This post is to help you answer a question we’re frequently asked: “How do I get my website to the top of Google?”

My short answer?

Forget about the search engines and start thinking about your customer.

To understand why, there’s a quick story for you, a list of fundamental questions you need to consider and then an outline of how you can tie it all together.

Quick story:

Once upon a time, Bluewire Media’s website was nowhere to be found on Google when you typed in “web design brisbane” – a pretty competitive keyword. This was not acceptable for a web strategy consultancy, so we set out to improve our ranking.

We used 2 sources: We posed a few questions to Reload Media and read Glenn Murray’s SEO Secrets e-book.

Armed with a better understanding of how the search engines worked, we were able to get to the first page of results. It was a good step but we still wanted #1.

We then focussed on “thinking like a publisher” courtesy of David Meerman Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”. We co-created the Web Strategy Planning Template with him and started to share much more content with our audience. The number of our back links increased dramatically and from high quality web sites like News.com.au courtesy of journalists and other visitors finding our blog and content useful.

In the process, we saw major fluctuations of our rankings and our competitors’. Some websites that had been on the first page for years vanished to the anonymity of page 4 or 5. Our own ranking bounced around as Google changed their search algorithm with countless small tweaks and a couple of major overhauls.

Ultimately our ranking improved over a few months until we were #1 for “web design Brisbane” (where we stayed for 3 years) and quite a few others. We’ve recently dropped to #2 but that’s ok, we’ll be back (my logic is next).

It’s time to consider some fundamental questions:

Why does a person use a search engine?

To find information.

What then is the purpose of a search engine?

The sole purpose of a search engine is to help a searcher find the information they are looking for.

Why will a searcher return to use a search engine again?

A searcher will return if the results of their search are useful.

How will a searcher choose one search engine over another?

Primarily by the usefulness of the results. A secondary consideration is the speed of the delivery of those results.

How does a search engine make money?

By having searchers click on sponsored links or pay per click advertising. The more people search, the more likely they are to click on the paid links. The more often people search, the more often they will click on the paid links. The more often they click, the more money the search engine makes.

Who is the searcher?

The searcher is YOUR customer, YOUR prospect, YOUR future No.1 referrer, a journalist looking for a good story in YOUR industry. The list goes on.

So if the searcher wants useful results and the search engines make money by delivering useful results, what do you think will drive your business’s long term search engine rankings?

USEFULNESS, to your customer or buyer persona, in everything you do on the web will drive your long term search engine rankings.

How can you do this?

• By genuinely knowing your customer or buyer persona.
• By understanding your customers’ problems and providing great content to help them solve it.
• By structuring your web strategy around your searcher or buyer persona not around your products (try using our web strategy planning template if you need help).
• By knowing what they a looking for and knowing what they are typing into the search engines and using their language, not some mumbo jumbo, jargon filled rubbish.
• By providing such interesting/useful/entertaining/valuable content that people will link to it and share it – thereby building QUALITY back links that create long term sustainable rankings, not junk links from an unrelated forum.
• By building content so it will be picked up not just by your customers but by journalists who will share it with a larger audience.
• By having landing pages that your customers find useful and that are relevant to what they are looking for.
• By refreshing your content regularly to demonstrate that you care about the issues your customers are facing.

Yes there is a place for Search Engine Optimisation to achieve short term results using technical changes, backlinking and other techniques. But do you seriously think trying to keep up with every change made to the ultra secret search engine algorithm by Google’s 31,000 employees (qualified by this type of entry exam) is a sustainable strategy?

Their algorithms are going to continue to refine, to reduce the impact of technical details like metadata, to build in the social proof as demonstrated by the number of tweets and likes and comments and check-ins and reviews and ratings and quality of authorship….. Then the next big thing will come along and swamp everything we know about today and demand more change from our businesses.

But the one thing you can count on is that search engines servicing their customers will be at the heart of it.

Don’t waste your time trying to keep up with every tweak made by collective brain power of the world’s best and brightest – get the basics right and then focus on your customer. If what you do is in their best interests, if you’re genuinely adding value with everything you do, then you can be sure the search engines will catch up and reward you handsomely for it.

So… what do you think? Is SEO dead?

Popularity: 12% [?]

Your e-messaging is about to get even easier with exciting upgrades coming to the system before the end of the year.

Save time with the new dashboard where everything will be at your fingertips: contacts, messages, training and reporting. See what your subscribers are doing in real time, as and when it happens. Plus much more…

Popularity: 5% [?]

The new look is coming soon! We’ve designed an interface that’ll give you easy, quick access to all the information you’ll need. Check it out below.

Customisable Dashboard

Upon login, the new dashboard will give you access to your calendar, social media feeds, and you can see your latest reports. It also includes a Live Feed so you can see who’s registering for your event, signing up for a newsletter, clicking links or retweeting your campaigns – all in real time.

If you prefer to have a clean dashboard, you can place as many or few widgets as you like, in just a couple of clicks.

Great looking interface with global search

The new interface has been designed to make everything more accessible. We’ve also added a new search bar so you can quickly find any contact, email, SMS message, file or image – virtually anything in your account by typing it into the search bar.

Once you’ve searched you can then choose what to do with the results, for example edit a contact’s details. You can also filter the results if necessary.

Improved navigation with help tips

The new improved navigation will allow you to completed tasks with minimal fuss.  You’ll spend less time learning how to do things by using the Help Tips throughout the system.

Easy Database Upload

You’ll have more flexibility when it comes to uploading your lists. Upload your Excel, CSV or TXT files or copy and paste contact information straight into the system.

Before uploading your list, you will be able to organise your contacts and include or exclude information by easily mapping the fields. This is a great feature for merging a number of lists into one.
 

Lists & Webforms

You’ll soon be able to edit your lists and forms from one single screen. Add, remove and edit your field and list settings while at the same time building great looking Web Forms to attach to your emails or place on your website.

Stay tuned for more information and release dates.

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you’ve ever wanted a hands-on course for getting started with social media, Tim Martin is your man.  He runs great courses and is a popular speaker.

I’ve been following Tim on Twitter for many years and had the pleasure of catching up with him in Melbourne recently.  I also got to interview him about the importance of a website.

Here is what Tim shared with me:

My name is Tim Martin and I’m the principal presenter for NET:101.

What’s the importance of a website?

Well essentially, my view of these things, is that all roads lead to Rome and Rome is your website. So the idea is that sooner or later no matter how people discover you online, through twitter or a social media platform, or through Google Search you’re going to end up on the website. And that website is a very powerful first impression so make it a good one.

It’s also a very important conversion funnel for you, so once you land people on your website, you want them to do something of value that you can measure and as I say adds value to the organisation.  And you need Analytics in there.  Plus it’s your primary publishing point to the web – it’s your ability to get content out onto the web – where it needs to go, at very little cost and you’ve got full control over it.

And speaking of control, you do have full control over it because it or not those terms and conditions you signed when you opened up your social media platforms means they can take it away at any time.  Nobody can ever take your website away, it’s the one thing you’re in full control of!

Make sure your website looks fantastic, it’s humming away, it operates and it’s findable by search. And look after it, it’s an investment.

What’s your website?

Several websites, the easiest one is www.NET101.com.au - that’s the training and education site. Or you can just google Tim Martin.

Connect

Thanks Tim!  And if you’d like to connect, you can follow @2sticksdigital on twitter.  Plus Tim Martin is a popular TEC speaker and runs NET:101 which social media courses around Australia.

Popularity: 7% [?]

It’s been obvious for a while now that mobile internet use is on the rise, in fact some estimates suggest that as early as 2013, more people will use mobile devices to access the internet than desktop computers.

It’s equally obvious that if you’re building a website now, you need to think about accommodating mobile users.

Until recently (or to be more precise, until this article by Ethan Marcotte in May 2010), accommodating mobile users meant creating a separate mobile version of your content. While this is fine, it comes with a few disadvantages (which I’ll get to soon).

Over the last year and a half, however, another option has emerged. Responsive Web Design.

Responsive web design is a relatively new web development technique in which the layout of a website changes according to the size of the screen it is being viewed on. This means that the one website can be optimised for mobiles, tablets and full-sized monitors (and whatever else might be coming in the near future).

On top of that, responsive websites are pretty cool. Check out these examples by following the links then slowly resizing your browser window and watching the elements shuffle around.

• Robot or Not – Ethan Marcotte’s original example
• The Boston Globe – An amazing feat of responsive web design
• 10K Apart – From the very smart people at An Event Apart
• AR Web Design – My own website

So which is the better option?

Well actually, both options have their advantages. A better question is “Which option is right for me?”

There are three things you need to consider when deciding: context, content and of course your current situation.

Context

If your website is responsive, it will serve the same content to both small and large screens, the only thing that changes is the formatting. If you have a separate mobile website however, you can (if you like) serve completely different content to a mobile user.

To decide whether or not to show different content to mobile users, we need to consider their context.

For example, if you were to access our website from your computer at home, it’s likely that your goal is to see how we stack up against other web companies, so you’ll probably check out some of our free tools, view our portfolio and maybe read about our methodology. If you’re accessing our website from a mobile however, it’s likely you have different goals in mind. Maybe you’re on your way to our office and need to double check our address or call to tell us you’re running late.

So in our case it might make sense to serve different content (specifically, contact information) to mobile users. It might be different for your website though, have a think about what you can assume (if anything) about a user accessing your website via their mobile, and whether that means you should serve different content to mobile vs desktop users.

Be aware though that mobile users aren’t always “mobile”. More and more people are using their mobiles to access the internet from home while watching TV, there are still plenty of people who’s sole internet connected device is their phone, and as phones get better, it will become more and more difficult to predict a mobile user’s intentions.

Content

A big consideration when developing a website for mobile devices is speed. Mobile users are often using slower or weaker internet signals than desktops, and mobile browsers are still a bit slower than their desktop counterparts, so it’s important that we don’t include anything unnecessary, especially if it’s likely to impact on the load time.

One of the disadvantages of responsive web design is that while you can easily tell design elements not to display on mobile devices, in most cases it doesn’t stop them from being downloaded and taking up bandwidth. To some extent you can get around this by serving mobile content by default, then only downloading desktop assets for larger displays, but the more images, slideshows, videos and general interactivity your site has, the harder it’s going to be to stop it from downloading on mobiles. In this case, you might be better off choosing to have a separate mobile site developed.

Your Current Situation

The last thing to consider when making your decision is your current situation. I.e. How satisfied are you with your current website? How’s your budget? How valuable are your mobile visitors (potentially)?

If you already have a website and want it to become responsive, chances are it’s going to need to be completely re-designed, so will likely be more expensive than developing a separate mobile version. Of course if you’re not happy with your current website, this may be a good thing.

If however you don’t already have a website (or you’re not happy with your existing website), taking the responsive approach may be cheaper than going with a separate mobile version, as a new website and separate mobile version would usually be thought of as separate projects.

Of course, while one option may be cheaper than the other, it doesn’t always mean that’s the path you should take. If your mobile visitors are potentially valuable, or if you get (or hope/expect to get) a lot of mobile traffic, you should probably spend more time considering context and content than budget.

In Short

Responsive web design is really cool, but has it’s disadvantages in some situations. If your mobile users want different content to your web users, or if your website is full of functionality and interactivity, you may be better off developing a separate mobile website. Otherwise, go responsive…

Popularity: 12% [?]

Has your name changed? Mine has.

After walking down the aisle in September, I’ve just started the massive task of changing my name everywhere. I’m sure most women (like me) don’t realise how big this task will be until they actually start the process. Bank accounts, phone, electricity, drivers licence….the list goes on.

But, these days we also have social media to deal with. How on earth do you change your name on Facebook and LinkedIn? I’ve just figured a couple of these things out and have some basic steps below. [Although...these sites do tend to change frequently so to future readers of this post, apologies if the steps aren’t quite right.]

FACEBOOK

Once you have logged into your Facebook page, on the menu in the far right you will see a small down arrow. If you click this you will see a number of options, one of which is ‘Account Settings’. Click this.

Within ‘Account Settings’ you can update things like Name, Username and Email.

Change your name

To start, change your last name by editing the ‘Name’ field. Change your last name to your new married name then add your maiden name to the ‘alternative name’ field. This will ensure that people from your past can still find you even if they don’t know your new married name. If you’d like your maiden name to appear in your profile, tick the box.

On my profile page my name now appears as Angela Logovik (Brown).

Change your username [or Vanity URL]

A Username in Facebook will make it easier for people to find you. This URL is also sometimes referred to as a Vanity URL.

Type in your preferred username and Facebook will let you know whether it is available.

If you already have a username and need to update it, Facebook will allow you to update your username once only. Type in your new username and save changes.

Change your email

If your main email address has changed update the information by adding another email to your account and updating your primary email address. The primary address that you choose will be the email you use to login to Facebook with (unless you have created a separate username).

Facebook does give you the option to include multiple email addresses in your account so you can add in your new address but also keep your old address for a while.

Remember to use the correct email the next time you try to login!

LINKEDIN

You may need to change a few things in LinkedIn, or at least I did.

Change your email

To change your primary email go to settings. There is a drop down list when you hover over your name in the top right hand corner of the page. Select ‘Settings’.

Towards the bottom of this page there are four tabs [Profile / Email Preferences / Groups, Companies & Applications / Account]. Select ‘Account’.

Under ‘Email & Password’ select ‘Add & change email addresses’.

A lightbox will appear where you can add and/or remove email addresses from LinkedIn. Add your new email address and update your primary address. Your primary address will be the email you use to login to LinkedIn with.

Remember to use the correct email the next time you try to login!

Change your name

Go to the profile tab (next to Home on the main navigation) and select ‘Edit Profile’.

This screen shows your entire profile and gives you the chance to edit various information. Select  ‘edit’ next to your name.

Complete your new details on this page. Change your last name, add your maiden name to the appropriate field and select how your name should be displayed.

Next to the ‘Former/Maiden Name’ field there is a lock icon that will allow you to set the visibility of your former name.

Change your Public Profile URL [or Vanity URL]

If you don’t already have one, you can follow these steps to create one.

If you have created a Vanity URL you may need to change it. For example, my URL used to be http://au.linkedin.com/in/angelabrownbluewire. For me it didn’t make sense to keep using this URL as I am no longer Angela Brown.

Go to the ‘Edit Profile’ page. If you have just changed your name you are already here. If not go to ‘Profile’ then ‘Edit Profile’.

At the top of the page you will see all of your personal information listed including name, current position, education, connections etc. At the bottom of this list is ‘Public Profile’.

Select ‘edit’ next to the URL at ‘Public Profile’ and this will show you your Public Profile page. This is the profile that people see when they search for you.

On the right hand side of this screen at the top you will see ‘Customise Your Public Profile’ and below that ‘Your Public Profile URL’.

To edit or create your URL, select ‘Customise your public profile URL’ (it’s a blue link).  A lightbox will appear where you can add setup your URL. Don’t worry it’s easy.

My new Public Profile URL now looks like this http://au.linkedin.com/in/angelalogovik.

Finally…

Don’t forget to update these details in your email signature. You don’t want people trying to click through to links that no longer exist!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Over the last few years, we’ve moved our business tools away from software and increasingly into the cloud.

I love the idea of the cloud:

1. accessing information from anywhere
2. allowing our workforce to be mobile
3. all the data backed up.

The ease of use and simplicity of design that typifies these applications is the icing on the cake. As is the ability to share data across them.

The search and constant involvement with the web eventually lead us to discovering Saasu which we now use as our web based accounting tool, along with a bunch of others. Since they are a web based application business themselves, I was intrigued to find out more about how else they use the web in their business.

Marc Lehmann is the CEO and founder of Saasu and was kind enough to share some insights here that might help you to use the web and the tools available. (transcript below)

Transcript:

We’ve always looked at the web as a very leveraged environment. You can have one relationship with someone on line, but in effect you have a second degree of separation relationship with all of the other people behind that person as well. If you look after one person well, in an online way, then all of the other people start becoming potential candidates to look at your product.

We’ve always looked at it like that – it’s a knock on effect. How many people can you influence and keep happy in a close sense? Then the people behind them starting hearing about you from them. So they become your sales team. People call it word of web, word of mouth, but for us we look at it like there are relationships there that we have online.

We do a limited amount of email because we don’t want to burn people’s attention. We don’t want to constantly send emails out, 1or 2 every few days, like a lot of accounting products do, but people’s attention starts to fall off. It might be important for the software company to send them those emails, but for them, their important thing is getting products sold and they don’t want us harassing them every 5 minutes.

We spend more time trying to find content for our blog, and when we do an email, it’s really relevant to creating time savings for the business owner. We’ll do an email out when we have a feature like automated statements being realised because we know that’s a job that someone has to do every month. Always make the content really high quality. Same goes for our approach with facebook and twitter and all the other mechanisms – we’re very careful about how we use people’s attention.

We spend a lot of time in community, business related events, accounting related events and tech events. We find that’s a great way to meet people and when you’ve met someone, the marketing power is an order of magnitude higher. [Side note: Keith Ferrazzi definitely agrees] If they know you they are so much more likely to talk about you. And it helps scale too because they are digitally connected. They’ll talk about us and generate that organic growth that we’re after. And that’s just us spending our time and money on building our product not on marketing and the old economy ways of doing it.

We use a product called Grad Connection for recruiting graduates. It’s more of a dating service for recruitment where you find out what the grad is looking for in a company and we get to look at what we need. We mightn’t want a graduate that doesn’t have a blog – we want everyone to be a blogger!

Then we use Campaign Monitor and Marketo for email marketing. And lots of great products out there – LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. And everything we do is pretty much online. We don’t really buy software, we just use online applications. Store our data in quite a few different locations in the US, Asia and Australia. That’s how you create safety in the cloud as we call it. Go with providers/web applications that do that. We spend very little money around maintaining our business around what applications we use, it’s really about picking the right application and spending the time researching the one you’re after. When we were investigating email systems, we spent a lot of time looking around.

Occasionally you have to buy a bit of software because not everything has been webified yet. We still use Microsoft Excel and Microsoft have some great products. We use Apple computers in our business – it’s probably 50/50. There are dozens of tech related ones we use.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Newsjacking by David Meerman Scott

My favourite marketing author David Meerman Scott has just released a new book today called Newsjacking.  Well it’s not literally a book as we used to know them.  It’s  only available as an instant digital download on Kindle or iPad, not as a printed version.

Newsjacking is term David uses to describe the practice of high jacking a news story.  It is done by astute marketers who publish real-time content that fuels a reporter’s desire for a unique angle on a breaking story.

The result: tons of media coverage, worth a fortune, that would normally be completely impossible to obtain.

Chilean Miners

The case study that I am most familiar with is the 33 Chilean miners who emerged from being trapped underground and were handed Oakley sunnies to protect their eyes from the sunlight. This real-time decision earned Oakley over $40 million worth of media exposure!

The same can happen with a timely blog post or tweet that attracts the attention of the news hungry journalists. When you notice an announcement in your industry (please be tracking these with Google Alerts!)  David urges you to post a timely response providing your take on the situation that will ideally be fodder for reporters to use in the second paragraph of their stories.

He also mentions you are much more likely to earn some press coverage if the original announcement doesn’t provide the full story or is full of bland, uninteresting gobbledy-gook corporate speak.

How to hijack a news story

The great news is that kind of stuff isn’t dictated by luck, it can be planned for: provided you have a real-time mindset and a culture that encourages initiative. David even shares his tips for doing so:

1. Find news to hijack
2. Formulate a strategy in real-time
3. Instantly get your take into the market

For more

I really enjoy David’s books and I love the challenge of implementing his strategies.  Previously when I’ve done what he says, it’s worked, so this latest one, Newsjacking will be exciting to put into practice.

It’s available on Amazon for $7.99 and is a nice, easy read and full of concise, actionable ideas. Highly recommended.   If you like, you can follow @dmscott on twitter.

Popularity: 6% [?]

When David Meerman Scott wrote the first edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR,  Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was only used by uni students.

Haven’t times changed since 2007?

Yes, we’ve seen social media sites like Facebook and Twitter explode and some like MySpace, implode.  I agree certainly that internet years are like dog years!

I like how David explains the old rules. There used to be three ways to get attention.

1. Buy it (adverts)
2. Beg for it (press releases)
3. Bug people for it (salespeople)

Luckily, now there is a 4th: Earn attention by publishing remarkable content!

David’s third edition of his bestselling book is full of case studies of organisations large and small that have achieved phenomenal success by embracing the ‘new rules’.  Having read both the second and third editions, I am stilled most blown away by the powerful introduction where the ‘old rules’ are debunked.

Page 7 entitled One-Way Marketing is Yesterday’s Message had me hooked.

Old Rules
A primary technique of what Seth Godin calls the TV-industrial complex is interruption.  Under this system, the advertising agency creative people sit in hip offices dreaming up ways to interrupt people so that they pay attention to a one-way message.

New Rules
The web is different. Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is about delivering useful content at the precise moment a buyer needs it.

On page 8, David elaborates:

The Old Rules of Marketing
- Marketing simply meant advertising (and branding)
- Advertising needed to appeal to the masses
- Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message
- Advertising was one-way: company to consumer
-  Advertising was exclusively about selling products
- Advertising was based on campaigns that had a limited life
- Creativity was deemed the most important component of advertising
- It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers

The New Rules of Marketing
None of this is true anymore. The web has transformed the rules, and you must transform your marketing to make the most of the web-enabled marketplace of ideas.

My favourite quote

Put simply (and this is my favourite quote and message from the book).

“On the web, you ARE what you publish”

My take

In a nutshell, my interpretation of the ‘new rules’ is to publish remarkable content that helps solve your buyers problems.  Publish frequently and share it liberally.

You’ll be rewarded with loads of interested buyers, backlinks which will propel you up the Google search rankings and enquiries from journalists looking for experts to write about.  Most importantly this will lead to genuine customers who appreciate your useful content and love the fact you’re not interrupting them!

Thank You

Thanks David.  On a personal we were excited when you agreed to collaborate with Bluewire on the Strategy Planning Template and thrilled that you included the template in the book. Cheers for the mention on page 153!

You can follow @dmscott, buy his book and follow his blog Web Ink Now.

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you want to know how to get things done, then Scott Belsky, CEO of Behance, is your man.

A good friend of ours Liz Watson, gave us the heads up on Scott’s presentation for Portable Talks when Adam was reading Scott’s book “Making Ideas Happen“. It was great timing and a fantastic presentation. Personally I believe in the adage: ideas are 1%, execution is 99% and Scott has dedicated his time to the 99%. His presentation ranged across all sorts of techniques from checklists, through to meeting patterns and technologies – all focussed on the execution of ideas.

It was perfect timing for us at Bluewire as we try to speed up our web strategy and web design projects’ delivery times.

[It was so good in fact, that when Adam and I saw it in Sydney, we booked 3 extra tickets for the team up in Brisbane!]

So at the end of the presentation I asked Scott: “What is your number 1 tip for making things happen fast?”

The answer: Take action without conviction, take a little action and take it fast. Check out the video below. Thanks Scott!

Transcript:

I’m Scott Belsky and please to answer a question for Bluewire Media.

The question is: Could you please reiterate your number 1 idea for making things happen fast and then how that might apply to web projects or which web tools might help?

One of the things everyone needs to think about is that with any idea that comes up, that we feel comfortable acting without conviction sometimes. Often times that means rather than thinking about when to start thinking about it, and who to start speaking to and when to take a test, just take rapid action. Rapid action to talk to a specific person about it and decide the next step. Or rapid action to draft it up and send it around for feedback. Or rapid action to buy the domain name. Whatever it is, these little actions are sometimes what help us break the seal of hesitation that often gets in the way of having an idea and actually see it transpire. I think in any sort of web development project, new business, new product, new service, when you have that inkling of an idea, push yourself to find the first action you can take and then take it quickly and see where it takes you.

Popularity: 5% [?]