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When I was a young boy I saw the movie "King Kong." It was just an amazing movie for me. Kong was gigantic, he could do
Google is the King Kong of search engines. It controls right around 80% of all Internet searches. According to ComScore, 1n 2011, consumers made 4,717,000,000 searches per day on Google. That accounted for more than 65% of all searches made worldwide. In comparison, the number two search engine, Yahoo, only accounted for 16% of the search market in 2011. Since then, Google has gobbled up even more of the search engine market and it’s getting stronger all the time. Aside from being one of the most profitable companies on the planet (their Q3 earnings in 2012 were in excess of $14 billion), they also own a number of other wildly popular sites. This includes such as Gmail, YouTube, Google+, Blogger, Play, Picasa, Maps, Local and many others. When it comes to succeeding online, you need to make friends with this largest of all online primates.
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| 800 Lb. Gorilla (Photo credit: Chris_Lott) |
In case you haven’t noticed,
Google is one picky eater. He wants what
he wants and how he wants it. And what he mostly wants is to
be fed his own brands. Therefore, when
you think video , think YouTube. When you
think blogs, think Blogger. When you
think social network, think Google+. If
you want the gorilla to like you, then you have to feed him what he likes to
eat on a regular basis.
The Names Remain the Same, but the Game has Changed and Google Makes the Rules
When Google started back in
1998, there were a number of viable search engines that offered the opportunity
to create page 1 placement in as little as 24 hours. Back then, everything you needed to generate
page 1 placement was right on your homepage.
In 98 there were no blogs, no social networks and no YouTube. Bandwidth was so tight that it could take
several minutes for a website to load if it sported a lot of graphics. So all the search engine spiders had to use
to make their ranking decision was contained on-site.
Jump ahead fifteen years and
while many of the names remain the same, the whole game had radically
changed. Nowadays one-page SEO only
accounts for 25% of the ranking criteria
used by search engines. The other 75% is made up of backlinks, blog posts,
social posts, videos, podcasts, etc. In
other words, content is king in today’s World Wide Web.
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Here’s where many people fall
off the wagon. You see, it isn’t enough
just to have blogs, videos and social networks connected to your website. If you want to succeed at search engine marketing,
you need to create content on a regular and continuous basis. With blogs you need to post at least once per
week. When it comes to social networks,
you need to feed the need on a daily basis.
As for videos, the more the merrier.
If You're Going to Play the Internet Marketing Game, Play to Win
There
are only 12 to 14 positions on page one for any search term. If you not
on page one, your not in the game. When it comes to working the
web to win, there are winners and there are losers. Just as in the casinos, the players with the
most chips tend to dominate the game. In
the case of the Internet, this means that big businesses can muscle their way
to the top of most searches. That’s
because they can afford to hire armies of bloggers, and social networkers, and
video producers galore to create content, content and more content.
Most small businesses on the
other hand find it hard to come up with enough chips (meaning content) to even get
into the game. Does that mean that
small business owners should throw in the towel? Hardly. Small business need to work smarter not harder. It mean you need to find a way to level
the playing field or at least tip part of the equation in the your direction so that you can
walk away with more chips than you started with.
The Principle of "Together We Stand, Divided We Fall" Works Here, Too!
The same principles that
built our nation can be used to build your web presence. What I am talking about is people power and
guerilla marketing. Use people power to
create an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality and use
guerilla tactics to hit the big guys where they ain’t.
Having trouble writing a
weekly blog? Either outsource the task
or get a blog buddy. What’s a blog
buddy? That’s someone who will read and
more importantly comment upon your
blogging efforts week in and week out. (It’s what used to be called an editor.) When writing a weekly blog it sometimes gets
hard to see the forest for the trees. A
blog buddy can let you know if you are going off the rail, or are chasing the
wrong story. They can help you clean up
your copy and can even suggest new blog topics.
The catch is that in order to avail yourself of these services you need
to either pay for or trade out these services.
(My CFO is my blog buddy.)
Writ large you can use these
same guerilla tactics to create a peer group that not only produces, but reads,
comments upon and reposts each other’s blogs to the social nets. This is the concept we used to create Club W
Cubed, the Internet blogging, social networking and search engine marketing
club. We recognized the high value that
Google placed on blogs, reviews, recommendations and reposts and created a
mechanism that allows members to efficiently provide these services to one another.
Google Loves Mixed Media
Another thing that Google
loves is called mixed media. This
consists of visual elements such as photos and videos. A properly optimized video can jump from
YouTube to Google page 1 way faster than a properly optimized website. Plus a video is five times as likely to
gener
ate a click as is a website. Video
content doesn’t need to be lengthy or flashy.
A sixty second video that is entertaining and /or informative is all
that it takes to get into the game. You
can either hire the job out or you can shoot your own videos using your laptop,
tablet or smartphone. (Please invest in a tripod if you plan on using your
cellphone, since there is nothing more annoying to a viewer than Shaky-Cam.)
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| Spezify: See-ming Lee / 2009-11-30 / SML Screenshots (Photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML) |
How To Set The Table and Win
When it comes to putting on
the feedbag for the 800 lb gorilla, it doesn’t take bushels baskets of cash to
bring home the bacon. All it takes is
patience, persistence and a bunch of bananas to get you into the game and on
Google’s good side. What
do we mean by a bunch of bananas? Lots of content and comments being posted to
your blog, social nets, and various legitimate back links to your website. This content must useful and it must be consistently posted on a frequent and
regular basis. By the end of a year’s time, you will have a massive amount of content
and connections leading back to your domain. We call this marketing method Content Marketing or Search Engine Marketing. Make sure your bananas have
the name Google on them whenever possible, (bananas like Google+, YouTube,
Picasa, Google Maps, Google Local etc.). If you do, the 800-pound gorilla we call
Google will reward you with higher ranking.
If you like this article, you can find more by typing “Google” in the search box at the top left of this blog. If you found this article useful, share it with your friends, families and co-works. If you have a comment related to this article, leave it in the comment sections below. If you would like a free copy of our book, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century", fill out the form below.
Thanks for sharing your time with me
If you like this article, you can find more by typing “Google” in the search box at the top left of this blog. If you found this article useful, share it with your friends, families and co-works. If you have a comment related to this article, leave it in the comment sections below. If you would like a free copy of our book, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century", fill out the form below.
Thanks for sharing your time with me
Since 1995, Carl Weiss has been helping clients succeed
online. He owns and operates several online marketing businesses, including Working the Web to Win and Jacksonville Video Production.
He also co-hosts the weekly radio show, "Working the Web to Win,"
every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio.com.
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