Issue #011- Staying Ahead of the Game and an SEO Bedtime Story

Search Engine Strategies- Chicago Dec. 13-16

Search Engine Strategies is THE place to find out what's hot in search marketing today! Don't miss this Chicago session, over half of the sessions are new topics.

By Scottie Claiborne© 2004

Never Rest on Your Laurels

It's heartbreaking. You wonder why you even try. Your wonderful, clever, successful and popular idea has been copied, ripped-off, duplicated. What's even worse, the competitors have improved on your idea and you are watching traffic and sales drop.

It's just the nature of the game. There has never been an industry that moves as fast as the Internet. The ease of creating web sites and web applications has made the competitive edge of being "first" with something exciting and original a brief, fleeting moment in the sun. Why try?

You've got to try! The world moves forward whether you are on board or not. If your business depends on the internet to survive, you can't rest. You've got to keep searching for that "something extra" that will brand your business as a leader and make it stand out from the rest.

Know Your Competitors, But Don't Obsess Over Them

No doubt, it is critical to know who your competitors are, and what they are doing. But don't follow their every move, or duplicate everything they try.

Back in my days as a retail buyer, one of my jobs was to shop the competition regularly and report on my findings. Most vendors knew the best way to get a big order was to drop the fact that a competitor had placed a big order. Upper management was so worried about "missing" the "next big thing" that we ended up duplicating what the other department stores were carrying. This was a huge mistake. Why? If we carried the same selection, the only thing we had left to compete on was price and that ended badly for everyone.

Trust in your instincts. Be original. Be different. Be creative. Just because your competitor is optimzing for a specific phrase, that doesn't make it a profitable one! Do your own research, implement your own tests, try new strategies and new offerings that you believe in. While studying competitors can be a shortcut to learning what works, it can also be a red herring and a waste of time.

Do Things That Are Hard To Duplicate.

It's easy to copy a page of content. Heck, these days it's easy to copy 1000 pages of content. But it's a lot harder to hide 1000 pages of content from the original copyright holder!

Blogs, forums, user reviews, and other "visitor-generated" content are hard to duplicate (and get away with it.) The more diverse your content is, the less likely you are to find it copied wholesale into another site. And user-generated content is more likely to make your site a destination.

While content is easy to copy, applications are a little harder. While peoplecan duplicate your tools and other application offerings, it takes more of an investment and once your tool or app is out there, it's likely to have garnered plenty of links and bookmarks- the competitors have a more difficult time getting established.

Never stop innovating- stay one step ahead.

What is working today for you will probably be imitated tomorrow and will lose some of it's effectiveness. When it comes to building a web presence, you can continue to build on your past successes and become even more powerful.

You wanted great keyword rich content pages, so you wrote detailed how-to's about your industry. It became so popular, that you decided to offer a paid "premium version" as well. Before long, you find your original free info as well as your premium offerings posted on competitor's websites.

So you built an industry directory. Spent hundreds of hours adding sites. It did so well, you started charging for listings. Before you knew it, someone with a website copier came along and in about 20 minutes, your hard work will be appearing on someone else's site with a slighly modified design. For free.

Because of the free info and the directory, people in the industry know who you are. So, you started a blog. And when that worked out well, you noticed a competitor started his own blog...

While it sounds discouraging, take a minute to look at what has been built! A well-indexed, popular site offering free information, a highly ranked directory, and an interesting blog. My guess is that the competition is still just trying to catch up.

Don't just change, improve!

Change for the sake of change will end badly. You have to find ways to improve your offerings, not just be different. It's not as hard as it sounds! Get FEEDBACK. Your customers are full of ideas and they will tell you what they want. While not every complaint is a goldmine of information, many of them are golden opportunities to improve. Online surveys and feedback forms offer a wealth of information as do salespeople and "real life" customers.

Promote online and offline.

A mistake many online-based businesses make is ignoring the "real world". There is a lot of potential in both local and national advertising for many businesses. Press releases can lead to articles in print and broadcast media. If you have a unique service or product, don't put all your efforts and resources into search marketing- diversify. Then the hiccups at the Googleplex won't cause you as much heartburn.

Pursue copyright infringers.

When you find directly copied material, don't just shrug and mumble, "It was bound to happen." While concepts and ideas aren't copyright protected, the actual words you use to convey them are. See the Content Theft and Pursuing Copyright Infringers edition of this newsletter for details on how to go about enforcing your rights.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

If you pick an industry you love, staying ahead of the game is a lot easier. Stay informed about what's going on in the industry through trade publications, newsletters, and RSS feeds and always look for those ideas that will set your company apart.

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for The Karcher Group and the facilitator of the Successful Sites Newsletter. She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High Rankings Forum.

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The Hungry Little Spider

An SEO Bedtime Story

Once upon a time, in a land called WWWebdom, there lived a little spider. It was a hungry little spider and it liked to munch up web pages and then keep track of which ones it liked best, so it could tell other people just how good they were.

The little spider never ran out of pages to munch because each page told the spider where to find other yummy pages (links). When lots of pages pointed him to one page, he usually found that page to be very tasty. Also, the more links he found to a specific page, the easier it was to remember it to tell others about.

*Incoming links are important to get your site found and ranked well.

Sometimes people tried to tell the spider which pages they wanted him to try and every so often, he'd check out some of the invitations he received. Usually, those pages weren't attached to any other pages, so the spider would be bored and forget they were there.

*Submitting your site to the search engines doesn't do much good without incoming links.

The spider enjoyed munching all types of pages, but some pages just tasted better than others. When he encountered pages that tried to make him eat a cookie and he refused those. He was on a diet and only ate yummy text.

Sometimes the pages seemed to recreate themselves over and over and they all tasted the same. Blech. Before he knew it, the spider would realize he was full of these repeating pages, so he would just stop and go home. The spider avoided the pages that had session ids all over them and never came back.

*Technical issues like forced cookies and session ID's will prevent your site from being indexed.

Some pages the spider munched on were very sparse. They were filled with fatty images and other things he couldn't eat, like Flash desserts. With only a little text on them, they didn't satify his hunger and he wasn't really sure if they tasted good or not. He didn't return to those pages very often.

The little spider loved big meaty pages with lots and lots of words. He really liked the ones that were well spiced with keyword phrases- it was easy to remember those pages and recommend them to his friends when they asked for a specific phrase.

*Get some real text on your pages and slim down on images. Use your targeted keyword phrases naturally throughout the copy.

Some pages were TOO spicy and the spider didn't like that at all. Especially when he hit a whole pocket of spice that he hadn't expected to be there. He also didn't like ordering one page, but being served another. Whenever he found out that was happening, he never returned to that page.

*Using tricks like keyword stuffing and cloaking can get your site banned by the search engines.

He loved the pages that were always changing a little- they were his favorite. He'd stop by to snack on those pages often. He liked the pages that stayed the same too- he just didn't stop by as often. He preferred to spend his time sampling new or different pages.

*Search engines like fresh, new content. If your content hasn't changed, there's no reason for the spider to index the page again.

While he didn't mind the extra side dishes of table code, CSS, and javascript, he never ate them. He just pushed it all to one side and left it there. He really appreciated the pages that kept the side dishes in separate files so that he didn't have to deal with them.

*Move your CSS and Javascripts to external files.

If he was really stuffed, sometimes he'd just order up the page titles and see what was available, making notes about the flavor of each page and whether he'd like to come back later when he was hungry and eat the whole thing.

*Partial indexing is typically nothing to worry about. Eventually, the page will be indexed, if there are no technical issues.

The spider had several spider friends who all liked the same thing and over time, there were more and more. They hoped one day, to eat every single page in WWWebdom and worked hard to make it come true. The End. ;-)

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for The Karcher Group and the facilitator of the Successful Sites Newsletter. She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High Rankings Forum.

Wrap Up

Watch out, Karcher Group!

The BIG news is something I'm really excited about! I've decided that the headaches of accounting on top of doings sales-service-followup all by myself wasn't as great as it was cracked up to be, and I've decided to again be part of a team. So, I decided to join the smartest, most dedicated team of professionals I've encountered in this business- The Karcher Group.

Since getting to know several of the team at various conferences and forums around the net, we've been batting around the idea of my working with them, and the timing recently worked out for us both. I'll have more time to do the consulting that I enjoy while leaving other details (like paperwork and payments) to other members of the team.

While it's not for everyone, I love the idea of being part of a team again. Since leaving an office environment 3 years ago, I've found that I really miss that interaction with others than inspires me to get more done (and stay on schedule!)

High Rankings Seminar Review

On a different topic, the Boston High Rankings seminar was great! We had a wonderful audience who really wanted to learn and everyone had a good time. Karon Thackston and I stayed over in Boston for an extra day to get cheaper airfares home and had a blast taking a water taxi across the Harbor for "authentic" New England seafood.

Chicago SES

If you're going to the Chicago Search Engine Strategies, be sure to stop in on my Virtual SEM session on Monday. We'll be talking about ways to take on more business without having to take on the overhead and responsibility of an office full of workers. Subcontracting, remote workers, and referrals are all ways to expand your services without a huge administrative commitment.

Jill Whalen of High Rankings and Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement will be joining me on the panel, as well as Ani Kortikar of NetraMind. It should be a useful and fun session! If you don't catch us there, you know where to look- the bar at the McCormick Hilton will be full of SEO's at all hours.

Hope to see you there! -Scottie

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