SEO Archives - Digital Tool Factory blog SEO Archives - Digital Tool Factory blog

The Digital Tool Factory Blog

Explain SEO to clients by using the greatest metaphor ever

I have created the golden metaphor to explain SEO to clients.  I was trying to explain SEO to a non-technical 80 year old client (the single best businessperson I have ever met) and I came up with the following metaphor.

Start to explain seo to clients like this:

Your website is like an ambitious young man trying to meet lots of attractive women.  Web users are like impressionable women who make a lot of bad choices with men.  Google is like her parents.  Using a search engine is similar to letting the woman’s parents pick suitors for her at a high society party.

Explain SEO to clients by using this metaphor

IMG_2102 © by dbking

Then use these comparisons

Getting considered in the first place

The Party: The biggest part is being there, you have to show up at the party to meet the women.

The Internet: Your website has to be online to be found at all.

Standing out from the crowd, i.e. Keywords.

The Party: The woman (and her parents) are looking for something specific, be it a left handed Methodist that plays hockey, or a progressive biologist that loves ice fishing.

The Internet: Your website has to be about something specific, like finding unprofitable clients or a fun and easy way to share audio clips.

Staying out of bad neighborhoods

The Party: No one wants their daughter to be with some loser that spends all his time in the ghetto shooting meth.

The Internet: Your website should stay our of internet “bad neighborhoods” and avoid link exchanges and link farms.

You should come from an old family

The Party: Who wouldn’t want their daughter to be with the a duPont, a Rockefeller, or a Roosevelt?

The Internet: Google likes it when websites have domain names that have been registered for a long time.

Everyone should be talking about you

The Party: Is everyone at the party talking about you?  If everyone else is interested, the woman’s parents will be too.

The Internet: If lots of people are linking to you, then Google will put you much higher in search results.

Prominent people should be talking about you

The Party: People from old families should be talking about you.  A kind word from a long time friend and member of the Mellon or Rothschild family will go much farther than a kind word from that guy her parents just met.

The Internet: Google likes it when prominent websites link to you – a link from cnn.com, apple.com or Microsoft.com will matter far more than a link from a new blog.

Everyone should be saying the right things about you

The Party: If everyone else is talking about what a great left handed Methodist hockey player you are, or how you’re a pretty good ice fisherman for a progressive biologist, her parents will swoon over you and throw their daugher in your arms.

The Internet: If you get many inbound links with find unprofitable clients in the link text, Google will throw throw users your way whenever some searches for “Find Unprofitable Clients”

You have to dress the part

The Party:  For some reason, er parents love a man that wears a full tuxedo, though they will make exceptions for the right man.

The Internet: Your page should be arranged the way Google wants you to arrange pages; with the proper mixture of header tags, canonical urls and alt text.

 

And there you have it, the best way to explain SEO to clients – it worked for a non-technical 80 year old consulting client of mine, and I bet it will for your clients as well.

And if you were interested in how to explain seo to clients, you will like this other post on how to sell to marketing departments.

 

Editor’s Note

This blog post originally appeared on the Profit Awareness Blog – as that app is up for sale, it has been consolidated into the main Digital Tool Factory blog.


29
Oct 11


Written By Steve French

 

How to Fix: Canonical Urls with IIS 7’s Url Rewrite feature for https

SATOR Magic squareThe Problem: You want to make your website all SEO friendly by creating a single, canonical url.  For example, if someone types in http://www.stronico.com, you want them to be redirected to http://stronico.com (Google likes it this way).  You do some research and discover that all of the default code and documentation for handling canonical Urls in IIS 7 uses web.config files and the URL Rewrite application program.  All is well and good so far, but what if you use SSL?  The stock code will always redirect you to http://stronico.com/Signup/ even if the original url was https://stronico.com/Signup/ (note the https). Continue reading →


01
Jun 10


Written By Steve French

 

How to fix Blogger page title problems

I was perusing my Google Analytics reports and did some checking on came across some sub optimal page structure.

The Problem: Blogger (my blogging platform of choice) sets page titles in reverse. More specifically Blogger will set the title of a post as “Stronico Contact Management – How to fix browser size problem in Silverlight” – which is not as SEO friendly as what I thought it did, which would be “How to fix browser size problem in Silverlight – Stronico”. The former has more words, and quite repetitive.

The Cause: Blogger is just set up that way

The Solution: I did some Google work and came across this post on SEO Book (Thanks!) Basically Blogger has a set of server tags it uses when publishing a blog to an outside server. For whatever reason Blogger sets the page title in an odd order. To fix the problem add in this code in the header section of the Blogger Template

<MainPage>
<title>Stronico Blog – Visual Contact Management</title>
</MainPage>
<Blogger>
<ArchivePage>
<title>Archive of the Stronico Blog</title>
</ArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
<BlogItemTitle><title><$BlogItemTitle$> : Stronico</title></BlogItemTitle></ItemPage>
</Blogger>

That will do it! Thank you SEO Book!

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


09
Nov 09


Written By Steve French

 

SEO Tip – Set your domain to expire in several years

I was recently looking into more Search Engine Optimization techniques and came across several experts (such as they are) saying that Google ranks sites with domain names that expire in a year or less lower than sites who’s domain names expire after that. While that doesn’t seem very fair, it does make sense. Many PR and spam sites aren’t intended to last for long, and a distant expiration date does signal that the site is meant to be around for a long while.

On that note, I just renewed Stronico for another three years.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


27
Oct 09


Written By Steve French

 




Copyright 2011 Digital Tool Factory. All Rights Reserved. Powered by raw technical talent. And in this case, WordPress.