by flickr.com/dnsnfr
Over the past few months we’ve written a little about the internet marketing daily junk mail you all get in your email spam folders – specifically the ones that promise to get your website “ranked #1 in the search engines.” By blogging about that stuff, we’re trying to set things straight and help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of what makes for a successful web presence. Of course there’s no way we can rebuke all the misinformation out there – there’s just too much of it – but I recently had a conversation with a client (who had been duped by one of those junk emails) that reminded me to keep trying.
So, I thought of you when I was reading Mark Jackson’s recent article in Search Engine Strategies Magazine, titled “3 Keys to a Successful Web Presence.” It’s a well written “in-a-nutshell” explanation of the important factors of creating and promoting a website. Chock full of real world analogies, the article states that the 3 keys are:
- Your Brand: “The look and feel of your website is a key component to online success”
- Your Website’s Usability: “Every click to your website is valuable, yet many don’t put the effort to get the most out of every click.”
- Search Engine Optimization: “The creation of your [website] should absolutely be done in conjunction with your SEO efforts.”
That’s a nice bite-sized list (which Mark expands on in his article), but I would also add ‘PR‘ and ‘Social Media‘ as key factors to web success. The reason he probably left these out is because he’s in the SEO business (SEO people sometimes lump SEO, PR, and Social Media all in together, when they’re actually distinct efforts). If you’re promoting a product or service online you just can’t ignore the value of PR and Social Media “ratings and stars” and now “Tweets” on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter.
Whether you group those last few items together or not, you can see there are several pieces to this internet marketing puzzle…so the basic rule of thumb is this: if someone tells you they can make you successful online by taking care of one piece of that puzzle (for $199), you can expect you’re going to get what you pay for. But maybe less obviously, if a seemingly legitimate service provider tells you that he can get you ranked #1 on Google at all, you might want to ask yourself – what keywords are they going to get my site ranked for? Are those rankings going to do me any good if I don’t improve my website’s look and feel, or usability? There’s more to it than just search engine rankings.
Not to be too self promotional here, but one of the ways I provide value, as an internet marketing consultant, is in considering all those pieces of your web presence puzzle.
If you’re wondering which scam the client I mentioned above bought in to, it was a service that promised to get her website ranked on Google by submitting it to “over 1,000 web directories.” The cost? Just $199. The result? Next to nothing. As far as she can tell the service provider submitted her website to a couple dozen worthless directories. Not even 1,000 worthless directories – just a couple dozen. Note that there are some “good” directories out there (ie: Best of the Web, Yahoo Directory), in which getting listed can be a good thing, but she didn’t get into any of those.
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