrases is like driving to Planet Fitness, doing 3 squat thrusts, spending the rest of the hour flexing in the mirror and going home wondering why your pants are still tight.

SEO, like working out is not something you can do once or for a brief period of time and then give up and hope the good you’ve done will last. It must be maintained and refined continually in order to remain effective.

Give it your all

Half-assing your work out will never get you buns of steel and dabbling in SEO will never get you great rankings. Period.

You can get on the tread mill set it to “leisurely stroll” and peruse the latest “Us Weekly” for half an hour but you’re not going to see a lot of results. If you build your site blindly, write link bait with zero market research, guess your best keywords and pray. You might also want to ask to win the lottery while you’re down there. Doing SEO properly takes time, and effort. It requires research and engagement with your community and your online market. Without these things you’re basically bench pressing the bar without the weights.

Vary your routines

Unless you want gigantic biceps and tiny little legs eventually you have to ease up on the curls and start doing some lunges.

Essentially, SEO is the same way. You can precision tune your on-page factors, but if you never ask anyone for a link, or promote your content in an effort to build links your rankings will never move. You can build back links all day long, but if your usability sucks, you’ll never really see the benefit of the traffic that comes for good rankings If you create social media profiles to protect your brand but never use them to build brand loyalty, you’ll never have any fans, friends or followers.

Doing one thing well is great, it’s called a strength, or a forte, but in SEO it’s not enough. Really good internet marketing is marked by diversity. It means actively, even if not evenly, engaging in a variety of marketing methods. By engaging multiple strategies there is a greater chance for maximizing rankings, traffic, and conversions on numerous fronts.

Personal Trainers, Classes and DIY

You can work out for free, and you can do SEO for free. As long as you know what you’re doing. Granted, most of us instinctively know that we can start to exercise simply by moving our legs in the rapid repetitive motion known as running. SEO can be a bit less naturally intuitive. However, the options when it comes to working out and doing SEO are much the same. You can go it alone, or get help. In fitness, a class may mean joining a roomful of sweaty people peddling frantically on bikes that goes nowhere. In SEO it may mean going to a conference or having a professional come in to give a full staff training. In either case, at the gym or learning SEO participants benefit from having someone who knows the ropes in the lead.

Using a personal trainer is yet another option for gym goers. Sometimes there’s nothing quite like tailored, individual attention. It can be extremely helpful to have someone show to the right moves to tighten your glutes, or exactly how to use the leg press properly so you don’t look ridiculous, or do more damage than good. Getting an SEO for your website is about the equivalent of having a personal trainer help you create a work out tailored specifically to your strengths, weaknesses and goals. A good SEO will have ideas that fit your exact needs. Every site, like every body is different having different needs and unique results. But one thing is common among all of these options, regardless of whether you choose to go it alone, or get assistance, do some research first.

Engaging in the culture improves your results

No matter how much you go to the gym, or how many crunches you do, if you never really embrace healthy living as a lifestyle you will inevitably plateau. The more you view exercise as part of a proactive approach to healthy living, the more you will find new ways to feel good and stay fit. With SEO, by being as minimally involved as possible, never learning about the jargon or how all the elements work together, it will always keep you on the fringe of your SEO campaign. By keeping in the loop, being involved and passionate about the process you will discover your own infinite well of great ideas innovative strategies.

The health of a website in terms of online life can be deeply impacted by good SEO, in the same way a person’s life can be deeply affected by regular exercise. By following some of the same principles for both it’s possible to have a long and healthy life, get rankings and look good in skinny jeans.

What kind of website do you have? There are millions of domains, thousands of styles and designs and hundreds of platforms. I don’t mean nay of those. I mean, what is your website’s job? I want to talk at least two different kinds of occupations a website can have, from my perspective there’s the Business Card and the Salesperson. Which one is yours? Well let’s explore the qualities that define them and then you decide what your website is to you, and perhaps… what it could be.

The Business Card

Many websites are little more than an online business card. Ok, a very large business card with maybe a product list or menu attached. But still essentially no more or less than a 2 by 3.5 inch card that contains your vitals. Address, phone number, heart rate, allergies, ya know the basics.

You may list the location of your “business card” on your promotional materials your take-out menus, your mailers. You may even have submitted your site to Google’s local search so you show up on the map. But why do you have a website? So that people who are looking for you can find you? Well, if that’s the case, you my friend have a business card.

You have a website which only serves people who already want to find you. And right now it’s sitting there gathering dust in the world’s largest rolodex waiting for someone to seek out your name and come a’calling.

But what about all of the people who want to find someone LIKE you but don’t know your name? How are they going to find your business?

Have you ever dreamt of hiring someone whose entire job was strictly to promote your business and services all day?  Well, your website wants to apply for the job. He or She doesn’t take lunch, doesn’t need vacation time, sick days, health care, coffee breaks or good office morale to function superbly. Oh and did I mention, he/she speaks multiple languages and will work around the clock without ever sleeping? I’d hire him. So why haven’t you?

The Sales Person

A good web site is out there pitching your business to everyone interested in what you have to offer. How? Search engines, referrals, social media. You name it. This guy can be out there singing your praises. Do you sell pizza? A well optimized salesperson website is out there vying for the attention of every person in your vicinity that has a craving for pizza. It’s like being inside a potential customer’s head at the precise moment that they want whatever you have to offer. Freaky, but extremely effective.

The salesperson website, answers questions, provides information, gathers feedback and projects an image of confidence to everyone it comes in contact with.  It is the best face of your company at all times. It is constantly looking for new customers, new ways to reach people, new audiences for your products and services.

The major difference between a business card website and a salesperson website, is actually pretty simple. It’s a way of thinking. It’s the difference between looking at a website as a place card that is taking up space on the net just for the sake of having something there, and looking at a website as the future of your business.

The major benefit of the salesperson site is it’s out reach, it doesn’t sit at home all dressed up on a Friday night waiting for the boys to call, it puts itself out there. There are a few ways to do that. One way is to join the rankings race. And it is a race, because when you rank high in a search engine like Google for a popular Keyword phrase, it can easily translate to hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site, A DAY. Imagine that. It sounds great, but because it’s so competitive trying to achieve rankings can be intimidating. But with help from people who know what they are doing, it’s not so bad.

In order to upgrade a business card to a salesperson, it will take some time, effort and planning. It may also take professional help. The thing is, Google has over 200 factors they take into account when ranking. Now, you can go out and research them, or you can enlist the assistance of someone with intimate knowledge of the search landscape. Either way, the active pursuit of search engine rankings is the first step to converting your site to a salesperson. See it’s not enough just to accurately describe who you are and what you do; a site needs to be intentionally structured to rank well within search engines. It all begins, very simply, with conscious intention.

Once you change the way you see your website, the world of possibilities on the web will be open to you. With the right marketing, creativity and a few smart technical decisions, you can put your new salesperson to work bringing in new business.

Do you market your company? Congratulations, you spend thousands of dollars buying air, and paper. When you think about it, advertising is simply a business of persuasion and influence, but even in print or promotional advertising, the ad, the flyer, the logo stress ball, theses are not your product, they are a means to an end. That’s the beauty of this multi-billion dollar industry; advertising is the pinnacle of intangible goods.

Online marketing is no different; we have the web, an internet which is not actually a place. It’s a sort of parallel universe a person can never physically reach. I mean, for a reasonable facsimile of what that might look like,  Dave Chappelle did a pretty hilarious job a few years back.

But millions of people are turning to the internet for every possible need. From finding a new family doctor to settling a good natured dispute over Rasputen’s first name (It’s Grigori btw). So it doesn’t matter what business you are in. You have a market online.

Even if you have accepted this reality, your next challenge is probably figuring out exactly how to mount a full scale internet marketing campaign. Which, to even the most internet savvy marketers is a daunting and intimidating task. I mean, go ahead and Google your product or service:

See those 232, 000, 000 results? Yeah that’s your online competition. It’s hard to figure out how to stand out from that sea of choices. First, don’t panic. Second, don’t let the difficulty of the task lull you into a sense that you are better off without pursuing it.

Everyone needs to have some sort of online presence. Without one you are missing out on every chance you have of being found by potential new customers, or even helping your current customers.

Here is an example: A new pizza place moved in around the corner from me. I didn’t get the chance to write down their number driving by, so my next inclination was to head to the Net for the digits. But, there was nothing there, so I ordered Pizza Hut. That small, burgeoning pizza place lost out on a new and interested customer by not being online.

Even a less drastic situation: Have you ever searched for a particular restaurant or store online only to get “directories”, rather than the store itself? Sure, you can get the address and phone number, but no pictures, menus or product information, the kind of details that would help persuade you to go there.

Don’t be that store!

Take control of your online marketing destiny. It’s never too late to take your business to the next level. In this case that “new level” is an existential plane that is just waiting to be conquered. Go boldly where millions are going every day, do it the right way from the beginning and you’ll never regret it.

Open up google.  Type in your name and what comes up? Type in your name + current company (or other companies you’ve worked for).  Check out your business name + another business you’ve gone head to head with in the past?

Sorting through these results and others can lead to a very effective reputation management campaign. There are many different alerts and other techniques that can help you track how your business is doing and what people are saying about it. Make sure to keep your hand on that pulse, otherwise you could lose potential business without realizing it.

Google Alerts are a great way to help track your business. Tracking business brand terms as well as phone numbers and top names associated with the business can keep you up to date on what new reviews, blogs and articles are coming out regarding your business. Without a quick response to a possibly negative article or even worse – no response – where do you rank in your reputation mananagement campaign?

Rankings, what we all want and need to build a successful business. Without high rankings, no one will find you. No one.

Google announced mid-last year that they had indexed OVER 1 TRILLION SITES.

How can you stand out in a crowd that big?

If you aren’t doing any search engine optimization, you’re even less than a needle in a haystack at this point. You’re nowhere. You could get lucky and take a variety of SEO tips and tricks to maybe help out, but a lot of what I’ve seen published on the majority of the internet leads to what could have gotten you ranked 5 to 10 years ago, not what has worked in the last year.

There are roughly 200 determining factors that a search engine uses to qualify your site above a competitors. These factors constantly change. Best practices that have been put out by Google as well as some top SEO practitioners have been the best course of action, as well as many other factors. Staying on top of the game is really the key to help keep those targeted leads coming in – or to get those targeted leads to come in.

Titles and meta have long been the targeted focus among marketing sites. Targeted copy, internal linking, external linking can help you gain those top rankings. Staying on top of the curve really can keep you on the top!

Local Search is helping redefine to a granular level how we search on the internet.  It is utilized in many ways to attract new customers to a business they may have overlooked in the past.

Search has become a huge part of all of our lives.  No long needing to rely on friends suggestions, we can go online to find out all of the information we need to make a decision.

Moving to a new area recently I was in the mood for a salad at lunch.    I typed in Schenectady Salad for a targeted result to hopefully obtain a menu from some local restaurants with salad choices.  This is what I received:

Any similar search returned these 3 results.  Clifton Park is a 25 minute drive from Schenectady and I knew there were plenty of places within walking distance from my building, but I couldn’t find them.  I eventually had to go out and about to grab menus from local restaurants.  It turned out that they did have websites with all of their food posted, but I couldn’t find their sites in search so to me they just didn’t exist.

In the end, I consistently went to the restaurants that I could read their menus online.  It was easier for me to compare food with several different places when I had all the options in front of me.  I did end up finding a great salad place but not through the internet.

In general, there is a lot of missed opportunities in local search.  Of the 3 businesses that came up for “salad schenectady” – there are still actually 7 more results that can be populated.

All users need to do are to go to Local Google, or Local Yahoo listings to get their results listed.  It is a simple step that can help propel business to your website, and then to your door.

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