Biznology

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Many local businesses look alike–it’s just a fact. If I dropped you into the middle of a dry cleaners in my town it would probably look a lot like a dry cleaners in yours. And there’s nothing wrong with that, until you try to market on the Web. Then, all of a sudden, there is no reason for your copycat business to be ranked any higher than anyone else’s. And you have no reason for customers to come to you over anyone else. Perhaps you’ve always gotten by with doing the same thing your competitors do. What can you do when you look like every other competitor online? To find out, check out my new post on Search Engine Guide, “Are you just following your competitors?”

Image by jonas_l via Flickr

Salesmanship has always been a little bit about hype. Putting a shine on what you’ve got. Painting it in the best possible light. You get the idea. But when it crosses a line, it becomes fooling your customers. Not only is it unethical, but it doesn’t really work very well anymore. The Internet makes it a lot harder to do than it once was, because you don’t have to fool just one customer. You have to fool all of them. Because if anyone figures out your trick, they tell everyone online. So, how good is your magic act?

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Image by Andy Field (Hubmedia) via Flickr

Sometimes marketing copy is quite simple and can get the point across, but now that the Internet has come along, there are more things that you need to think about. For one thing, people don’t read copy online, they scan it. And second, they’ll never find your fabulous prose if you don’t make it search friendly. If you have trouble keeping all that in mind as you sit down to write your next Web page, you might need my “Checklist for Writing Online Copy.”

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I know, I know. You might not spend a lot of time thinking about how your Web site’s URLs look. You might not even know how the system comes up with them. But they are important. If you have URLs full of weird characters that trail on the length of I-95, then you might have a search marketing problem. If you are concerned that your funny URLs might not be so funny after all, check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, “Making Pretty URLs for Search Engine Spiders.”

Image via CrunchBase

by Frank Reed
Earlier this week Google announced that there would be a change in how many of the search engine results are presented to their customers. The traditional look of a result in the SERP’s (search engine result pages) would have a clickable title tag at the top followed by the meta description and underneath the result would be a traditional URL in green that is clickable as well. Now there seems to be a desire to change that up a bit. When I look at the result, I can’t figure out if it’s good or bad.

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