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Think Like Google

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In Jeff Jarvis’ 2009 book, “What Would Google Do?”, he presents the case that companies like Google are not merely creating a new way to use the Internet, but instead are revolutionizing how businesses think and work rocking many industries to their very core. My wife and I walked into Picture People in order to take some photos of my wife’s family; we had a great time during the photo shoot. The camera lady was very energetic and though she earned only minimum wage, they had taken the time to train her and teach her how to do her job well. Then came time for us to select the pictures, we fell in love with all of them. When we looked over the prices, I realized we could not buy a single picture for less than twenty dollars. I explained to the young camerawoman that she did not have to print out the half dozen large photos and place them in frames, for we would be buying only a few. Then she told me the craziest thing; she said that her company policy was to print everything out even if I was not planning to buy it. The young lady would be fired if she did not print and setup the frames, each costing around $200. I even thought if the image is that expensive to buy, then why is it so cheap for Picture People to print it and then throw it away if I do not buy it. This simple policy of waste and sales is the nature of our current corporate culture, one that corporations believe is the best strategy to trick or convince their customers into buying their products and services. Google differs from most other corporations in that it does not adopt this business model.

Inefficiency and mass thinking is like a cancer that is eating its way through modern businesses; many small companies as well as Fortune 500 enterprises operate no differently than the big government bureaucracies which they so adamantly rally against. Businesses do and can still make money the old way, but if they are to survive in the next ten, fifteen or twenty years, they must adapt to a different way of thinking. If they do not do so, companies run the risk of having their businesses cannibalized from the ground up by smarter, faster and more open competitors. Google’s way of doing business has changed the rules and allowed new and old corporations to cannibalize themselves and revolutionize their way of thinking for the better.

The first of many issues plaguing corporate culture is Customer Service. The relationship between customer and company has changed for the worst over the last few decades and we seem to think of it as progress. Small business imitate large corporations in everything they do including how they handle customer service because they believe that it will bring them similar levels of success. Whether small or large, companies cannot afford to put a customer on hold for long periods of time no matter how much they continue to tell them that “your call is important to us!” As the internet has shown, people are looking to interact with these companies, to tell them what they want from those companies; the question is are they ready to listen to their customers? Give the customer control of your product or service, and they will use it for the better to help you create value in your company. If one listens to the users and cherishes their ideas, even the bad ones one will succeed.

The advantages to giving control is that the worst customer can become a best friend. Dell Computers ran into some problems a while back when they where first known as having the best customer service in the industry. Yet when random blogs began to pop up chanting the atrocities of Dell’s Customer service department the company ignored it, thinking like many do in old media circles that if peope do not give it credence it will just go away. Yet the internet has freed the customer to speak out against a large organization and for everyone to have a shared discussion of any company together online. The more the company ignored it, the worse the problem became, until finally, when users did a search for Dell on Google, a popular site called “Dell Sucks” became number two on the search results. With the advent of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, companies are scrambling to learn how to use them to the most advantage. Dell immediately told their customer service staff to look on every page and every blog for problems and ordered them to start answering customer concerns. Many companies would claim that they do not have the man power to do such searches and answer every customer problem online. However if they tried, they would recognize that it is possible to do so. Dell’s customers were already having a conversation about them; it was up to Dell if they wanted to join that conversation.

The second advantage is that the best customer is now the best partner. The best example of this is Google’s Gmail service; they could have launched it out like so many other Email providers like Yahoo or Hotmail, but they kept it in Beta (testing version) for nearly five years before they even offered it as a product. They handed control of the service over to their users for free and got so much feedback that it is now one of the most powerful webmail clients used by enterprises world wide. The critics would say that it is great if one is offering a free product to people, but what does one do when people have to charge their customers. Salesforce.com charges their business customers for access to a platform they built and they themselves use. Their business is Customer Resource Management and they do it well, if there is something that their customers need, they immediately implement it and offer that feature to all their other customers without a problem. They do this by creating an internal network for their customers to communicate with each other and ultimately do business amongst themselves.

In the previous case we saw with Picture People, I was a loyal customer, I loved their product and their service, but when I told them not to print all those photos, they did not listen to me because they felt they knew better. Picture People’s business belief is that if they force their employees to do it, the customer will fall in love with it and want to take it regardless of the price. Not to say that some do not but it is a waste and probably not very profitable. Plus the picture I take there is Copyrighted so that means I cannot make my own copies of a picture of myself. Why cannot I take this picture and post it on Facebook or Twitter? What makes them think that I am going to come back to them for reprints if it costs me a fortune to do so and what gives them the gall to make me feel like a criminal for doing it myself. If Picture people made the customer a partner and allowed them to post their pictures for the world to see, it may gain more customers. My love for their product should be their greatest asset, not their chance to nickel and dime me for every cent. In a world with so much choice, customers will no longer be content with a business’ half hearted attempts at customer service; one must go above and beyond for their business.

The second solution is that business needs to look at is the way it views the new economy. Small is the new big. Large corporations with hundreds of employees is too costly when one factors in Union Worker Costs and employment benefits. A company must manage abundance and not scarcity. When Adams wrote the book Wealth of Nations he explained that scarcity raises prices and thus is what they need as a business man to look for. Airplanes have a limited number of seats so they can charge more for those seats, Theaters have a limit of people that they can have in one movie so they charge more based on the number of people who want to see a film. In a world where a start up company can compete with a Fortune 500 in a level playing field, it pays for a company to stay small both for their clients and their share holders. Businesses need to think distributed in that they must share and network with others and not hoard for themselves. Instead of wanting the customer to come to the business, go to the customer. The news paper should look for its local bloggers, invite them to write on their print paper. Websites in exchange would promote the newspaper’s own website and content. Many newsmen will say that this cannot be done, that their profit margins will be too low to support the paper, the solution is to gut the paper. It is better that they canabalize their own business and not allow a competitor to do so. They should not see Bloggers as a threat but instead view them as a valid cheap resource for news stories that senior news men can view and edit if necessary. The news papers can also turn over their ad services to Google allowing it to do find their advertisers for them so that they can focus on what they do best, find the news. The more a business focuses on its area of expertise, the more Google will search them on that content and make them the experts on the subject.

The first advantage of new economy is the ability to rid corporations of the inefficiencies in business and focus only on what will make the business profit. In the case of Picture People, their inability to be efficient will probably be their downfall, a better and cheaper photo place will do a better job and take them down much like they took down Olen Mills. Google’s view is that one needs to manage abundance of information and not control scarcity of what the customer does not know, instead of linking to select websites with guarded information, Google search is built to get better as they get more sites on the internet in order to be able to search them and give their user a more concise answer to the question. Nothing that is done at Google can be done without data, there are no hunches at the board room. No single executives pics the product because they think it is a good idea. If an employee has an idea, they must come to the boss with hard data to back up that idea. If they want to make a change to a site, they run tests of different designs and see which customers found easier to navigate. If they want to create a new product they do Beta runs for customers to give them feedback that then they can present to the CEO. If one cannot come to the boardroom without the data to back up everything they want to do then they do not get to present it. If one does then the board votes on what they feel based on the data shows the most promise. Many will say that this is an absurd way to do business, that employees should be doing their jobs and not collecting random amounts of meaningless data on something as random as a website change, yet Google has proven itself a leader in innovation at every turn because of this method. They manage their abundance by allowing their customers and users to get more and more data back to them so that they can then create a better product.

The second advantages businesses must remember is that we now live in the gift economy, free as a business model. Everyone of Google’s products is free in some way shape or form, they make their money off of advertisements that are geared towards the niche needs of their users. So the better Google gets at offering ads to niche markets, the more money Google gets from it is advertisers. Walmart has destroyed man small businesses who sold the same product as they did and at a much more expensive price, they sell mainly to mass market needs and can control their prices in order to wipe out the competition. Any company wishing to compete against the Walmart’s of the future must think Niche, they must offer products that one cannot find at the mega stores thus creating a niche economy that they lead and own. The mass market is dead, the economy of niches is the new paradigm. A boot maker in Texas uses Google to sell his $5000 boots online, he only sells to a select set of customers that find him based on his niche market and with the help of Google sells hundreds of these per month. This niche product will not be found on Walmart shelves any time soon, but ask the boot maker if he is complaining? Remember Picture People, their absurd prices for their photos prompted me to realize that if they changed their business model they could increase their customers and grow their value. Instead of Copy-writing the photos they take, offer them for free online. Charge a hosting fee after the pictures have been taken that allows their customers to go online and pull the pictures from. They know their customers will want to go to Walmart or other Photo sites to print their pictures so offer them that as a service. Give them the ability to purchase through Walmart and make a few cents on the dollar in the long run. Allow the customer to post the pictures on their Facebook or Flickr accounts so that they can share it with everyone and thus promoting the business more. Do not hold the customers to one’s standards but instead allow them to create their own and make money in the process.

Most businesses would look at this and think it is absurd, “I sell a product” the say “not a service or a website,” Yet one does not always to see free as something business offers their customers but it can also be a means to learn from them as well as their employees. Google offers a 20% free project for their workers, this means that during an 8 hour day, employees are allowed one and a half hours to work on their dream project or innovation. Google benefits from this time because almost all of the projects invented during this 20% become full time Google products later on. Everything from Google Maps to Gmail was once someone’s 20% and is the lifeline of Google’s innovation. This also creates employee love for their work and most will spend their free unpaid time working on the project in an attempt to get it out there. Google gets this kind of work almost for free because it gives rather than takes from their employees and customers the ability to work on their dream projects. This is the new Google economy that every business must understand, the ability for businesses to stop marketing to the mass and create products that will still be found and sold in a large way but can be geared at a certain audience with specific tastes and loves.

Ultimately there are many more things that one can do to make their business more like Google, but the key is openness and throwing off the previous notions of success in mass in exchange for customer loyalty and brand honesty. If a business gives their customers control of the product, they will make it their own and love it, the final decision is still in the company’s hand but they can ensure success by welcoming the customer into the conversation more. Businesses need to remember that their customer does not have to come to them to have a controlled discussion of their products or services, the business must go to the customer by listening to their feedback and going where they are. The customers are already having a conversation about the product, the business just needs to find out where that discussion is going on and join in on that network. They also need to create a platform for the customer to work with and build on, this creates customer loyalty and brand respect. Finally a business must join the new economy by not over charing their customers for what only they can provide but instead offering them a free or low cost solution where the customer can do what they want and the business can manage the abundance from it. Using free as a business model is important whether one is implementing a free time for their employees to innovate or are offering a free service to the customer in exchange for data, customers and employees can go somewhere else for what one has to offer them, give them a good enough reason to stay. Google’s way of doing business has and will revolutionize every industry on the planet. With the ability to instantly gather and sort information steadily growing and getting better, we will soon not be able to run our businesses without these principles managing everything we do.

Boxee vs Google TV

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For those of you who don’t know what Boxee is, think of it as easy to use software that you put on your TV to access your movies, pictures, music and TV shows both on your computer and on the internet. Boxee was originally a fork of an open source program called XBMC that gave you a gorgeous interactive experience on your television to what your content on. Boxee took XBMC one step further by creating not just a more gorgeous interface and easy to understand controls but they synced their software with the Internet Movie Database or IMDb that catalogs television and movie information online so that when Boxee looks at your hard drive or what you tell it to look for, it also shows you where that information is available on sites such as Hulu and other television networks like USA, Fox, CBS etc.

Eventually they also added a social part of their programs which allowed you to watch YouTube videos that your friends posted on Twitter or Facebook and allows you to share whether you liked the movie, tv show or song you’re listening to for all your friends to check out as well. Yet the most impressive part of Boxee was their App development platform. With this feature the program took on a life of it’s own as companies like Pandora and Last.fm created applications to stream music into your tv from their website much like you can do through your browser or phone as well as it gave a way for internet TV companies like Revision3, TWIT.TV, Crank.com, YouTube and others including most recently Mevio to immediately give you a easy to use menu to watch their programming as well as post their live streams. CNN and MLB also created apps for Boxee and there is a growing number of developers looking to use Boxee as an open way to bring the web’s wealth of content onto your TV.

Now in lies the problem, with the launch of Google TV the guys at Google Labs have taken what Boxee has been able to accomplish one step further. Using a variation of the Android Platform which most people know for it’s implemention in famous phones like the Droid or Evo smart phones, they have created a way to search for content online that is very similar if not better than Boxee’s. The problem with Google TV is it’s difficulty of use, Boxee has the experience from XBMC and years of user testing to work from and thus they have a much simpler and better user interface for even the most novice of people to operate. Google’s complicated program not to mention it’s 45 minute install time makes it bloated and a bit user unfriendly for something as ubiqutous as a TV. Boxee has an opportunity here to really take a large chunk of this market from Google before they get better, it will take some time before Google learns many of the lessons that Boxee has had to learn and considering Google’s large amounts of capital and desire to enter this market Boxee does not have much time before a company like Google takes over the market like they did in so many other aspects. So how does Boxee do it?

Well currently they are following Google’s steps in allowing a third party vendor to creat a “Boxee Box” produced by D-Link that is pretty and costs around $200 for the consumer to purchase. Google TV can only be currently found on Logitec Revue boxes as well as a Sony special TV but Google has promised to Open Source the software hopefully in 2011. This is the trend that most people see the industry going in and for the most part can have some real success for both companies, so why do I feel this is the wrong move for Boxee? As someone who uses their product religiously, having given up cable almost 2 years ago first for XBMC and now an avid Boxee fan I see trouble in the future of the Company if Boxee does not plan a gorilla campaign against what is essentially a major threat to their survival as a platform. Currently Boxee offers their source code freely for anyone that wants to develop for it, they also have a version of it’s program that people can download for Windows, Ubuntu Linux and the Mac and Apple TV system.

Many Boxee users run the software on their Windows or Mac desktops and or laptops but there is an underside of advanced users that are using the program straight from Linux and have dedicated “computers” which run only Boxee for their TV’s in every bedroom. For those of us that do this because we want the Boxee Box experience without paying the $200 price tag for a product that we can’t really mess with internally ourselves is very frustrating. We do things like increase the buffer rates for flash video and or have Boxee start up as soon as the OS starts up for a seemless transition, much of which would be difficult for the average person to do. Boxee needs to fix this problem by creating an OEM disk or basically turn Boxee into it’s own Linux Based operating system for both x86 and x64 based computers.

There is a precedence for this with the Mythbuntu operating system which basically turns your computer into a Media center but it’s impossibly hard to properly set up and has way more features than necessary. If another 3rd Party developer wanted to create this it would be relatively easy but the reason why I think this should be something that Boxee is doing is because it would give them better control over the platform and would also open the gates wide open for massive implementation into this market. A single easy install disk or ISO would allow even the most novice of users to take an old computer they no longer use and install BoxeeLinux overtop of it so that it’s a dedicated Boxee Box for their TV’s. It would simplify the process for Manufacturer’s wanting to develop their own Boxee Boxes and would saturate the market with machines based on the Boxee platform. This is important because unlike a cell phone in the example of the Android platform, Boxee can be easily installed on almost any computer and linux which would have to be the main kernel it would run off of is just as versitle.

OEM’s could build entire computers from old $20 dollar machines and sell them for cheap creating a market that Boxee still has control over since in order to use it you still have to create an Account at Boxee.tv. I understand Boxee’s apprehension in opening the flood gates for people to do buy sub standard Boxee machines but the ideal here is to take over the market and create demand for their service before Google does when it open sources it’s Android based software. Boxee has the benefit that it’s easy to use and even easier to implement so the faster they do this the sooner we the consumer can really start promoting their product to our friends and family without the expensive cost making them buy a Box. If Boxee doesn’t do this then Google eventually will and eventually Google TV will be as easy if not easier than Boxee and we will all forget about the company that changed TV for all of us.

The Open Textbooks

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The Open Business Show is a new Podcast that takes a twist on Business Talk. Every week we will find a different business or industry and take it apart in order to show how it can be changed to thrive and survive in this new economy. Using the book by Jeff Jarvis called “What Would Google Do?” as our standard, we will look at different companies currently existing and go over what you could do if you are trying to compete with the big guys. This week we analyze how the textbook industry makes it’s money and figure out how one can make textbooks and education more open.
What is the Current Market Analysis? Textbooks are expensive and textbook companies as well as schools and colleges make a killing in selling physical textbooks to students. They use tactics like yearly additions in order to bolster sales and loose money due to a large behind the scenes textbook resale market.

What is the Current Market Problem? It’s hard for college students to afford textbooks and even harder for highschools and middle schools to purchase them and keep up with the latest edition. Textbook info is usually outdated and no one legitimate is willing to canabalize their own pofits in order to fix it. With textbook prices ranging between 50 to 200 dollars, and the manufacturing cost only being around 5 to 15 dollars, you can see why they like those kind of profit margins.

What is the Current Market Solutions? The market is excited about the possibility of things like the iPad being the alternative and have already started building applications for both iOS and Android devices in an attempt to enter this market. This solution is near sighted in that both the cost of these devices will take years to address and most textbook manufacturers still wants the school or consumer to pay the same amount of money that they pay now for a textbook but as a digital product.

What is the Industry Core Business? If you remove the book printing side of making text books which many text book companies still think is their core business but is usually outsourced to a third party anyway and you remove the overwhelming price placed on a textbook that we all know is not sustainable over the long haul with more and more schools looking for a cheaper alternative and more and more students wanting a lower price, what exactly does a textbook company do anyway? They simply provide a learning tool for schools to use when they come up with their curriculum and with the advent of the internet much of this data can be found online anyway and much of it is either more up to date online than in a printed textbook as well as cheaper to get at.

What is the Industry Myths? The industry and the schools that support that industry think that the reason for buying a textbook over getting the same information online is because of peer review, they are assured mostly by the textbook companies that these issues have only the information that has been researched and agreed upon by the experts in the industry the book covers. Yet in many cases because of this need to rush a new edition to market, it’s pretty common that books come out with mistakes and in an attempt to get a totally new addition out many companies release information that has to be removed later on due to inacuracy. As many who buy and sell textbooks know, it’s a completely inefficient business practice but because of the high profit margins very few are interested in changing it.

What is the Industry Cannibalization? When you think of a textbook company as providing learning tools for schools and students to base their curriculum around, then you need to really consider what parts of your business still needs to be there and which are worth canibalizing in order to grow the business further. In an industry that is famous for backroom dealings and special gifts granted to school boards and university presidents for special consideration when their organization is ready to make a large order or assign a certain book to a certain class, it’s hard to suggest that textbook companies get out of the book industry all together and focus their efforts in the information business but this is what is needed.

What is the Industry Competition? With groups like the Open Textbook Consortium (http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/) and OpenTextbook.org who provide valuable free textbook information, it’s hard to believe that a textbook company can exist just in information alone. Many attack sites like Wikipedia and other user generated content as sub par and thus not fit for scholarly or university consumption. The point to make here is that someone who wants to enter this industry and upset the establishment has to look at it both from a utilitarian point of view as well as a political one. Much like the legs of a tripod, one can enter this industry strong and compete but first they must consider which legs to take down before removing the giant from it’s pedestal.

How to make it an Open Business? I think an Open Textbook company will embrace these initiatives like the Consortium and others as a source of information but will also provide their own internal network of data as an addon bonus to doing business with them. This bonus could include automatically updating schools and students with updated versions of their product when done in an electronic format or even providing free online tools as many already do to purchasers that compliment the purchase. These tools can include giving schools an online system for teachers to give their students homework if they choose that can be done electronically or providing teachers with fun in class ideas that don’t necessarily come with the book in the cases of classes that are considered boring like science and math allowing teachers to choose how they wish to use your textbooks verses just forcing them to follow your schedule. Not numbering your texts into chapters but instead using titles also helps teachers better plan their students reading requirements choosing to remove entire chapters from your work if they feel it’s unecessary for their class.

Automation is also key, textbook authors are also a large reason why the books are so expensive at times as companies try to hire the smartest and most well versed experts in the field and this comes at a hefty cost per book. Focusing on a system of shared information verses a single textbook author writing each and everybook may not be the most prefered method of right now but it’s where this industry needs to eventually get to in order to keep up with the change of pace in information. Whether that’s a system that automatically turns the information provided by these systems into a readable PDF that can later be printed or reproduced electronically without the need of an editor working with each page and wasting time making sure the “book” looks right is one thing.

Another important point is making sure that their focus is more on the interactive rather than the physical so in many ways the textbook company might sell the school cheap ebooks like the Ectaco Jetbook http://www.jetbook.net/ or something more akin to a tablet pc like the iPad or an Android based tablet for wealthier institutions with all the textbooks they need alread in them or as well as have the ability to sell these to students who may want to pay more for an iPad than to get the free cheap ebook from his school. What’s important to understand here is that you are selling a much needed service to a school that allows them to focus less on the textbooks themselves and more on the material in them. Automatic updates allow of content allow schools to make changes themselves if they wish to the content or request the company make the changes to future editions more quickly than the physical hardbooks of today.

Also price point becomes the biggest issue, just like in any other digital good like music or movies, books that essential start and are sold electronically need to be at a low enough price point that prevents piracy and allows universities and grade schools to be able to look at it and see it as affordable. Dropping your price too low may at first may prevent people from wanting to do business with you because they think your product is too cheap but your ultimate goal should be to reduce your price to the lowest possible point short of loosing money all the while allowing for the largest distribution possible giving you full integration into most schools and universities as possible. You ultimately don’t want to be the biggest textbook seller, you want to be the most available and influential source of information in an industry schools that prides itself in reputation and saturation.

Now you still want to provide physical books for those that prefer them but by creating an automated system for publishing PDF documents from the information that is always updated means that you can have a third party publisher like Lulu.com and others who focus on as needed publishing and since this is not your core business anymore you shouldn’t worry to much about the profits you are making from this side of the business. This is merely an extension to the service you provide for schools and allows them to transition from the old school world of printing books to the future of electronic book readers and tablets. Thinking distributed is one of the most important things to do in an industry where most of the companies try to do everything in house.

Finally making your textbook business more open means allowing for an openness of how you do business and letting both your customers and those who use your products know that you are doing your best to provide them the most modern system available while still ensuring them that they are taking the best path necessary to grow their school and their student’s learning experience. You need to show them that you will be there for the long haul so that they feel they can invest in your company since schools and universities are some of the oldest organizations in the country. In the end this is a sensitive subject as we are talking about the destruction of an entire industry that is so vital to our infrastructure, but only when new ideas are formed and invested into businesses that work can industries be changed for the better. Let me know if you are in the textbook industry and like or plan to implement any of these ideas or if you are against them, either way we want to hear back from you.

Tech and the Family

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There is a long history in the technology world of entrepreneurs and business men with strong family ties doing great things in this business. As I’m getting ready to be a father for the first time this month with our new son, I can’t help but think of how important family is in the decisions I make and the direction I take. Whether it’s Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, the Waz (for those who know who he is) or Jeff Bezos from Amazon who started their companies from their house garage or new examples like Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook who had to borrow money from his parents in order to keep his servers running, there is a long history of achievements in technology that simply could not have happened without a strong family support.

These men and in many cases women could not have started their companies or firms, could not have taken the time they needed to focus on making these wonderful tools we have today long before they had investors or employees without both the financial and emotional support of their spouses, parents and even kids.

I’m blessed to have a great family that is behind me while I go to school and try to work around the clock. I think my biggest motivation has been my wife and my son whom I know both depend on me making good choices both about how I spend my time as well as the kind of risks I’m willing to or not going to take in this business. I am small potatoes in this industry but I can’t help but look at the example of firms and businesses that have come before me and admire just how large the role family played in their eventual success. Larry and Sergey when they created Google had been pushed by their parents since kids to work on computers and to have a love for them thus had the skill sets and knowledge at such a young age to do some powerful things.

Those of us under 30 see our idealism as a strength and don’t necessarily equate it to a weakness though others that are older may either support us for our ideas or reject them depending on their life experiences. I’ve noticed when I talk about the things that I’m working on or hope to eventually get involved with, the guys that usually get excited are the ones that did it themselves while those who played it safe or whom had difficulties throughout tended to question everything but I see both as a positive influence for all of us to learn from

In the end I think that family helps those of us in the industry to accept responsability and have better focus on what we create. We know that our time to work on projects is limited and that if we want our family to be happy we will try to be as efficient as possible in how we spend our time so that they don’t suffer for our tech passion. I don’t think I would be as dedicated or focused to my ideas now as I would be if I weren’t married. I like how Gary Vaynerchuk said it, “Family is the first rule in business and without them you can’t do anything right…”, I paraphrased ofcourse but you get the idea. As a kid my dad got me involved in technology and I fell in love with it right away, I just hope I can pass that on to my son or daughter and that they love this science as much as I do.

Common Sense SEO Part 5: Analysis

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The final part of proper SEO is doing an Analysis of your own site compared to others. Check out how you compare to other similar websites. You need to monitor your traffic rank as well and see if your optimizations and new content are showing benefits. You will be able to draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business. There are hundreds of sites that will review your site’s data for you such as Grader.com or Alexa.com. Google Analytics also helps you but you can’t really use it to check out your competition. The easiest way to find out who your competitor is would be by searching Google for the keyword you want and finding the guy that’s at the top of the page. Then do a search on one of the sites I talked about and see where they are ranked and how many inbound links as well as indexed pages they have on Google. This will give you an idea of what to shoot for in the long run and are the most important part of your analysis strategy.

If you are trying to enter a market and want to see if a specific keyword can be achieved, you can again use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to either search for specific key words and see how many people search for them both Globally and Locally (US) every month. Another important thing to look at in this tool is the ability to see trends, the small green blocks on the right hand corner when you search will tell you if the search trend is increasing per month or decreasing over time. You can click on the key word to pull it up on Google or the best part is search using your website domain name and see what key words your website come up in to try and see if you need to work on increasing your rankings with a keyword or if you are not even coming up on a key word you’ve been trying for. Try putting your competitors website and see where they fit and whether or not you need to start changing some of your content to compete properly with them.

Another way to see if a keyword is worth going after is by checking out the end of a Google search query. When you search for a keyword, at the top of the address bar next to the end of the Google address place the following characters exactly “&start=990″. This will then pull up your Google search in reverse order and give you the very tail end of your Google search. At the very bottom you will receive a very interesting statement that goes much like this, “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 656 already displayed.” Your number could vary greatly during your search but this number represents the number of sites Google is willing to catalog for a specific key word. The lower the number the better chances you have if you write good content of getting into the top rankings, the larger your number is the less likely you will be able to reach the top. A good point of reference is to avoid key words with more than 700 cached sites. Anything below that is easy to work with and you should definitely go after that key word by creating relevant content on your site.

The biggest difference in marketing your website is that you can’t simply throw money at it, well you can if you advertise on Google but you can’t just depend on ads like you can in regular marketing. You need to think differently about your site and your marketing strategy by creating systems that will help you solidify a more permanent ranking on Google that isn’t inflated by ad money. Using Social Media also helps you do that because more people will find the content you are creating interesting and hopefully they will create back links or inbound links to increase your position. The more content you create on your sites (aka more posts and pages) the more Google will have to catalog and the higher in ranking you will go.

The goal is to have at a minimum 100 search worthy items to include pages or posts on any topic or subject that has to do with what your website is about at least. This is why many businesses try to focus on just one site that has all of their products and services verses many sites that have many products and services but the benefit of having multiple sites is that they can link to one another and create a network that Google considers in numbering your back links. If you don’t have time to write out blog posts, news articles, press releases, recipes, product reviews or any number of content you plan on having on your site then you can hire an intern who’s only job is to take the day to day information they are seeing in the office or in your field and blog about them online creating an article a day or more depending on how fast you want your content up.

The beauty of systems like WordPress is that you can set yourself up as editor to make sure you review everything that goes through if that is a major concern in your business. Another great and cheap tool are sites like Fiverr.com where people post things they are willing to do for $5 dollars. Their social media section is a treasure trove of opportunities ranging from having someone write one or two articles for you or having them create back links for you. The negative side of this of course is that you have to check up and make sure they did it otherwise you are wasting your money but whether it’s an intern, an employee or yourself who does it, once the content is up it stays up forever and using the social media automated posting tools I spoke about earlier there isn’t much more that you have to do with those posts.

Use every opportunity you can to create content for your websites, as I am writing these 5 things for common sense SEO, I am also posting them on my site as individual blog posts each, I will also be putting them into a book to give away for free on my website and may print them out on brochures to give to clients. I am using an opportunity that I have to explain these facts to you as also a means to build up my site content and thus a means of getting more Google Juice. If you are sending out an email explaining some part of your business, put that information on your site. If you get to speak in public, try to record it and post it on your site for people to watch your speeches. Some companies post daily on their blogs if not hourly when they are hosting events or at an event in order to generate content that can be searched later. This is what much of the tech industry does and quite successfully may I add to increase their common sense SEO.

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Common Sense SEO Part 3: Promotion & Social Media

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Now that you are producing remarkable content and optimizing it for search engines and other channels, you are ready to start promoting your content. There are many ways to promote a website but only a few are cheap. The reason why Google makes as much money as it does is because it takes advertising and creates a system where by you don’t have to pay for ads that you don’t use. The pay per clicks way of doing web ads has been around for over a decade but only Google mixing it with their heavy traffic on their website and providing it to other sites with a system that reads the site’s content and gives you the best ads compared could really master internet advertising. I know a lot of people that use this method of promoting their sites and it’s fine if you have the money but can get expensive. This system is usually great for online retailers trying to sell a product or service businesses trying to sell directly to someone in need of their services. Google keywords work in an auction system so basically the more popular the keywords are the more expensive they will be to purchase for ad space. Everybody knows this but what most people don’t know are the downfalls of this sort of advertising, the first being that you can’t control who clicks on your ads.

In the past the problem was related to location, so if you had an ad for a pizza place in New York, you could use up your ad revenue having people who couldn’t even order from you clicking and using up your ad money. Since then Google has fixed this with hyper local which allows you to choose whether or not you want people in your area or throughout the country or even the world to see your ads. You can even advertising in specific areas while not advertising in others much like you can with regular local TV or Radio ads. The second downfall is that ads don’t create permanence online, that means that if you have a ton of traffic coming to your site from ads, as soon as your ad money runs out so does the traffic. Yes you can get a bit of a bump in your Google rankings if you get a flood of visitors but overtime that rating will go down as you stop getting new visitors to your site. This is why using other methods to increase traffic like creating inbound or back links to your site and building content are so much more vital than paying for ads because it’s a more permanent solution and will keep your site’s popularity and thus rankings up in the long run. In short the ad system is great if you have a product you want to sell quickly and directly to the public but usually business to business companies don’t do well with ads since people click thinking they will be able to purchase or buy something but end up finding that they can’t buy directly and the ad was wasted.

The second way of promoting your site online is through social media, this will also only work if you have a product or service worth promoting to the general public. There are different social media platforms for different target markets, you’re not going to market your enterprise services or business to business on MySpace but LinkedIn might be your mecca for promoting your business using social media. A company that sells a product or service to teenagers may want to use MySpace and Facebook and may skip LinkedIn all together. Either way there is one social media site that crosses all those boundaries and that is Twitter. There is way to much hype associated with Twitter and way to many businesses put all their efforts in learning everything they can about it as if it’s going to help them increase sales and that is just not the case. Social Media can only do two things for your business and I’ve listed them below so you have an idea of why it is important but you shouldn’t believe all the hype behind it.

First Twitter and other sites help you create back links, If you have a site that produces recipes or a company that has regular products or services that are launched it helps you pass that information on to people who are more likely to post links to it somewhere of value like their websites or forums and create back or inbound links for your website. The is really the only reason why a company should absolutely have a Facebook or Twitter account at least. It also ties into having more content on your site, the more stuff you have on your site to work with the more likely someone will repost or re-tweet it on theirs and you get Google juice in the process. This is why you see every large company always giving out their Twitter and Facebook profiles on commercials and in person asking people to follow them. They understand the likely possibility that even if one in 100 people following them reposts their blog article or message on their blogs or websites, than that create a back link that will permanently increase their business ranking at a quarter of the cost. The more followers you have, the more times this may occur which is why it’s called cheap advertising. A big problem small businesses have is that they don’t have the man power to stay on top of these things or post their blogs on these sites. Services like Ping.fm are perfect for businesses wanting to use social media to reach out to people who can possibly create back links for them, ping allows for instant submission of content to more than 50 different social media websites without you or your employees from having to go on and log into each of them and post your article, blog post, recipe etc…

The beauty of using a content management system like WordPress is that they have plugins capable of automatically posting to services like Ping the minute you Publish a blog post and thus it saves you from even having to worry about keeping up with Social Media. There is one plugin which I enjoy the most that takes your old posts and will send them to Twitter at a random interval of your choosing so that your content is always being redistributed online once a week, a day or even a minute if you have enough website content to not have to repeat yourself and it saves you hundreds of dollars from having to hire someone who would do that for you in the old days. I’m in the process of working on one that does the same random interval routine but for Ping.fm so that I can reach all 50 social media platforms with random articles from my site regularly. Then all you really have to do is make sure that people are adding you on Facebook, following you on Twitter and friending you on LinkedIn either through your regular advertising, product packaging or even on your website and you have an automatic pipeline to their attention.

The second thing Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and all these platforms are good for is customer service, If you promote your customers to post on their twitter accounts with a hashtag # and your company or product name (aka #myProduct) any time they have a problem or a question with your product or service. Then you can see instant on demand feedback that people are having and solving their problems on the spot if it is an important one will give you an edge that few businesses actually understand. There are both plugins and services which will email you every time someone hash tags or just types in your company name or product name so that your customer service rep has up to the minute information of issues if they come up. Not all businesses see the importance of this and this is not useful for all businesses. But some like Continental Airlines and Dell have embraced this as a means of getting to the heart of solving a problem without tying up expensive customer service lines with a representative and are now using it with those same customers to test out products and get honest feedback without having to pay for costly focus group. Again what it all comes down to is finding ways to create more and more inbound or back links in order to improve your site’s importance on any number of subjects and getting more eyeballs on your products and services. One of the reasons for Jeff Bezos decision to move Amazon away from just books and into any product online was his desire to see more of his products listed on search engines like Google and when they added a reviews system, it was really as a way to give users a means to create for them more content that was valuable and searchable. Next I’ll discuss the topic of Conversion or getting your customers to buy and stay or come back to your site again and again.

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Common Sense SEO Part 2: Optimization

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Optimizing your website’s content is a key step, however, to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web. In essence, this section is about maximizing your ROC – return on content. Using tools like WordPress is great because it streamlines your site’s overall code and does a lot of the optimizing for you. Everyone involved with SEO always talks about focusing on your meta keywords, that would have been valuable a year or two ago but since then Google has focused less on that and more on page titles and descriptions. Make sure that your page title isn’t just your company name or About Us. Ensure your titles are attractive and appealing and consist of the key words you want to push for. I can talk about this more in depth later on but the most important thing to remember is that Google’s focus is on the Page Title and Description because it’s what users see when they search on Google.

Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help signal to the search engines, what the web page is about. Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user’s perspective. However, it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot really “see” images. So, if you have lots of images that contain textual content within the image itself, this content will not be seen by the crawlers. HTML helps address this issue by providing a way to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for those that cannot view the images themselves. This can be search engine crawlers or text-only web browsers.

Another very important part of optimizing your site that I’ve talked about before is both the age and registration length of your domain name. Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain “stability” when looking at your pages. Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site. The reason why this is important consists of two parts. First there are plenty of fake sites out there that don’t actually want to show you anything and want to game Google’s ad system by getting you to visit them and click their ads. In order to avoid these sites Google has many tools they use but the most important is how old your site is and how long your site is registered for. The age of your site tells Google that you’ve been around for a long or reasonable amount of time and you’re not a spam site so you are worth increasing in rankings. Web sites that have been around for 15+ years like Yahoo and Amazon get a tremendous amount of ranking from being registered for so long. This is why it’s important to register a domain name you plan on using as soon as possible, even if you don’t use it down the road, having it registered before you even start planning what will be on the site is called aging the registration and can add plenty of Google juice for you down the road.

The second part is how long your domain is registered for, Google is pretty good at finding spam sites which means if a spam site has any hopes of making money it can’t be registered for more than a year because Google will eventually block it. In order to make it financially unreasonable to create spam sites Google has implemented a query that ranks sites based on length of registration, so a site registered for more than 1 year will be less likely to be a spam site and they will increase ranking for it. A site registered for 5 years gets a higher grade because Google knows they plan to be around for a while and sites registered for more than 10 years get special status. Though most big businesses have what is called permanent status on their domains meaning they are registered for an unlimited set of time in general you don’t need more than a 5 year registration mostly because you really don’t know how long you’ll want your site to last. For personal sites like mine (http://michaelbastos.com) or established business sites it’s okay to register for 10 or more years because it will increase your ranking since you plan on having that site around for the rest of you or your companies life.

Finally, One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it or back links. The more links the better. Having links to your website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content. If you have relationships with big organizations that you do business with, ask them to create a back link to your site from their sites or if you are a manufacturer or wholesaler and sell to different online stores, have them create links to your site for product information and customer feedback. Many people will try and say that the more links you have the better but that only works on sites like Yahoo and Amazon with enough pull to really drive up your rankings. The general rule of thumb is that you only need one link per site and the more sites that link to you the more popular Google will make you. If you are a service business than ask your clients if they can link to your site and vice versa, this is why many web designers and artists have a client portfolio and why site developers put a link to their site in the footer of their work. To sum it all up this is why inbound or back links are important, if you can reach the magical number of about 1000 or more you will most likely make it to the first page of almost any key word you are trying to reach for. If you can reach 10,000 or more you will most likely be in a position that most businesses pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to place ads in each month, the top 5 in a search result. Next I will talk about Promotion or what a lot of people refer to as social media and what about it is valuable and what is not.

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Common Sense SEO Introduction

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SEO is a term that can be easily grasped but rarely fully understood. In essence Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way of improving your website’s ranking and thus your visibility online through a natural or organic form and the loosely related Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a way of paying for this kind of visibility. SEO can include more than just web pages and can be targeted today towards promoting and increasing the popularity of Video, Images as well as Local Information from a natural unpaid methods. If you own a website or are trying to start one then the very fundamental point to understand is that to successfully promote your website you must consider and understand how Search Engines work, what people are looking for and what they are actually typing into Google or Bing and how you can more closely link that to your company’s product or service.

Google isn’t the only search engine but my focus will be mostly on how they run their search system because it is essentially the industry standard across the internet for most search engines. The most important thing to remember about all of this is that there is no magical formula for bettering your site’s rankings and no matter how much you pay someone or what kind of promises they make, they cannot increase your rankings by some special mysterious way. What it really takes is an understanding of the technology and tools available and a willingness to implement it. The rules from Google change all the time which means what someone tells you one year may not work the following year, this is because Google is constantly changing their algorithms in order to keep up with all the fraud out there that tries to “game” the system. As things change and we learn about them we will update you as we do all of our former clients and will try to explain them in a way that will be easy to understand. So let me go over a few things and then we can get started.

Google works by running software called spiders or crawlers out onto the internet to automatically catalog as many websites as possible as quickly as possible. Picture someone who spends their entire day going online from website to website saving a copy of every page, every link in every page and keeping a comprehensive list of what’s linked to what and how many links a site gets. That’s essentially what Google does but instead of hiring someone to do this like it’s rival Yahoo use to in the 90′s, Google has very special software that does this automatically across millions of servers spread out throughout the world. This is Google’s best kept secret and being able to filter and sort through that data is what makes their search capabilities so good. The concept of SEO is simple, when you launch your site Google will catalog it completely using all the methods explained above and it will also keep track of people going to your site from Google.

They also search your site for links to other sites and will search other sites for links to your site, the more links you have to your site the more important Google thinks your site is on the internet so it gives you a higher level of importance. Some types of links don’t count and linking from certain websites don’t count because people have used these types and sites to try and game the system and give them as many links as possible. The more important the website is that is linking to your site the higher your site’s level of importance goes up. Cataloging the world’s websites isn’t the only Ace up Google’s sleeve, using a technology that exists on most internet browsers called server sessions or cookies, most sites are able to keep track of traffic going from one site to another. Google takes a look at the cookie data on your browser and essentially figures out where you have been as well as where you are going and adds all of this information to better their search data.

Google has also focused on something called hyper local which means if I search for Pizza from San Diego, instead of giving me the most popular pizza shop in New York with the highest ratings on Google, they will actually give you the most accurate local pizza place based on your location so it does a better job looking for the kind of things that you search for on a regular basis in your home town. With their new Google Instant feature, if you are logged into Google when you start your search and you look for a key word, your results may be completely different then those of your spouse or even those of your family on the other side of the country depending on what you have clicked on over time. Remember that if you are logged on Google saves everything you search for forever, this way it’s system can always provide you with a more narrowed down view of your interests.

If you search without being logged into Google, it still saves your data forever but it becomes anonymous usage data that it will continue to use to make it’s systems better. They still have data from when they’re very first test search so it gives you an idea of why their system works so well. The most important thing to take out of all of this is that no one can ever promise that if you pay them a few thousand they will get you on the top of search queries, because of hyper local and the way Google’s algorithm is structured, what you see may not be what others see so it’s pointless to do it through artificial means. There are a slew of factors that Google accounts for when ranking you but the most important one to remember are those links I told you about earlier. I will be covering all of this in the next few days cover the topics of Creating Content, Optimization, Promotion, Conversion and Analysis and break these important factors down for you piece by piece.

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Genius in Google Adwords

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A few years ago Google created an advertising system called Adwords which allowed individuals and companies to advertise on their search engine directly without a middle man. The program was so successful that they later introduced Adsense which allowed other websites to share in the ad revenue. In both programs, advertising money is not spent or made until a user clicks and shows interest in the product or service being sold. Google has made marketing better by providing advertisers with a way to clearly measure their advertisement’s progress and not rely on phony marketing estimates.

In an attempt to make the very popular search engine profitable, Google did not go to the advertising powerhouses and Madison Avenue men of the time to find companies wanting to advertise on the site. Instead it reached out to anyone and everyone wanting to advertise on their site because much like their motto, it believed that people could do the job better than executives. The idea was simple; its ads would not show up on the front page to discourage or confuse newcomers to the site, one cannot target an ad to someone who has not given them what one wants to know about yet. However, once someone does a search, Google provides relevant ads through Adsense which makes sure that an advertiser’s ad is on a corresponding site. By removing the middle man of advertisers, Google was able to reduce the ad costs significantly making them the cheaper. As an example, Adsense is now selling TV ad rates 50% less than the average ad agency because they don’t care too much about getting a large commission from it and are a more obvious choice for businesses.

In Adwords, advertisers would have to bid on a particular word or set of words and depending on how many people wanted that spot, the market would choose the price of the advertisement based on demand. Busineses also only got charged based on clicks which meant that one’s ad would run for as long as it needed to and the advertiser would only get charged based on tangible results, something never seen before in advertising. This created a fair market system where users did not get bombarded with irrelevant advertisements and businesses, in return the site only gets paid when those users show an actual interest in their products by clicking on the links. Of course Google gets a cut of that ad money depending on the data. They avoid getting executive kick backs and sweet heart deals which forces Google to focus on making their system better and more efficient. This makes Google more profitable in the process and creates quality data that advertisers can trust. The advertisers can see when a user clicked on an ad and when as well as match that information with when financial transactions where made on their site to see if Google is bringing in paying customers.

Google has always depended on data and user choice to run the business. There have been many attempts to trick or side track this dependence such as creating link farms, websites solely dedicated to linking to each other and to other sites, for the purpose of tricking Google. Yet even those attempts eventually go away as the search engine learns and adapts to what people do and click on. Aside from giving higher rankings to sites that have been registered online longer than others or demoting sites registered for less than a year, Google has had to do very little to curb these kind of abuses. Letting the user vote on what is better eventually creates a stronger more powerful search. What this all boiled down to was honesty. Google could have sold their search spots like many other companies did, but it believed that their customers needed to trust that it would put their needs above profit. Google’s reliance on data based marketing means that the better and more trustworthy their advertising data is, the more profitable they become.

Marketing executives look at Google and fear their ability to give a better product then they ever could. Yet their ability to do what they do so well has inspired many Ad agencies to join them instead of compete against them. The pay per click system has changed the way advertisers see the business. If I as an individual want to advertise my product, I simply go online and pay Google a few dollars to put my site on their search engine and Adsense websites, it does not cost me a million dollars and I can reach only those who are interested enough on my product to click it. No longer is a company willing to pay for an imaginary number of viewers who supposedly see their ads based off of the Neislen Ratings system; Instead they can use the dependable system within Google to choose where to put more of their money towards with confidence. The trust that is garnered in a system where numbers beat out suggestions makes Google’s advertising seem more like science and the Ad Agencies look more and more like alchemists.

Many would criticize Google saying that they are taking away from current Ad revenues, some spell the collapse of modern business because they no longer have control of modern day advertising. I say that let Google take them apart and make them cheaper and more efficient. There are better advertising systems than Google, and not every product can be sold or advertised this way, but for the most part Google has proved its method by its earnings. There is a boot maker in Arizona who sells his $5000 dollar boots with Google Adwords, he does not need to place an ad on television or in local newspapers and his business still has more orders than he can produce. That is what makes Google better.

The Google Model

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Google’s core business model is to create a platform for people to use and then step back and let the scientific data make the decisions. Their first product was the search engine we now know as Google Search and it utilized a combination of web spider software that constantly surfed and cataloged the Internet and used user generated feedback to create results that are both smart and efficient. If someone does not know the answer to a question, just Google it. Google’s name has become synonymous with search, because of the steps that it took to create its search engine.

In the old days of the Internet, companies like Yahoo or Ask Jeeves hired editors much like newspapers, in order to filter the content online. It was relatively easy and cheap to do back in 1995, even with the Internet growing by millions of pages a year. Their thought process was that they needed to categorize the sites on the web much like the Yellow pages categorized business phone numbers. They could then charge more to get people to rank higher on search results. This would create a tier search system where if a user typed in Nike or combination of Nike, only Nike.com and other Nike related sites came up no matter what combination of the word Nike a user typed in. The older search engines and not Google were trapped by categorization and bad taste thus making the Internet not at all a reliable place to gather and store information. A user was lucky if they even found what they were looking for at all and then came Google. The first part of making Google synonymous with search was that they figured out what was wrong with Internet search at that time.

When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first started the company back in 1999, they did not simply want to create another search engine such as Yahoo or so many others that existed at the time. Their plan was to create a company that based what it did on pure data with the belief that customers and not executives held the power to make the company great if given the chance. Sergey and Larry’s idea was simple, much like MetaCrawler who by its name crawled the Internet looking for websites link by link. They would use that same kind of random Internet surfing idea and take it one step further. Since they had the data of Internet sites and who they linked to, they would take which sites had the most links coming to them and use that as a basis of importance. The reason they did this was because they believed that if multiple web sites linked to a single web site, there was probably something of value or worth in that web site. This was their initial basis for Google Search. It worked, but they did not want to do like many other search engines and settle there. The second part of associating Google with search was that they revolutionized how a search engine worked right away.

Upon review of the data coming into their Google Beta Search engine they realized that once a user typed in a search query, they would have to scroll from page to page trying to look more specifically for what they were trying to find. So the next step of brilliance came in saving user click data. If they saved every click to a website that a user made for every word that they typed in to search they could rank that particular site as being more valuable to the topic at hand and thus should rank higher overall for that particular word or phrase. That is one of the reasons why to this very day, Google has saved the information for every search and click it has ever received since the very first day it launched. It does this to ensure that the search results are as complete as possible and that users get the best response possible for their queries. The third part of making Google synonymous with search was that they continued to make their searches better by changing it at every step.

This single revelation turned out to be the brilliance of the Google way of thinking put into action. Instead of hiring legions of editors and staff surfing and cataloging the Internet as many companies had before them, they would allow their users to be the ones to catalog the Internet for them. With every click of the mouse and every search on Google, they ensured that the engine got smarter because they believed that a smarter engine would be able to give better results to its users. Google could then create a cycle of perfect harmony between the program and its customers that forces companies to play nice and allows every site to have a level playing field. No decision is made inside of Google without having hard concrete user data to back it up.

Even though Google loses millions in mistakes with product research it eventually makes up for the loss in billions. Besides the money, Google also learns as much as it can from the mistakes it makes. With Google Gmail, Voice and Wave in the horizon, it plans on using the same lessons it learned from it’s search engine creation to revolutionize Email, Telephones and Social Networking.