I Felt Like Some­thing Wasn’t Right

To make an oth­er­wise long story short, I do every­thing I should do to be a good cyber-world patron. This includes mak­ing sure my web­site is user friendly, build back-links, keep the site updated with fresh con­tent, and, be seo.

How­ever, when I search for cer­tain terms in the search engines, that I know should lead the aver­age user back to this web­site, I end up never find­ing my site in the search results on Google’s search engine.

This doesn’t mean I don’t have any expo­sure to Google, I have a few sites link­ing to me that show up in Google. The Express Mar­ket­ing Blog, and my other two blogs, hosted on Google’s Blog­ger, are few sites that show up in Google when I check for back-links. I see blog­ger gets plenty of love from Google.

Then one day I started search­ing for peeps who may have sim­i­lar issues. Then I found it, its called the Google Sandbox.

The Google Sand­box is almost fair, now that I under­stand it, I don’t feel to bad.

Metaphor­i­cal Exam­ple of the Google Sandbox.

We Build a Website

In this exam­ple we are going to be a wanna-be singer, named Joe Fleeks. Joe Fleeks has a few nice songs that he and a few friends pro­duced and they and their friends love the series. They are damn good cuts. Joe Fleeks wants to mar­ket his product.

We Sub­mit to Google

Joe Fleeks heads over to Bobby’s Music Store, speaks with Bobby, and strikes a deal for the title to be shelved in his store. Next week Joe waltzes into the store to find his work, on the very last shelf of his respec­tive musi­cal genre.

Joe demands to speak with Bobby, Joe says, “Bobby, this is bull­sheeiit, move my stuff to the front”.

Bobby responds, “no one has ever heard of you”, and, I have very pop­u­lar artists whom are sought after and cus­tomers are com­ing in specif­i­cally for their par­tic­u­lar albums.

Work on Your Seo

Joe finds it hard to argue. Joe needs a plan. Joe then decides to go down to the park where him and his boys hang­out. Dur­ing the gut-spilling to his bud­dies, one of them sug­gests that they round up a few friends and peri­od­i­cally head to the store and ver­bally request the album. They also have an album release party and let their friends know about the album, and the genre.

Build­ing Back Links

Obvi­ously, Bobby notices the traf­fic and moves the item from shelf 45, to shelf 43. Bobby then goes by a few com­peti­tor stores and the album is nowhere to found. Bobby then moves Joe’s album back to shelf # 44.

Joe, not being a total dumb-ass, notices that he needs more songs, a larger more organic fan-base, and real­izes that his works need to be in more out­lets to max­i­mize on his cash flow probabilities.

Guest Post And Write Articles

Then it comes to Joe that he may even need to fea­ture on a few of his com­pe­ti­tions albums to broaden his hori­zons a bit and he sets up a plan to do just that. Fea­ture on a few other artists albums and per­form a few con­certs, after a few months, peo­ple know about Joe, and respect Joe. Who knows, the only way Joe may ever be heard of, is to fea­ture on other artists albums, who already have a following.

Cre­ate and Pro­mote Your Social Net­work­ing Fan Pages

After a few months of pro­mo­tion and fan-base build­ing, Joe comes back to Bobby’s Music store and notices that his album is sold out. Bobby approaches Joe with a demand for more of his prod­uct to sell and also has his works on the 9th row. This is a huge improve­ment for Joe, who still has a long to go.

This is how it is with Google, and how they pun­ish new web­sites, I think it is fair to a cer­tain extent. Good thing we have Yahoo, Ask, and Bing, they don’t pun­ish new webmasters.

If you are search­ing the Inter­net for infor­ma­tion about the sphere of inter­net mar­ket­ing, then visit the web site that was men­tioned in this line.

The state­ment, “but my cus­tomers are not online” is noth­ing but an excuse against invest­ing in a solid SEO cam­paign. Here’s the real­ity about this par­tic­u­lar excuse:

FACT: Google’s cus­tomers are ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing for infor­ma­tion online in the best pos­si­ble for­mat to use in mak­ing pur­chase deci­sions, edu­ca­tional research, recre­ational pur­poses and so on and so on. Google’s own mis­sion state­ment attests to this very fact, albeit in more detail. These peo­ple make Google and flood their web­site look­ing for info every­day, heck Google (the verb) has even made it in the dic­tio­nary now, yep the good old Oxford Dic­tio­nary. It means almost EVERYONE is using Google and your cus­tomers are also bound to be on it.

FACT: Google have realised that they need more rel­e­vancy in their search results and have intro­duced Google Maps, Geo tar­get­ing and Google Local search. No point show­ing you the Domi­nos Pizza in Swazi­land when you are in that place in Ice­land that spewed all the vol­canic ash that got half of Britain stranded abroad. So if peo­ple are in your neigh­bour­hood they will prob­a­bly get local results in their searches which may include your business.

FACT: More and more peo­ple are using the Inter­net (Google) to look up local busi­nesses then walk right up to them and buy what­ever it is they need that day from a local supplier.

I could spin out a few more facts about this but my point here is that every busi­ness can do very well by get­ting them­selves online in the search engines and don’t get me started on the social net­works like Face­book, MySpace, Twit­ter etc.

Back to my point, as long as peo­ple that patron­ize your busi­ness, do a walk-by search on your High Street to find your busi­ness, or what­ever it is they want to buy, guar­an­teed they will also look for it online. It may just be for direc­tions but it is a search nonethe­less. Google have a lot of tools that the local busi­nessper­son can use to really get vis­i­ble and most of them are free. There really is no excuse not to get involved at all. You see, if your busi­ness and all the other bil­lions of busi­nesses world­wide did not put infor­ma­tion online, Google would not exist as we know it today. There would be no search, no rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, no SEO and other related busi­nesses thriv­ing today, and they know this! They are actu­ally dying for you or that extra busi­ness to include their infor­ma­tion online so they can have an index that rep­re­sents all infor­ma­tion pos­si­ble. This is also in their mis­sion state­ment, about being the goto place for infor­ma­tion sources on anything.

What does this mean for you?
It means while your last cus­tomer may have found you on the High Street on foot, Google have done so much work and pulled ALL your prospects to their web­site and now you can just do a few things and lit­er­ally farm for busi­ness from that one place. This is excel­lent for you. You can switch between watch­ing TV and your lead gen­er­a­tion or follow-ups all in the com­fort of your lazy­boy chair these days. We have cer­tainly come a long way from the days of hunt­ing your din­ner every­day and hop­ing against hope that you kill it before it kills you! I’m sorry but I am laugh­ing hys­ter­i­cally as I write this.

Of course there will be some work to do to take advan­tage of all this but that is why search engine mar­keters exist and we are all here to help you get to that per­son, you know, the one with a fist full of cash and search­ing for the very same prod­uct that you sell!

Trust me, if your cus­tomers look for you on the High Street or even at the break­ers yard, if you are in that busi­ness, they are online as well. talk to me about how to con­nect with them and stop mak­ing excuses and start mak­ing con­nec­tions online!

Read­ers who are surf­ing for infor­ma­tion about the topic of free traf­fic, then go to the link that was quoted right in this passage.

What is the big deal with Google and why should the old mom-and-pop set-up even bother with this phenomenon?

To get straight to the point, the UK is expected to spend over £6 Bil­lion on gro­ceries alone this year 2010 and to spend almost dou­ble that fig­ure on every­thing else on the Inter­net! I do not know about you but this is a whole lot of money and most of the peo­ple spend­ing will be doing so by way of search engines to find their purchases.

You see we are now in the Hurry Up/ PlayStation/ Xbox/ Nintendo/ iPhone times where we do every­thing on mobile tech­nolo­gies and have no desire to leave our mobile phones or our TVs and com­put­ers. This means the aver­age kid will not want to go the local shops any­more. What? To put their Nin­tendo Wii down when they are at the high­est stage pos­si­ble in the game? No Chance!

So what do they do? They click over and order what they want online and it gets deliv­ered to their door — sim­ple. Researchers say this trend will con­tinue until all deci­sions and activ­i­ties will be made online to the tune of 99.99% of the time. The last 0.01% cov­er­ing only absolute no-nos like tak­ing a bath or toi­let duties which can­not be done online for obvi­ous reasons.

What does this mean for you and your busi­ness? You guessed it, Google. They (us, me and you) will Google every­thing they need and your busi­ness bet­ter be there to be found oth­er­wise you will be dead in the water. In other words you will spend your days in your cor­ner shop drum­ming your fin­gers, wait­ing for peo­ple to come and buy some­thing but noone will show up. You will chew your finger-nails, wait for them to grow back, chew them again and still noone would turn up! Learn­ing every sin­gle cross-word puz­zle in the mag­a­zines in your shop won’t help either! You need to get online and on Google fast.

They say that (today) over 90% of all online pur­chases and con­tacts start with some sort of search. Google. The guys at the top of page 1 get it all as well. Think about the last time you bought some­thing online. I would imag­ine it went some­thing like this:

•Gosh it’s my mother-in-law’s birth­day, what will I get her?
•Com­puter on. Google for ideas (the cheap­est and tack­i­est– it’s the wife’s mom after all)
•Find page 1 and browse the top guys for gifts
•Select the worst gift on pur­pose
•Pull out your wal­let and select your new 0% credit card
•Pur­chase gift with a cyn­i­cal smile
•Hold back the urge to write a mean mes­sage in it
•Pay for pur­chase
•Done

These are the peo­ple on Google. Peo­ple that already want what you sell. No follow-up meet­ings with see-more direc­tors that just want to see more graphs and brochures.

No gov­ern­ment ten­der­ing process that always seem to ask for every­thing else but the real rea­sons you are ten­der­ing in the first place.

No bang­ing on doors. Inter­rupt­ing their din­ner or tea. They tell you to come back in 15 min­utes but when you do, they pre­tend to be alseep! All this at a quar­ter to six.

No cold call­ing. No dialling for dol­lars. No hit­ting the dialler.

No beat­ing the pavements.

No weird mem­ber­ship fees to At-Your-Own-Risk-Good-For-Nothing-Networking-Meetup-With-The-Same-Faces-Since-1998.

No weird MLM that only pays the guys at the top, who, for some rea­son, keep invit­ing you to attend sem­i­nars to con­vince you thay are not out to get your money but at the same time charge you to attend that VERY SAME meeting!

You know what I mean?

Google (and other search engines for that mat­ter) have peo­ple with a credit card in hand, that already want what you sell, the only real con­vinc­ing they need is that you are the right seller to buy from and they are ready to pay you!

Yes, Google is THAT impor­tant. Are you in it? Can your busi­ness be found on Google?

In case you are surf­ing for info about the topic of web­site traf­fic, then please go to the page which was men­tioned right in this line.