All posts by Michael

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

When Should You NOT Shoot For First Page Placement?

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One thing that every SEO company in the world will tell you is that first page placement is the gold medal of the SEOlympics. If you can get on the first page, you will get organic search traffic, and that means you’re in business. It doesn’t matter whether you use organic methods, PPC management, or some other hat’s toolbag to get there, if you’re not on the first page, you’re dead in the water.

Right?

The answer is “not always”. There are actually times when you might not want to spend the time and effort it takes to get onto the first page of Google — it might actually not be worth the investment. It sounds like an impossible scenario, but it can happen. That’s not to say that being on the first page is ever a bad thing, mind you — just that you might have other priorities that take precedence.

For example, if your site is built to sell to or otherwise take advantage of a specific community, you might not care that much about Google’s SERPs. If you were the genius that first thought up icanhascheezeburger.com, you knew up front that your audience was 4chan and that was about it — at least until the site went viral and everyone bookmarked it for themselves. If you’re the person who profits from the banner ads on elementscommunity.com, you don’t give a crap about Google because your entire audience consists of people who play elementsthegame.com.

Similarly, if you have a site that serves a specific geographic locale, you might do better to purchase IRL advertisements like billboards, newspaper ads, or local radio spots in order to increase awareness of your website. You’ll still definitely benefit from a first page placement, but you don’t actually NEED it to get by.

Of course, if you’re one of the 99.9% of webmasters who doesn’t have a large community to piggyback off of, you’re going to have to choose a route and aim for the moon, because without a first page placement, you’re going nowhere with extraordinary speed.

Video Marketing, Web Content

Three Ways a Web Presenter Creates Sales

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web presenterProbably there’s a lot of you out there wondering exactly what a web presenter is. The answer is simple and complex at the same time. The technical description of what kinds of scripts and coding are behind a web presenter are long and convoluted — what you need to know is that a web presenter is a moving picture of a real person that talks in real language to the people who land on your website. There are three powerful advantages to using a web presenter.

Stickiness
When your surfer lands on your website, you have all of four seconds to convince them to stay. That’s about how long it takes the average surfer to click away if they don’t immediately like what they see. A web presenter, however, offering a human face and voice, is much harder to click away from, because there’s an immediate psychological effect at play: curiosity. People have an easy time clicking away from text and even pictures because they can easily tell themselves that it’s not worth the effort required to digest the message. But give them the message in a format that mimics someone really talking to them, and suddenly it’s much easier for them to sit back and absorb passively, which means it’s much harder for them to justify clicking away.

Personality
One of the hardest things to do on a website is to stick to acceptable business-level voice and yet somehow get your site to stick out in the minds of the people reading it. Essentially, text obliterates the personality inherent in normal speech. A web presenter can easily correct this flaw in normal web-based communication by giving your words a ‘real’ life. The end result is that the surfer feels more connected with your business as an entity than any amount of text and formatting can ever achieve.

Complete Communications
Science tells us that 90% of communication is nonverbal. It has to do with the expression on our faces, the tone of our voices, the posture of our bodies, and the position we assume within the group. Of those four other categories of communications, a web presenter provides three of them — only position within a group is left out. That means that a web presenter literally gives a surfer a more complete sensation of understanding and a greater degree of comfort than any other form of web-based communications.

Of course, a web presenter must still be complemented by sufficient organic SEO or PPC efforts in order to make sure it gets seen by plenty of visitors, but when it comes to converting surfers that do find your site, they’re the best.