Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams

When people think of the entertainment industry, and in particular the music industry, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the glitz and glamour, pop stars with unheard of fame and more money than they know what to do with. Yet, in spite of that reputation, the entertainment industry for the most part has always used marketing strategies that were just simply the worst to be found in any industry.

It usually worked by having a scout in the employ of the record label go out and frequent clubs where popular local acts would be performing, in the hopes that they would catch sight of up and coming talent that had yet to be discovered by anyone else.

Once an artist was “discovered” in this manner, the record label would offer them a contract and then work with them, trying to tweak their sound and image to fit what they saw as the current market trends. Once a corporate identity of sorts was established for the artist, the label would then spend outrageous amounts of money on marketing and promoting their album, in the hopes that it would appeal to the public and become a hit.

Of course, many great acts and performers have gotten their big break this way over the years. The system certainly works at least some of the time, and the fact that the record industry is still going strong is proof that when it does work, it tends to work rather well.

Still, with such an approach, it’s just as likely that the label’s investments would be sunk into an act that just never goes anywhere and doesn’t generate a profit. In other words, there was vast room for improvement.

Enter the reality television boom of the late 1990s, and its most identifiable breakout success: American Idol.

American Idol is not just a successful television show (although it is that), it’s a total revolution in the way that entertainment marketing is done. You see, like all smart entrepreneurs, the folks behind American Idol have done a complete 180 and made their market research an integral part of their product. Using a wildly popular television show that offers the promise of fame and riches, they bring potential acts to them instead of seeking them out, and then weed through them until a batch of qualified performers are selected for a final showdown.

Each week, one person is eliminated on the television broadcast, based on the number of votes that they receive from the viewers who call in to show their support. This approach is genius in two ways: first, it gives the record labels the opportunity to test the waters with an artist to see if they have the public appeal it takes to succeed without the need to invest much of their own capital upfront, and secondly, they actually make money by doing this, because they charge people to cast their votes and also profit from sponsorship of the television broadcast.

Rarely has there been a more innovative and redefining marketing move than the one put forth by American Idol. There’s no reason to let them reap all the rewards, though. Their success can be yours as well, if you’re willing to use a little creativity to apply the “market-first” concept of product development to your own business.

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To first understand how to make the most of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your business, you need to understand exactly how it is that search engines go about their business.

In the English-speaking world, the major search engines include Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (which includes AskJeeves).

Typically speaking, search engines perform two functions.

• They “crawl” the web and create an index (database) of the billions of documents (web-pages) that are available online - this includes your business’ website.
• They use this index to provide useful answers to questions that users ask of them, most often in the form of a list of relevant web sites after someone searches on a particular phrase or term; such as “plumbers in melbourne”

Let’s look at each of these.

Crawling and Indexing

Search engines don’t just head out across the expanse of the web at random. Instead, they proceed along methodical lines. Most every webpage you’ve ever been to on the internet contains at least one or more hyperlinks to other website pages or files. This sharing of links, in theory, serves as a network connecting all of the pages that exist on the internet. By using these links, the software that search engines use to scour the web (known as “crawlers” or “spiders”) can reach the billions of documents available on the web through any given starting point.

Randfish explains it brilliantly using the analogy of a city bus or subway route. While the main points of interest are the various stops and cities along the route (think of these as the web sites and files), the streets connecting them (the hyperlinks) are critical and of no less importance.

So if you don’t have any hyperlinks (on other webpages) that point to your business’ website then the search engine spiders will never be able to find your website and place its pages in the index. It is this web structure (hence: world wide web) that the search engines crawl through, making these stops, where their next task is to take a look at the code that makes the pages and store the relevant sections of code in their database for retrieval…

Retrieval and Rankings

When most people go to search for something on the internet, say looking for someone to fix the leak in the bathroom… they submit a query at a search engine, by typing in the phrase/term they are looking for (plumber melbourne), and in return they get a list of relevant web pages.

To do this, the search engine looks through its massive collection of documents, and performs a two-step process. First, they return results which are likely to have some relation to what the user was looking for. Secondly, and this is important, they determine the order, or “rank” in which these pages are displayed to the user.

To make this determination, the search engine judges two aspects of your businesses page: relevance and importance.

Relevance is a very complex matter that we’ll be discussing throughout this guide. Suffice to say, relevance is no longer simply a matter of having the right words (plumber & Melbourne) in the text of your webpage. SEO goes far beyond that and incorporates a great number of factors.. but as a starting point; the only way the search engines can determine what your business (website) is about, is by reading the words of test on your sites pages. So if you are a plumber, make sure you incorporate words such as plumbing, plumber, leak, toilet etc etc in your copy.

Importance, from the search engine’s perspective, has to do with how popular your site is… and just like in high school where the most popular people had the most friends… the more links you have pointing to your site, the higher your importance, and the higher your rank in any given search.

If you’ve used a search engine before, you likely know this, but the more relevant and important a page is thought to be, the closer to the top of the search engine results list it can be found. How many times have you even bothered navigating to the second page of a results list to find what you’re looking for? …Exactly….

Of course, these two factors are determined by machines, so there’s a lot of room for error. But rather than see this as a negative thing, we should look at how we can capitalize upon it. In other words, if we figure out just how search engines go about determining how important and relevant your page is, we can make sure that they award us high rankings.

In the next post we will be going further into the actual look and feel of a Search Engines Results Page and how that all works… stay tuned..

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimisation, search, engine, optimisation, google, yahoo, msn, sem, serps, pete williams, pete, williams, preneur marketing, preneur, marketing, small business, small, business

I came across this great quote the other day from, Frank Luntz, an American corporate and political consultant and pollster who has worked most notably with the Republican Party in the United States.

Anyway, it got me thinking about its relevance to marketing…

So too often small business owners spend so much time trying to scribe the perfect sales pitch, but then simply slap it in a local newspaper with an almost disregard for you will be hearing (reading) it.

It so important to match the message to the market - someone reading the Chicago Tribune will hear (read) your messages completely differently to someone reading the trade specific journal, and someone searching on Google will hear what you are saying differently again.

What about Madison Avenue style advertising, they type where you create a really clever slogan, tagline or witty statement that you stick on a billboard - You may be saying some really clever, but is anyone actually listening at 120 Km p/hr.

“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.”

Like many small business owners, you may not have even heard of SEO before. And yet, it is one of the most critical things that you need to understand if you want your website to stand out from the crowd and actually generate positive results for your business.

Just What is SEO?

SEO refers to “Search Engine Optimization”. And basically, it involves making very subtle changes to your website so that it becomes more attractive to the programs running the net’s most popular search engines - Google, MCN, Yahoo etc etc.

If you’re not convinced that this should matter to you, take note that the majority of all web traffic is generated by just a few major search engines: Yahoo!, MSN, Google, and AskJeeves.

When was the last time you went to the yellow pages to find a business instead of Google? Exactly.

If these search engines can’t locate your site, then your site cannot be put into their databases. If you aren’t in their databases, you can’t turn up during a search.

In other words, you will never reach those people who are out there, actively looking for your product and services.

This isn’t just a matter of generating random traffic; it’s about ensuring that those people who are in the market to buy your products already will be able to find your site when they come looking for it. If your website is not getting listed on the first page of the Serach Engines Result Pages (SERPs) your business simply doens’t exist online…

So How Exactly Does SEO Work?

Search engines are constantly looking for ways to improve upon their services; they want to go deeper into the web and return better results to their users… That’s their business - to return (display)the most approprite sites on the internet for the ’search term’ entered by the user.

However, it’s ultimately computer software that is conducting these searches, not a human being. As such, they’re prone to error, as I’m sure you all know by now. The good news is that these programs search for sites in a very predictable and methodical fashion. If you know how they conduct their searches, you can make the changes to your site that you need to (often, just a tweaked word here or there!) to take you from the bottom of the search pile to the top!

Why wouldn’t you want to be part of this?

In this blog series, we’re going to cover SEO at a high-level. But before we get into all that, you need to ask yourself if SEO is what you’re looking for… Why did you build your website in the first place? Was it to satisfy your ego and burn money on a slick-looking interactive brochure that nobody is ever going to read? I doubt it, but if so, then you can probably achieve that goal quite nicely without bothering any further with SEO. However, maybe your aim was to generate new leads for your business? If so, then SEO is one of the most effective means to that end in your entire arsenal.

Are we on the same page here? Have I convinced you that you NEED SEO if you want to take your business anywhere in this day and age?

If make sure you check back here in the next couple of days to read the next installment which will cover: How The Search Engines Operate… How the Search Engines Rank Your Site… and much more.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimisation, search, engine, optimisation, google, yahoo, msn, sem, serps, pete williams, pete, williams, preneur marketing, preneur, marketing, small business, small, business