Yesterday I had a chance to sit down with a company in the satellite television market.  They are a local Utah company that does door-to-door sales for satellite tv offers from Dish Network and from DIRECTV.  They had asked me to come in, sit down with them, and tell them what I could do for them on an SEO level.  I always like the opportunity to discuss SEO and of course always like the opportunity to provide a quote on my services for online marketing.  After a long discussion about my background, current and previous clients, SEO theory, and the expectations they could have with building a website and marketing it online, they asked me what would stop them from just learning this and doing it themselves.  My answer to them was simple…nothing but your own desire, time, and effort.

The reality is that SEO isn’t a magical potion that only a select few can perform or understand, rather anyone can do SEO but the level of success will depend on your desire to do it well, the time you have to dedicate to learning and performing the trade, and the effort you put forth in making SEO work for you through you and your network.  I basically said, if you want to take your focus away from your successful business to try and do this on your own, that is fine with me.  In the end I think they realized it was much better to hire a professional SEO to do it for them.  I’m not sure if they will hire me or not, but I at least think they realized that they are going to need some help on it.

There was no were else in my career that taught me this fact more than while I was working at Prosper Learning.  While at Prosper Learning I literally worked with 1000’s of small ecommerce start ups and these business owners basically had two choices…they could either learn SEO and do it on their own, or hire it out to a professional.  Most of them, due to lack of funds, decided to try and learn SEO and do it on their own only to fail in the end because they didn’t have the desire, time, or put forth the effort to really do it well.   We’ll see what happens with this satellite tv company, but I hope they find someone to help them reach their goals and honestly, I hope it’s me.

The other night I’m at dinner with a few friends and there was a couple there that we hadn’t seen for some time. The husband had recently left his old job for a new job in event management. I asked him some questions about his new job and the things he likes about it and what he didn’t like about his old job. Pretty common answers came back like his new job is more exciting and more flexible than his old. He then asked me for an update on my business life and I let him know some things that were happening and that I was happy with business. He then asked, “so how did you get started in online marketing and SEO”; that is a very common question I get asked so I figured I would toss this post up explaining it.

I launched my first site in 2001 with a partner that I still do business with. It all started with us sitting around saying…we need to do something that let’s us be in control of our lives and gives us a chance to make a lot of money. We decided on the internet and launched our first site MyLDSMissionary.com which is still online and profitable today. From there I started working with a number of small business consulting firms and eventually decided to work full-time for a company named Prosper Learning. My experience there is what really gave me the push I needed to really dig deeply into online marketing and SEO and while working there I launched 5 additional ecommerce sites, most were successful, a few failed.

Prosper Learning is a company that coaches or mentors small business owners on how to launch, grow, and create a successful business. The specialize in mentoring in 5 major areas of business: Ecommerce, Real Estate, Personal Finance, Stock Investing, and General Entrepreneurship. While working at Prosper Learning I had the opportunity to mentor thousands of small online business owners through the concepts and process of building a website and marketing it. I got to rub shoulders with many extremely successful entrepreneurs including: Robert Allen, Mark Victor Hansen, Anthony Robbins, David Bach, and many more. I also attended every convention you can imagine in the realm of online marketing and SEO including: SMX, Pubcon, SES, CJU, etc. I already knew what it took to build an launch a successful website before working there, but having the chance to hone my skills and work with thousands of businesses really gave me a unique look into ecommerce. Most small business owners rarely start and build more than 1 or maybe 2-3 business during their lifetime, but I had seen thousands of business launch. Of course not all succeeded, but I could see why they failed and learned from it.

After leaving Prosper Learning I have gone on to create my own SEO firm, Dream Systems Media and Utah SEO Firm along with my two partners and have continued to build and create profitable ecommerce businesses. I think my greatest moments of learning where watching a business that I had high hope for fail. It gave me a direct seat to see what should have been done better to make it work. I have been involved in ecommerce and online marketing now for 8 years and like to think I know how to do it well now.

So there you have it…how I got started in online marketing and SEO.

Back…It never left. I have read about eight blog posts and articles today on how the title tag is becoming really important again and that website owners should start including their keywords in their page titles again. I think it’s been good practice to optimize your title since I used Metacrawler to search the web. I mean really, what SEO would be able to tell their client that page titles are not important and keep a straight face.

Page titles are the most important element of onsite optimization and should be a focal point for every website owner that intends on creating traffic through search. I guess I’m just surprised, more than anything to see, that that many SEO’s are talking about how all the sudden the title is important again. To demonstrate in a clear way, I will give an example of a title used in offline guerrilla marketing…see the picture below.

Here’s a title, in a sense, from an offline service company that installs vinyl fencing in Utah. It’s their name and it says Vinyl Fencing on it; good keyword placement. It’s at the top of the fence and doesn’t include more than about 10 words. And, it’s clearly out there for all to see. I guess my point is, if you can make good use of a “title” when installing a vinyl fence offline, you might want to make sure you actually make use of an optimized title on each page of your site.

For the past year I have overseen my companies shopping network strategy for multiple sites including my memory foam mattress site www.rockymountainmattress.com. Believe it or not, there is strategy that goes into getting ranked well in a shopping comparison site such as shopping.com, shopzilla.com, and the like. The reality is you have to treat your product rankings at these sites just like you treat your site rankings at Google. And it’s worth it!

Over 100 million shoppers visit the shopping comparison engines per month, yet only 1 in 4 merchants use these engines to market themselves. The best news is that over 84% of those merchants state that they find it to be an extremely effective method of marketing for them.

Here are the top 8 things you need to do well for SEO in a shopping comparison engine.

1. Your product title is the biggest factor that will help you rank in most all of the shopping networks online. You generally have about 200 characters to make use of so make sure you use a relevant title and get your main keyword in it. Good example would be something like this: 14″ Rendezvous Memory Foam Mattress with I.C.U.

2 . Your product description should be complete and include good info along with keyword repetition. This goes back to content being king. You need to use the 200-1000 characters provided before truncation and make it convert as well. The first 50 chars are by far the most important so get your keyword(s) in at the front and then let em’ know that you offer free shipping or any other promo.

3. Products that are missing a picture will not do well. Make sure you include a picture that works well as thumb nail size. That is all they will see at the comparison site.

4. Get your product category right! If you are selling kitchen accessories and your products are listed in the auto category, you have missed the boat and your conversion will be zero. Make sure to follow the individual shopping networks category taxonomy when listing your products on their engine.

5. Include the model number or SKU when inputting your product. 38% of people who use shopping comparison sites use them to compare the same product offered by multiple etailers. Make it easy for them to compare your products with others.

6. Get customer surveys. Getting positive feedback through the customer surveys provided by the network will help you become a trusted store and increase your rankings in that engine. You need to use them, no matter how annoying they are.

7. Set your PPC price high enough to get you ranked…and higher if you really need the help. Most comparison engines will tell you that setting your PPC high won’t get you ranked highly on it’s own. I believe them a little, but I have noticed that if I jack my price I jack my rankings…use the rest of my tips though to heg your costs so you rank well naturally as well.

8. If you want to show up in product results on Google search make sure you select the product type as “product” in Google Base when setting up your products there. Don’t create your own or use one of the other defaults…only select the type of “product”.

If you have any suggestions on things I left off let me know so I can keep this updated.

In the last 30 days I have been approached by two different dentist concerning SEO for their practice. Both of them invited me in to sit down with them because they were excited about the opportunity having a ranked website affords them as a professional in the dental industry…I was surprised to find out that a few thousand dollars a month is “way out of their budget” for online marketing or “SEO” as I called it.

I’m not a dentist by any means; I brush my teeth night and day and floss once a day and call it good. I thought my few visits a year from me x 100’s of patients would put some money in their pockets, but I guess I was wrong. I thought Dentists were made of money, at least all the houses of Dentists that I’ve been too are. One of them told me that they are even reluctant to spend $200 a month for the SEO plan that GoDaddy offers. I couldn’t believe my ears. The quote I offered them was fair and the rankings they would have received would have been top 10 for sure.

Now I can handle being rejected. Every business owner has the right, and should have the ability, to choose what is best for their business. I respect someone who tells me, this sounds great and the price is right, but we are going to market through another means. However, having someone tell me they expect my services for less than $200 a month is plain ridiculous. Maybe I was being punked or something?

So, to answer my title question…YES. Most dentists rely on word-of-mouth referrals to grow their business. What they don’t realize is that tens of thousands of people are looking for dental services a month in their locations and most of them are using the web as a means of finding what they are looking for. So here are my top 3 reasons why every dentist should have a great site that is ranked.

1. New patient acquisition. Dentists are not selling a physical product, rather a service that targets local customers. They need to do all they can to find local customers to bring into their chairs to enjoy the laughing gas as I so do.

2. Patient interaction. A great dental website will allow patients to get information about the services they might consider so they can ask questions to their dentist about these services. This will increase a dentist’s dollar per patient revenue and grow their business. They can also offer features such as online scheduling to allow patients the opportunity to schedule and unschedule their appointments.

3. Reputation management. With all the news out there about dental malpractice and dentist’s molesting their patients every Dentist should be very interested in controlling their rep online so they don’t get dragged into any of that by accident.

Maybe I don’t understand their concerns, but I think my arguments are pretty strong.

Posted by Andrew Melchior