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?

Seeing the below in my profile screen inside Google + has made the little +1 button make a whole lot more sense and seem that much more of an important addition to your website. All your +1′s while not only having an impact on search results*, will show up in the streams and profiles of everyone using Google +.

So, how do I add it to my website?

It’s super simple, visit the +1 Webmaster’s page and follow the simple instructions. Basically you’ll need to add some code (a script tag and another custom tag where you want it displayed) to your websites html.
NB. You’ll need to be able to edit a page’s html source so if you need some help, contact your website developers (or us) for some help.

For more info about the +1 Button – Watch the intro

The Interactive Tour is also quite cool and worth a look.

* From the +1 FAQ

The +1 button and search results

+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant—in the context of Google search results.

When a signed-in Google user is searching, your Google search result snippet may be annotated with the names of the user’s connections who’ve +1′d your page. If none of a user’s connections has +1′d your page, your snippet may display the aggregate number of +1′s your page has received.

More FAQ’s

What do you think, do you think Google has come up with a decent answer to Facebook? Will you add the +1 button alongside the Facebook Like & Tweet buttons?

P.S I’m out of invites so sorry, you’ll have to wait or find someone else….

P.P.S – I know, we haven’t even added the +1 button to our own blog yet but it’s coming don’t worry… be sure to +1 our home page though…

As background, our General Manager Toby Jenkins has lived down in Sydney for 12 months now and I moved down in January this year, and our ‘head office’ is in West End in Brisbane.

How we do it

Well, to be honest nothing has really changed. We have our daily huddles at 11.05am and our weekly meetings at 9.05am on a Monday. This keeps the communication rhythm going and ensures everyone is in the loop.

We set goals every quarter and have weekly action items that we all decide upon in the respective meetings. As for us being out of the office, it is fine — once the the goals and action items are set, it means we are out of everyone’s way, so we can all get to work!

Using Skype for video calls

For example, to show you how it works, we’ve just finished our weekly meeting at Bluewire.  We start at 9.05am every Monday.  Sam in the Brisbane office dials us in via a computer using the free Skype‘video call’ feature.  And this is what we see – just like a face-to-face meeting.

Bluewire's Brisbane contingent - via a Skype video call

Unfortunately for everyone in Brisbane, this is what they see.

What the others see

So, Skype is perfect for facilitating the visual and audio component of our meetings.

Using Google Docs

Google Docs are just like Microsoft Office Word documents, but you can access them online instead of on your local computer.  The big difference is that with Google Docs you can have multiple people editing the one document at the same time.

In our meetings, this allows everyone to see the meeting agenda and minutes being filled out.

Since you can have multiple people editing the document (eg. 2 people taking notes), it’s really useful because when it’s the scribe’s turn to talk, someone else can fill in for them.

It’s also good because you can see where each ‘editor’ is [they have a different coloured cursor which shows their name] and you can see what they are typing in real-time.  The meeting minutes literally gets filled in right before your eyes.

Weekly meeting agenda & minutes get filled in real-time using Google Docs

So, that is how we run our Weekly meetings using Skype and Google Docs.  Any questions?

For more on the value of a Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly & Annual meeting rhythm, check out some of Verne Harnish’s articles on his Gazelles website.

And for the record, for our monthly and quarterly meetings Toby & I fly back to join the team.

Recently, Bluewire Media has claimed the #1 spot from John Hacking, who has dropped from #1 to page 2 (any ideas why?). If you looked at the home page of the Bluewire Media website however, you might be confused as to how we’ve made it to the number one spot. There’s no heading saying “Web Design Brisbane”, the words “Web Design” and “Brisbane” appear only once each in the browser title tag, and they’re not together or near the start. In fact, the phrase “Web Design Brisbane” or “Brisbane Web Design” doesn’t even appear anywhere on the page.

Compare this with the companies who share spots 2-10, most of whom start their titles with “Web Design Brisbane”, and you’ll be left to wonder why Bluewire Media is even on the first page.

Well, if you know anything about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you’ll know that inbound links (links from someone else’s site back to your site) play a huge factor in getting your site to rank higher in search results. A quick scan of the number of links pointing to each of the top 10 websites reveals that Bluewire Media has roughly 24,000 inbound links, while the rest of the top 10 have between 1,000 and 10,000 inbound links (with a couple of exceptions).

Search results for "Web Design Brisbane" using SEOBook's SEO Toolbar to display link data

Fair enough, you might say, until you hear that Bluewire Media does not actually offer SEO services directly (apart from ensuring the websites we build are search engine friendly, we refer our clients to our SEO partners, Reload Media, for all their other SEO needs). How then, have we managed to get twice or three times the number of links that our competitors have, most of whom offer SEO and linkbuilding services?

Well, at Bluewire Media, we’re big believers that the best way to market your business online is to give something of value away for free. Our free Web Strategy Planning Template, co-created with international keynote speaker and best-selling author David Meerman Scott has been downloaded and used by thousands of businesses worldwide to help them define their web strategy.

By giving this template away for free, we’ve managed to not only get our logo and contact details into the offices of hundreds of companies Australia wide, but also to get hundreds (and eventually thousands) of links from webmasters and bloggers who have found it useful and wanted to share it with their audiences, and in doing so have helped us achieve our number one ranking.

We try to recommend to most of our clients that they write an e-book or similar and give it away for free, but many of them, being business-people, just can’t get their head around the concept; and it’s often hard to think of all the right arguments to convince them on the spot. Here, I’ve outlined here what happens when you give away for free something other people thing is pretty valuable.

The process:

1. You publish something (let’s call it a widget) that people would pay for (because it’s that good), but instead you give it away for free. It could be a free e-book, an online tool or app, a printable template or checklist (like ours), or even just a great blog post!
2. People read or use your widget and find it valuable. It’s so good that they can’t resist telling their friends and followers about it using social media (especially if you make it easily shareable). This spreads your brand name and increases your reputation.
3. If your free widget is good enough, eventually it will create enough of a social media storm that people will start blogging about it (hello backlinks!).
4. People who read those blog posts will then know about you and your free widget, and if they find it valuable enough, they’ll tell their own friends and followers.
5. This cycle goes on and on while your brand name is being spread further and further and your reputation is skyrocketing.
6. You now have a first-class reputation, and your customers come to you ready to buy your products/services because they’ve read about you, seen your work and trust your expertise.

But why does it have to be free?

Making your widget free means that when someone comes across it, they don’t have to deliberate over whether they can afford it or whether it will be worth the money, they don’t have to get up and walk across the room to get their credit card details (don’t under-estimate the laziness of the general population), and they have no reason to trust that your widget will do what you claim it will. If it’s free, however, there is absolutely no reason why someone wouldn’t use/read/download it right then and there and be blown away by how valuable it is. Basically, by making it free, you’re allowing it to spread faster and further.

Want to learn more?

[Edit: Lesley has linked to an excellent video in the comments. If you're interested to know more, please have a look]

David Meerman Scott is a thought leader in this field, and has some great books that really help clarify exactly why you should give something away for free. I recommend buying and reading his book ‘World Wide Rave’ (we’ve got some copies in the office if you’d like to borrow one) and downloading some of his free e-books (yes that’s right, he practices what he preaches).

Are you convinced?

A lot of people will remain un-convinced, especially if they think they’re in an industry that this doesn’t apply to. Really though, if you have a product or service and you have a website, there’s a way that it can work for you: you just need to be creative.

If you’re having a hard time thinking of a way to do this in your industry, leave a comment explaining your situation and I’ll think of one for you!

It details how the main pages for these various products stacked up in their own search results and how they fair across a number of common SEO topics. It was designed to provide the product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimisations. These optimisations were intended to not only help search engines understand the content of their pages better, but also to improve the users’ experience when visiting their sites.

What did I learn?

• Google, arguably the biggest & best search engine, still has to consciously think about search engine optimisation.
• By following simple rules you can greatly improve both your search engine rankings and your users experience of your website.

They’ve released the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters can learn from the report, which is filled with a heap of great examples taken straight from their products’ pages. It’s an interesting read, and shows that even the Google team make mistakes when it comes to some of the simple rules of SEO.

SEO Brisbane: If you’d like some help optimising your website and getting found on Google, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

Disclaimer: The C+ image was created and added to give my post a little colour. Google and their products don’t necessarily deserve a c+, this was merely added for illustration purposes. Google, you get a A+ in my books, keep up the great work and keep releasing these great resources and products!

It’s with a bit of trepedation that I take over these posts! So here it is… the first of Bluewire Media’s Monday Weekly Round-ups.

• Has the iPhone lost its cool? – CNN
• Test drive Internet Explorer 9
• 24 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed – Mashable
• 17 Useful Tips to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life – Guiding Tech
• Google Launches Secure Search – Mashable (Use it here: https://www.google.com)
• 25 Crazy Cake Designs – Abduzeedo (graphic design inspiration… really)

Did you miss Google’s Pacman game? Play it here.

Fascinating stuff! Do you think we can fill Sarah’s blogging shoes? Look out for next week’s round-up, now on Mondays.

But one particular area of knowledge has helped me immensely, not only with the work I do here, but also with my side projects – search engine optimisation.

About six months ago the team had a quarterly priority to take on and participate in some P.D - The goal was to learn something new or extend our knowledge in a topic. I picked SEO.

There was an ulterior motive in this selection since my partner and I had just  launched the website for Home Spa, a mobile beauty & day spa business servicing the Brisbane area. Starting from scratch and having no real client base to build from, we really needed to be found in search engines before any business came our way.

Just today I’ve noticed we have improved the rankings for a couple of our targeted keywords which has increased the number of leads, and eventually appointments, we get through the website. I was proud of my ongoing efforts so thought I’d share some of the useful tools I’ve used along the way.

While they won’t necessarily help you get to #1, (I’ll leave that to the experts), these tools are super useful in tracking your progress:

Analytics gives you a plethora of information about how your users are finding your website, what they’re doing there and what they had for breakfast the morning they visited (well almost).  I’ve recently found creating custom reports to be particularly useful. With these we’re able to pull out quality information like which particular keywords are resulting in turning visits into conversions (or appointment requests in our case).

Another Google product – (yes I love them) is Google Webmaster Tools. It gives you a whole lot more specific information on what your website looks like to Google and where you appear in the index. If you can see the world through the Google Bots‘ eyes it will go a long way in helping to understand why certain tweaks to your code & copy help your rankings.

A great tip I got from a  friend over at Reload Media was to check out the SEOMoz.org website. It has a number of free SEO tools you can use along with a heap of quality information on their blog on SEO in general. You have to create an account but a basic account is free.

Rank Tracker is one of such free tools on the site, allowing you to track your ranking in various search engines for particular keywords. It also keeps a history of your searches so you can view your progress over time.

The above screenshot is the rank history for ‘Home Spa’ for the keyword phrase ‘mobile beauty Brisbane’.

The results I found using Rank Tracker:

• When I first checked in November, we were nowhere to be seen and outside the top 50.
• By January 19 we had improved and moved to #8
• This week we’ve hit #4!

What SEO tools do you use?

SEO Brisbane: If you’d like some help optimising your website and getting found on Google, call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

It has helped me to find websites who have used our content without attribution and is a fundamental part of brand management.

It also points me in the direction of discussions relating directly to our field so we can be involved in them. Plus, it’s a set and forget process – that’s how we like it!

So here’s how it works:

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts.

2. Type in the phrases or words you want to monitor – this can be anything, but for better results be specific.

3. You can choose what type (or all types) of media you monitor on the web. This includes video, blogs, news sites and forums, to name a few.

4. Decide how often you want to find out the latest on your keywords. Perhaps you want daily updates on topics of lesser importance to you but as-it-happens updates on your company or number one keyword.

5. Choose how many results you’d like to receive at a time.

6. Enter your email address and go to your inbox to verify the process.

It’s simple, you don’t have to sign up to anything and you can disable it whenever you like. Rather than trawling Google for mentions of a topic or company, it’ll go straight to your inbox.

Good old Google.

SEO Brisbane

 
What did we do before Google?

Via Informavore.

 
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