I think one of the best things I have ever heard a webmaster blog from a major search engine say is to build your website like a brand. Bing’s exact words state: “Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content”

To many people out there get all antsy to have their internet marketing look like a recipe. If it looks like a recipe it is a recipe for disaster. Bing’s official webmaster blog states that it is very important and vital to treat your website like a brand. How would a brand build its image? If you take that step you will build your business the right way rather than just go after rankings. Rankings are important but they are not the only and final goal you should be worried about for your internet marketing campaign. Building business is the most important aspect to your SEO campaign. Bing also recommends taking an approach that really utilizes a robust social marketing element into your daily routine. Link building is very vital to the success of a website and it is important to do it in a way that allows your business to grow and not just your rankings. Bing also refers to going “unnatural” in the search engines which states that an unnatural approach is one that blatantly attempts to manipulate the system in order to achieve higher rankings.

Bing’s exact words go as follows:
” So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you’re trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site’s content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms.”

Bing hasn’t been the first search engine to come out with this type of best practice’s guide. Google has been doing it for years now just not many people want to follow it. When the top two search engines in the world layout a best practices guide on how you should conduct your search engine optimization efforts it is time to listen.

Please take a look at the Bing Webmaster Post that talks about link building and SEM, it is a great read:
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/11/20/link-building-for-smart-webmasters-no-dummies-here-sem-101.aspx

It seems to me that it doesn’t really matter the size of a business or how many clients they have the consensus across the board for many businesses is that they still have a real hard time understanding the concept of SEO or even its value to a business. This actually blows my mind that in today’s market place you can take a rather large established and robust business and ask them what is search engine marketing? Your answers will probably be devastating.

Why is SEO such a difficult concept to understand? Is it that people just can grasp the whole idea of inbound marketing? The concept is not all that difficult. You have to take a step back and just really dumb things down a bit. People are under the preconceived notion that SEO is really technical and it is all about finding the tricks and secrets to get web pages ranking in the search engines. It seriously couldn’t be further from the truth. The problem is that search engine optimization was a technical approach for many years but not so much anymore. Things are changing in the search engine marketing world. Before MySpace there was no serious online community and conversation aspect. Now it is a part of everyone’s daily life.
Matt McGee is the editor of Search Engine Land and he recently came across a study that shows how a rather large group of Fortune 500 companies are still confused about the whole SEO concept.

Matt McGee States:
“Despite spending millions of dollars on paid search, Fortune 500 companies continue to fail when it comes to natural search visibility. That’s the conclusion of “Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500: Q4/2009,” the latest study released today by Conductor, a New York-based SEO services/technology firm.”

You can view the rest of the study here. Search engine optimization seems to still be viewed as a dark art. Kind of like the black sheep of the digital marketing age. I think over time this reputation will be seriously cleaned up. Search behavior and shopping patterns are changing and they have been for quite some time. This is a fast moving industry that truly requires having an open mind and the ability to really keep up with the sweeping changes that often times occur in the SEO industry. One day an effort might be perfectly ok to apply to your online marketing approach and the next day it is highly frowned upon by all search engines. Maybe for this reason many big businesses that have been conditioned to conduct business a certain way for so many years are having a hard time adopting this new form of marketing and communication. I think over time as younger generations move up in rankings through a variety of industries we will see an even bigger boom of search engine optimization needs. Right now many businesses are very reluctant to incorporate SEO into their daily business model because I think they just don’t understand its raw power.

With social media hot on the heels of search engine optimization it makes things even trickier. Search engine marketing has been around for almost ten years and many businesses are yet to adopt the practices never mind diving into something even much younger. Social media has only been in full swing for about 3 years and many businesses don’t have any intention to introduce it into their business just yet.

Look at these daunting statistics that Matt McGee laid out on Search Engine Land:
• Only 15% of Fortune 500 companies have “mid to strong presence” in natural search results for the same keywords on which they advertise the most.
• 53% have “no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords” — meaning they don’t show up in the Top 100 results.
• Collectively, the Fortune 500 spent about $3.4 million per day on more than 97,000 keywords, but they show up in the Top 50 of natural search results for only 25% of those keywords.

Could it be because they are such big entities they feel like they don’t need it? Or is that they are scared of it because they don’t understand it? I think it is a strong combination of both. Like I said as the younger generations move up the rankings through these corporate giants we will see them start to leave a much larger foot print in the search engines. Until then we all have to play our part to let them know that it is important. Is it smart for them to play the business as usual card?

In this video Matt Cutts discusses how important it is to understand the value of interlinking your websites properly if you have multiple websites on your server.

Here is the video that Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the cross linking question:

Often times people think that just because they have a few websites that placing links on all of them will help them with their link building efforts when most likely it will negatively impact their search engine results. Cross linking websites works when information is relative and beneficial to the user. If you cross link websites simply to manipulate search engine results to gain rankings the search engines they are going to pick up on that very quickly and penalize your website. Once your website is penalized it could takes months to get it back to where it once was. Matt Cutts states that if the websites are under the same corporate umbrella and they make sense to link to each other than there shouldn’t be a problem. You want to keep in mind that this like any other online marketing effort requires a tasteful approach and abusing it will results in serious ramifications from the search engines.

Always take a tasteful approach to your search engine optimization and internet marketing and keep in mind the user experience. If you over do or abuse your search engine optimization and online efforts and your user experience starts to diminish, you will not get any of the conversions you where hoping to get so it is very important to keep this in mind.

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer it correctly.

For many years Google pagerank was the sought out factor for many people diving into search engine optimization. Over the years it has been severely abused as people seek out science project like marketing campaigns only to increase page rank. News flash, rankings alone don’t grow a business and the search engines are really starting to evolve and change the way that they rank websites. They are tweaking and modifying search engines to only reward those who take a natural approach to building their business. An approach that builds over time with heavy branding and marketing elements rather than pouncing on loop holes to achieve rankings in search engines. Internet marketing company HubSpot based out of Boston MA had this to say about Google page rank: “Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.”

Basically what HubSpot is saying is that businesses and websites should be focusing on building their brand and their business and not worrying about what the Google pagerank of their website is. At the end of the day page rank does not offer any value. You can’t track where your page rank comes from or why it is even there. It has almost become a distraction for website owners that have lost focus on what it really means to market your business online. Even Google has removed any mention of pagerank from their guidelines.

A recent Q&A session on one of Google’s forums had this to say:
“Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

When Google comes out and says it than you better believe that it is true in every possible way. You can read more about Google’s view point on page rank on the Google webmaster forum. I given touched on the subject of Google PageRank sculpting as a waste of time a few months ago as well.

Most of you understand that marketing a business or website is important and with that comes the need for some sort of plan to get the job done. Don’t just try to store the plan in your head. Write it down and visualize it so you can better understand what it is that you are up against. Pull up a fresh excel worksheet and let’s get started.

Start by creating a 12 month outline for your link building plan. This way you can visualize what is coming up ahead and make changes whenever necessary. You will most likely make some sort of changes at some point throughout the year. Ask yourself what type of press release marketing you want to do for the year. List all the distribution sources and which one you prefer to take. Check off which months you want to launch that effort in and also if possible topics you might want to announce if you don’t have any real newsworthy items happening at that specific time. Below that do the same for any article marketing you are planning to do. Remember that when you scroll down each month you want to have a variety of items you are doing that particular month so don’t just focus on one effort and beat it into the ground. You want to make sure your approach is highly diverse with a strong emphasis on really branding your business online. It is important that each month you find some sort of niche industry site you can become a part of. The niche sites will be important for your link building and also for generating highly targeted website traffic over to your website.

After you have finalized these three areas in your link building strategy you will want to concentrate on a handful of profiles you can list your business in that could potentially bring in a new possible client or even just a visitor to your website who might be curious. You can see that we are diversifying the approach which is exactly what you want to do at all times when marketing your business on the internet. If you find an area online that brings over more than usual traffic and exposure it is important to hang out there but don’t neglect other possible locations that could bring in just as many new clients or customers. Write out your strategy like this and it will create a much clearer picture for you to visualize what it is going to be going on with your website.

It doesn’t matter how large or small your business is targeting your local audience is always very important. Your surrounding communities can often times be some of your best customers and clients. Many times businesses will search for a vendor that is local just because they would rather give the business to someone locally rather than some company they might never be able to meet with in person, will you be visible when this happens from your audience?

If you live in a city or town that does not have any local search volume for the industry you are in that is ok. Craft some of your content on one of your high level pages like the home page or about page using the closest city related keywords that target your products or services.

For example (since SEO is on my mind, I would use this as an example)
Current Title Tag: Search Engine Marketing Firm Offering SEO Related Services
Proposed Title Tag: Boston MA Search Engine Marketing Firm Offering SEO Related Services

Just by placing Boston MA into the title tag of the page it will allow you start moving around for your city related search terms, again this will help you target local visitors in the search engines only if that is where your business is located. Also, be sure to target the geographic area naturally into the on site factors, such as your content, etc. This will not make it all of a sudden appear for Boston terms but once you have spent some time creating good quality links and your website has generated enough authority in the eyes of the search engines your website will start to gravitate towards any related searches that might occur. Just because there is no search volume now doesn’t mean there won’t be in the future.

Prepare your website to appear for when someone does finally look for a vendor in your specific area. It can be difficult sometimes to want to sit and focus on your local audience when you have a business that can pull in a global audience but it is very important to be visible everywhere, even locally. Targeting your local audience with a heavier approach can lead to more opportunities than just search traffic. If you really make yourself stand out all of a sudden you have the ability to participate in some offline marketing write ups by local newspapers and magazines. Remember that many writers use the internet to research companies they are doing stories on so making yourself visible to your local audience could open many more doors than just online.

Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going to be a large factor for website rankings. Matt Cutts from Google has said that as it will be important it will not be a major factor yet. Matt describes it in a little more detail in the video below:

Google’s ultimate continuous goal with or without any search engine updates is to increase the speed and efficiency of the search engines which is always a very important aspect of anything technical and online. You really can’t blame Google for wanting to make their search engines highly efficient and lighting quick. After all it is all about the user experience when it comes to using a search engine and if over time the results take longer and longer to appear people will eventually be turned off. Is the search engine optimization industry just getting paranoid? Maybe a little bit but at the end of the day it is still really important to have a very quick and efficient website regardless of what Google says will be a ranking factor.