Google are at it again!

They’re not content with just offering up search results that they think you’ll be interested in, they are now giving you the choice of altering the results, saving them and remembering your favourites so they can serve you better in the future.

For example, if you searched for ‘Sandwich Shop’ and you weren’t happy with the results, you could promote the results you preferred above the ones you didn’t. Sounds odd, here’s it in action:

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So, Mr Darling has dropped VAT to 15% in an attempt to give the economy a kick. Whatever you think of his policies, he’s certainly creating work for someone and given that there’s only been a week to sort it out, we envisage this weekend will be tech-heaven with IT departments working late to ensure all systems are up to date and ready to charge less come Monday morning.

But we’ve heard some worrying comments from some businesses about shortcuts they intend to take to ensure they are ready. Unfortunately, they could end up losing thousands.

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Since we started providing search engine optimisation services for companies, we’ve seen a worrying trend in the industry. It appears to have been going on for years, but as we approach SEO from a marketing angle and not a purely search engine angle, we seem to have been immune to to most of it.

Thing is, when we tested a lot of search engine companies, even the big ones, the first thing they ask is “what keywords do you want to be optmised for?” The problem for many companies is they just don’t know and even if they think they know, they’re not the expert so what if they’re wrong?

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If you’re a web developer then you’ve probably spoken to many companies who say they don’t need a website. To them, it’s a complete waste of time because all of their business is through word of mouth, traditional contacts or simply hitting the road with a boot full of samples. These companies don’t need to market themselves via the internet.

We meet this all the time, you see it’s absolutely true that some companies really don’t need a website or any online marketing and they’re fairly easy to spot so you shouldn’t even try to sell them any. These are companies who’s very presence on the web would be a complete waste of time because their product would not benefit from the increased exposure that a presence on the Internet would bring.

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Recently, we’ve been approached my many companies who are just fed up with their current or recently sacked web developers or SEO team. Sometimes they’ve had their website development handled by someone in house (usually the IT team - a big mistake) or sometimes they’ve just had a pretty poor relationship with a freelancer or designer.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s impossible to be on the same page with all your customers and it’s the mark of a good company when they can stand proud and move away from a relationship when it’s not working.

However some, especially in the search engine world, will try anything to keep hold of a company. They will even resort to giving promises and guarantees that are just impossible to keep. Have you ever been told by a company that they can get you to number one on Google guaranteed? I’m sure you have, it’s almost an addiction within the industry to blurt out the word whenever they’re talking to potential companies.

Well, it appears a company in the US has been taken to task over it.

http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?&id=21378

This is important. It states that companies making promises that they can’t keep will be chased down and taken to task. Will this ever happen in the UK? I doubt it, but the fact that it’s happened and is quite high profile means that it will help to inform business that this company that phones up and says “We will make you number one on Google” are obviously stretching the truth.

But why can’t they guarantee it?

Well, Google (and other search engines) really don’t have any obligation to index your website. They’re a company just offering a service to users and if they don’t want to index a site then they are quite within their rights to happily ignore it.

And that’s it. There are no guarantees with search engine optimisation. At all.

Your website is your ambassador on the net. It’s what Internet users see when they’re looking for your product or service, if that visitor doesn’t like what he or she sees, they’ll go away.

So why do you simply put your site up and forget it? Why are so many websites under-valued, abandoned and left to rot while your competitors’ sites are happily sweeping up all your potential customers. There are millions of people using the Internet every day, and a lot of them are looking for your products - you need to be attracting them to your site.

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Many people dismiss web marketing as a fad or something just for geeks and nerds. If we’re in a meeting with a marketing or managing director discussing their web presence, when the conversation moves on to the search engine aspect of promotion, a quick phone call is then made to the IT department and a ‘translator’ is summoned to the room.

I.T. strikes fear into the souls of many people. It’s seen as an impenetrable fortress of acronyms, thick manuals and buzzwords created solely to ensure ‘normal’ people will never really understand it. In some cases, rightly so. Accountants spend an awful lot of time learning their trade so you don’t have to do your own books, IT people spend an awful lot of time learning their trade so you don’t have to bother with computers. But why is search engine marketing tarred with the same brush?

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As a dedicated Twitterer (join me here - http://twitter.com/andycal), I have been following with interest the ways that people use the medium to interact and market their services, websites and products.

Sticking with SEO for now, one subject that came to light was how to build links to your own site. If you have read the free DIY SEO book, you’ll already know a little bit about link building and how it can affect your site positively. Essentially, any site that has a link to your site will generate a little bit of ‘rank’ for your page. Some SEO people call this ‘link juice’ and you’re looking to get as much ‘link juice’ as possible.

But how do you get these links?

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Social networking is a phenomenon that has passed many people by. Some people view it as the most important thing to happen on the internet since the internet itself, others that it’s a big waste of time that yields no results. Both could be right.

There are so many different platforms for social networking that it’s hard to keep track of which one to use, I decided to have a crack a ‘Twitter‘.

Most people’s reaction to Twitter is that it’s a way for people with no life to waste even more time online. When I checked it out, my suspicions were correct.

However, with all these things when there is a mass of people communicating together, there is an opportunity to market your business. After spending some time on Twitter, I came up with the following reasons you and your business should be utilizing it:

1. First and foremost a direct increase in your web traffic.

2. Greater interactivity in terms of people opting-in to your subscriber lists and comments on your blog.

3. The ability to directly connect with people that you would not be able to reach any other way. Possibly even businesses that you want to work alongside, not just market to. This could open the door to some nice co-marketing, affiliate marketing or joint ventures down the line.

4. Increased sales! (Depending on your offering of course).

5. It’s an opportunity to branch out globally. We aren’t just attracting a UK audience interested in web marketing and SEO, but we’ve had people from lots of other countries including France, Australia and the US communicating with us too.

6. Twitter can help you easily generate more ideas for your overall marketing plan by seeing what the competition is doing. You may even find competition that you didn’t know existed.

And now I’d like to invite you to follow us on Twitter and see how we leverage this ‘social media tool’ for networking and strategic internet marketing at http://twitter.com/callowaygreen

In our last newsletter I explained how using our DIY SEO book principles I’d managed to get a completely new website on to the first page of Google within a couple of weeks. Well, it seems that if you type ‘Birmingham Laundry’ into Google, the website I created is actually at number one!

Want to do this for your site?

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