If you pay for the advice, follow it!

I was in a meeting with a client yesterday and got the best comment from one of his assistants. He asked her about a suggestion I made about a particular image on the site. She swiftly responded, "Are you paying her for her expertise?" the client responded yes and she then said, "Well I would listen to what she says." Nice!

That reminded me of a story that I told during a presentation several years ago:

100 business professionals consulted an internet marketing company for advice.

These professionals were from large and small companies, they were marketing directors, owners, sales people. Some of the companies were in manufacturing, some in the service sector, some in the political arena and some represented retail companies.

All of these business professionals were concerned about the effectiveness of their respective company websites.

The internet marketing consultants reviewed each website, made recommendations and told the professionals how to improve the performance, position and results generated from the websites. Each professional was given a to-do list that, when implemented, would assure improvement.

Thirty-six of the professionals immediately and enthusiastically went to work making the recommended changes and exploring the recommended venues. And, a couple of months later these professionals were so pleased and encouraged by the improvements that they put even more time and effort into marketing their websites. The work was paying off! Some even consulted the internet marketing company further to see what other options were available.

Sixty-four of the professionals immediately and enthusiastically went back to their respective businesses and gathered co-workers and employees to tell them about the exciting things they had heard and how all the changes they could make would surely improve the performance of their websites.

They had rallies, held lunch meetings, and designed posters about the steps their company would take to get to their goal of a successful online marketing tool. They hired staff to handle the additional emails, customer calls and service needs. They did training, they covered every base – or so they thought.

A couple of months later these sixty-four professionals looked at their sales sheets and there was no change. There was no change because they failed to actually implement the advise of the internet marketing company.

While I have told this as a story – the facts are true. 64% of all companies fail to follow and implement the advice of their internet marketing consultants. Be sure your company is in the 36% that do follow the advice, implements the strategies and comes out on top.

Fast does not make you first...

Yesterday I had an interesting experience that got me to thinking. I was headed toward the ATM at my local bank to make a deposit. As I turned into the drive a woman in another car coming from the left inside the bank’s parking lot literally sped up nearly hitting me to get to the ATM first. I would like to tell you that the ATM was broken-it wasn’t.

The experience reminded me about a potential client who contacted me Sunday. They were interested in having me optimize their newly launched website and had gotten a quote from another company that "guaranteed" top 10 placement for their site.

Everyone these days seems to want things better, faster, now! But the reality is, not everything fits into that "fast food" mold. Search optimization is one of those things.

Good, ethical, white hat search engine optimization takes time.

• It takes time to go through each page of the website and make sure that the descriptions are accurate to the page content, that the title is unique, that the appropriate key phrase is used.
  
  
• It takes time to get the search engine to index (place) every page of the website, not just the "home" page.
  
  
• It takes time for people to start to visit your website in large numbers and start linking to you (one way the search engines determine how high to place the site).
  
  
• It takes the search engine time to move your site up the to the coveted high rankings area.
  

The only way to achieve instant top 10 placement is to pay for advertising on the website. But you should know, that although this does generate awareness and some traffic, the majority of search engine traffic (85 to 95%) comes from the organic listings.

Even Google gives good reason not to believe SEO's that guarantee top ten rankings:

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. . . Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. And lastly, some SEOs guarantee ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway

I often ask my clients: Would you rather have 1million visitors who don't buy anything or 1000 visitors of which 50% buy something? It's an easy question and yet often surprises people. While I can guarantee an improvement in page rankings overall (you're site will move upwards), I am not foolish enough to think that I can put every client I have on the first page for every relevant key term.

Like fine wine, optimizing for search engines takes time and must be done in the most ethical way to ensure long lasting high rankings.

To view the full Google SEO guide, click here.