In 2007 Facebook had over 600 million internal searches per month.  According to Comscore and others Facebook has doubled in unique visits from this time in 2009.   Facebook is clearly a primary destination for many.   How are you taking advantage of people that are searching on Facebook?

YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social sites also have their own search engines.  Yes, some of the content from these sites can be found in the major search engines but do you want to rely on them to expose your content?   What if a visitor never goes to the search engine but rather uses the internal search engines?

In real estate the sales adage is: location, location, location.  This can also be applied to search marketing.  You must be found where people are searching.  You can’t tell some where to search.  All you can do is ensure they find you wherever they search.

Mobile Subscribers:

• Rogers 8.6 million
• Bell Mobility 6.8 million
• Telus 6.6 million

Rogers reports that 35% of its subscribers are using smart phones.  Let’s assume that this is the same percentage across all providers.  That’s 7.7 million smart phone subscribers, in Canada alone.  

When was the last time you tried to view your corporate website on a smart phone?

At the very least you should make it easy for someone to find your contact information when they are using a hand-held device.  Treat your webpages like letterhead, put your phone number on every page.

Last fall Mitch Joel released Six Pixels of Separation, Everyone is connected.  Connect your business to everyone.  This book is a compilation of the process, ideas, and methods that Mitch has been sharing on his blog and during his speaking engagements.  The book covered a lot of material that I’ve already learned and put into practice.  It did do one thing for me and that was get me to focus on some social marketing skills and  techniques to help my advance my own business.

One of the things this new focus allowed me to do was to reach out to an author whom I admire.  I read Made to Stick by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath.  I really like this book.  I follow their blog in my RSS reader and noticed that they moved to a new URL and blog that runs on WordPress.   In looking at the new site I noticed a couple of configuration options that could help make the site more search friendly.  I dropped Dan and email letting him know that updating his permalinks to be human readable and using tags and categories would both help his search engine optimization but also help his users better navigate the site.  A couple of emails later and the Heath Brother’s blog was in much better shape.

So what did taking Mitch’s and Jim’s advice do for me?  For starters, it got me and advance copy of Switch.  That wasn’t my goal but I am looking forward to reading it.  Does this one act immediately translate into more business?  No, but that wasn’t the point.  I wanted to help Dan, that’s all.  I’ve created some goodwill that I might be able to use in the future.  That goodwill translates into value for my personal brand.

It will be interesting to see how this has an impact on user behaviour.  Will Twitter become more relevant or less?  Google also struck a deal with Facebook so we can expect to see more of that content appear in the Google index.

I wasn’t quite sure why I was getting such a warm reception. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe these folks were so enthusiastic because I’d given them a little SEO primer a few years ago, long before they hired me. I did it then because they asked me to and I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to do a favour for this firm. I wasn’t sure anything would ever come of it but as the saying goes nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I also had a phone call today with a potential client. They were grilling me pretty good about what I would do to help them with their site. The call sounded a little like a fishing expedition. Even though I wasn’t sure this company was interested in paying for my services I followed Jim Crocker‘s advice and gave them some free hints.   The advice I gave them was to create content on their site that people would be interested in linking to.  In the link economy you get paid for good content with a back-link.

The notion of earning a back-link is no different than the age old adage:  you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.  I’ve been able to successfully live this adage offline as well as online.  When you are developing content for your site remember to write something people would actually enjoy reading either because it helps them or entertains them.

For a while now I’ve been frustrated by my inability to articulate a specific point related to SEO. The idea I’m having trouble with is figuring out how to get my clients to stop talking about themselves! Instead of talking about their products based on features and benefits I want them to tell stories about what their product did or can do for their clients. Why are stories so important? Because people share stories not features or benefits.

Search Engine Optimization can be broken down in to three rudimentary blocks: site design, site content and back links. I don’t seem to have any trouble getting my clients to redo their design or even getting them to add relevant content to their site. Where I get challenged with my clients is finding a compelling reason why someone should link to my client’s web site. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of simple things I do for my clients to get them quality back links. Once we get passed the low hanging fruit I know we need compelling content but I’ve had trouble in the past articulating exactly what content we need. That changed recently when I realized that my clients needed something worth sharing and what better to share than a story.

We have all read business related stories in the guise of a testimonial. Intuitively we know these are powerful because at one time or another we have been swayed by a testimonial. I’m never more gratified when my client tells me they have “signed up 3 new clients this week as a result of our website”. That testimonial then becomes a story I share with current and potential clients. So now we know we can use testimonials to craft stories but how do we craft a story around a term that we know people are searching for? Stories can take forms other than testimonials. A “how to” page can be a powerful story about a particular feature or benefit.

Here are five story ideas that might lead to stories worth sharing:

1. Reviews – books, conference, competitor, software, hardware, etc.
2. How to guides
3. Lists – top 10, thematic, clients, etc.
4. Case Studies
5. New Hires, everyone loves a success story. Linking to stories about how great it is to work for company can be quite helpful.

I’d like to hear if you have other ideas. I’ll post additional ideas on my blog. Of course I’ll also link to the companies that provide the ideas.

UPDATE

I received this from one of the recipients of my newsletter.

“We met on a flight from Ottawa to Toronto over a year ago and our conversation that day lead us to focus our business plans on what we do best, exposing a long tail market for job opportunities. A rather timely topic it seems.” Dave Forster, Careeraim

I suppose the stories I told him on the plane were enough to get him thinking about his business.

In 1447 a new technology was introduced that revolutionized reading and the dissemination of information, it was called the printing press. Suddenly books could be printed quickly and cheaply. It was the beginning of the era of mass produced books.

In 1999 a new technology was introduced that revolutionized access to music and dissemination of information, it was called Napster. Napster ushered in the era of peer-to-peer file sharing. The music industry was slow to accept this technology and at first tried to kill it. They failed. P2P is hear to stay and in fact is distribution method of choice for music. Ignoring P2P as a distribution model did not help the music industries profits but in fact hurt them!

In 2001 Apple unveiled iTunes and the music industry finally saw the light. iTunes sales have continued to rise since the launch. In addition to reducing the friction associated with online music distribution Apple coincidentally reinforced the power of the Long Tail by making hundreds of thousands of songs available. They suddenly made it possible to monetize the back catalogue of many record companies.

And what does all this have to do with book publishing? Changes to the distribution model. Book publishers have not embraced online delivery of their content. As a result fewer books are sold than could possibly be sold. While speaking at Google’s Unbound event Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, informed an audience of several hundred publishers that the average book sells 500 copies per year, “a depressing statistic” that places over a third of books squarely in the long tail.

I love books, I love to read. The problem with books is that you don’t know what you are getting until it is too late. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do a book only search on a subject and then get excerpts from the book? This would allow you to find the best book for your needs not just the only book your library or bookstore has! In fact if you find the right book then you can go to your favourite library or book store and request it.

It is unfortunate that many book publishers do not see online access to their content as beneficial. The overwhelming popularity of sites like Youtube and iTunes is a clear indication that digital distribution is the way of the future. Publishers have two choices: embrace this new model or reject it. My bet is the publishers that embrace online distribution are the publishers we’ll be hearing from in ten or twenty years.