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What Your S.E.O. Strategist Won't Tell You
By Jerry Bader (c) 2007

Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you're a critical
cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your
company, brand, product or service. If that describes you,
here's eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but
were afraid to believe.

1. Time To Be Heard
Your mother told you 'children should be seen and not heard,'
but you're not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all
those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you
want to deliver a lot of content that people will remember, try
letting your website do the talking.

2. There's Nothing Like the Real Thing
In a world of virtual everything there's nothing like the real
thing. The sound and image of real people delivering your
marketing message makes it a believable, memorable
presentation.

3. Unlock the Conventional Wisdom Straightjacket
Driving traffic to your site is great, if those visitors stay
long enough to find out why they should be doing business with
you. If your website traffic is leaving as fast as it's
arriving, maybe search engine optimization isn't the answer
you've been looking for.

4. Linking Your Way To Obscurity
You know the reciprocal linking strategy everyone is talking
about as a way to generate leads? Did you ever consider that
each link to another website is an invitation to leave your
site? Is that really what you want - to invite people to leave?
I think not!

5. Your Company's Voice Is It's Personality
Give your company a professional voice, with a finely crafted
script delivered by a professional voice-over announcer that
presents a compelling, memorable marketing message and a unique
brand personality. Or do it yourself and sound like an amateur.
The choice is yours.

6. Addressing Ass-backwards Priorities
If your website design firm is twisting your marketing message
out of shape to conform to the technical 'technique du jour'
that only looks good in one popular browser, then you hired the
wrong guys. It's not about technology; it's about communication.

7. Text-Ads Are Dead. Long Live Web-Video
Squeezing your marketing message into a pay-per-click text-ad
is like trying to attract leads using one of those newspaper
real estate ads where every word needs to be decoded. Start
communicating with a Web-video that tells a story - your story.

8. Nobody Ever Bored Anybody Into Buying
The vast majority of website text is boring, unimaginative and
self-promoting. If you don't present a compelling focused story
then you are just wasting peoples' time. Seduce your audience
with an informative, entertaining, and memorable presentation
created by marketing professionals.

9. Too Much of Good Thing, Isn't So Good
You were worried about load times and search engine
optimization so you dumped most of your images and multimedia
and proceeded to put enough text on your site that would take a
month to study; but have you considered whether anybody is ever
going to actually read that stuff? And that's assuming people
could ever find what they were looking for in the first place.

10. Stop Hiding Behind Your Email Address
You've got a killer website. It tells visitors everything. All
they have to do is place an order. But wait … somebody has a
question. So they go to your contact page and find an email
address. No contact name. No address and no phone number.
You've provided a Q&A, an FAQ, and a list of technical specs.
What more do they want? Well, what they want is to talk to
somebody to make sure you're legit and if they have a problem
that you'll stand behind what you're selling. Silly them.

11. Do You Suffer From Redundant Redux Reflux?
Search engines love content. They index all your text,
searching for keywords and phrases. So what do you do? You
repeat and repeat stuff, over and over to make sure the search
engines understand what you're all about. To bad all your
Web-visitors get indigestion from reading your redundant copy
and leave because they forgot why they were there.

12. Inform. Enlighten. Persuade.
Knowledge is today's high-value commodity. If you have a set of
skills that people want to acquire, then you've got something to
sell: something to build a business around. But if you don't
know how to present that knowledge to an audience, then your
skills are unmarketable. If you want to get paid for what you
know, you better find out how to deliver your content.

13. It's Not About Numbers; It's About Quality
It's not the number of hits you get on your website, it's how
long visitors stay on your site and how much information they
retain after they leave that counts. It's about the quality of
traffic not the quantity. And the best way to create quality
traffic is to provide easy to find, easy to understand, easy to
remember content.

14. Don't Play Constant S.E.O. Catch-up
Every time an S.E.O. whiz kid comes up with a trick to beat the
search engine algorithms, the experts at the search engines
change their criteria. This means you're constantly playing
S.E.O. catch-up. Good for the whiz kid, not so good for you.
And have you ever wondered how all those search engine
optimizers can guarantee you, and everybody else they are
selling, top billing - kind of hard to believe isn't it?

15. Show Me What To Do
Anybody who has ever spent the night before Christmas trying to
decipher the arcane instructions provided by the manufacturer of
the bicycle you bought your kid, or the bizarre graphics
included with the do-it-yourself kitchen you bought from 'you
know who', knows that there is nothing like a good video to
explain how Part A actually does fit into Part B.

16. Even Cows Have Brands
If you've got a business, you've got a brand. We're not just
talking about a logo. We're talking about every thing you do:
your website, your print collaterals, everything, including how
you answer the phone. You do answer the phone don't you? If your
website design firm doesn't get it, if they aren't creating a
brand personality, what are they doing?

17. Lost In Space
Ever go to one of those websites that's impossible to navigate.
Maybe the navigation system doesn't work in your favorite
browser, or maybe the navigation system is so confusing
visitors get lost in cyber-content-hell. Information
architecture, how people find the content they are looking for,
is critical to creating a satisfying user experience.

18. You Can Have It Both Ways
Remember when your mother told you, you couldn't have dessert
if you didn't finish your broccoli? Sounds like those
know-it-all search engine gurus telling you that you can't have
multimedia on your site. Well you're a big boy now, and if you
want that multimedia hot fudge sundae you can have it. And you
can also have all the good-for-you search engine friendly copy
too. Who said you couldn't have it both ways?
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Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,
a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and
Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads,
http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com.
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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