John Andrews is a mobile web professional and competitive search engine optimzer (SEO). He’s been quietly earning top rank for websites since 1997.
SEO is actions taken to improve your status in the search engines such that you are granted customer referrals and desired competitive positioning. This include everything from brand impressions to actual conversions. The typical middle result is targeted search traffic.
What isn’t SEO: Actions taken to harm competitors, to cause content to appear in search engines where it doesn’t belong, fraud & link-building.
SEO Rules of Engagement: SEO Placement is always defensible. SEO driven actions are protected by plausible deniability (we can all sleep at night). Google SEO is executed such that a reasonable person would conclude that any impact of that SEO was the result of Google’s actions and Google’s actions alone.
The Google Paradox: There’s more to online marketing strategy than executing a set of SEO tactics better than the next guy. “What if online strategy as limited to SEO tactics? What sort of online world would we get?” This is the Google Paradox.
Google is changing and we probably won’t like the Google too much. 1 website can appear on Google first page up to 7 times.
Competitive Web Publishing addresses everything you put onto the web (websites, business listings, ads, editorial coverage & press releases, web applications).
Assertions: You pay too much for some things, don’t pay enough for some things, and need to do more yourself.
Who is driving your online business efforts? Online business strategy (goals); web design, web development, SEO; Advertising & promotion (including links), Analytics / Online Business Operations, Adjust for Market + Metrics + Goals.
A business gone online has to become and online business. Would you leave a physical store unattended, to run by itself?
Example: WordPress core platform, WordPress Theme (coded by someone else), WordPress Plugins, Your Server Configuration (set by server admin). With all the changes and updates, WordPress is far from free.
A complex system that worked always evolved from a simple system that worked and complex systes designed from scratch never works and can’t be made to work. You have to start over beginning with a working simple system.
Design Stage: Take More Responsibility, Website Design: formulating how a website will function (not just the aesthetics). Balsamiq for website wireframes. Keep working with mockups. Wireframes / mockups help you refine your functional design ideas. Stay in wireframe mode until you are confident that it will work. Engage your SEO person in this stage and business people…much less expensive when engaged at the early stage of development. Developers do their best work when SEO is addressed early and issues clarified.
Visual design–”Mood Board”…collection of objects which begin to communicate design preferences. You should make your own mood board. Designer made mood boards may invest too heavily in a particular visual effect at the mood board stage. Your designer needs to be confident in understanding your expectations before doing good work.
Business people need to make sure that everyone gets / sees your message.
Who is watching out for your business? By the way, everyone is trying to monetizing you…
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
John,
You delivered some great “take a ways”. Here are three I won’t forget.
1) Wire frame mock up tool – https://www.balsamiq.com
2) The cost of “free” software
3) Using Mood boards in the design process
Thank you,
Mark