The two of them go together like cold weather and orange paint.

HUH…?!

Let me explain…

Yesterday I came across an ad on Craigslist by a forward-thinking business owner who decided he needs some help with SEO.

Good idea, I’d say. Because the difference in ROI and raw leads to your business can be staggering once you show up on the first page of Google.

(click to enlarge)

But I had to smile when I read this post.

What’s wrong with this picture?
(have a look, and you tell me…)

Did you catch it?

Okay, how about another example…

Wanted: 1 Hamburger
Please provide your price and how long it will take for you to prepare it.

Now if this was Mickey D’s, that would work. Hamburgers are all the same there.

(No really. Have you ever tried to order one with extra ketchup or no pickles? How’d that work out for you? It’s pretty likely that you got the standard hamburger, paid your $1.89 or whatever it is, and got your hamburger 2.47 minutes later. Then scraped the pickles off afterwards.)

But you almost expect that going in, right?

I mean, they don’t need to know your background, or your history, or what other restaurants you visit during the week, to filll your order. Because on a fast-food take-out menu like that, there aren’t too many variables.

“Ye pays yer money and ye gets yer burger”

What

But let’s get back to our SEO-challenged business owner. There’s a bit more that goes into even a ‘decent’ SEO project than your average quickie hamburger.

Like figuring out what your keywords are (and making sure they’re the right ones to catch ‘buyers’)… what industry are you in, and how much competition is there for your keywords… your market… your location, and your specialty?

What’s your site’s URL, it’s history, and it’s current position in Search Engine rankings?

And, believe it or not, it even makes a difference what Search Engines you want to get top rankings on. They each react a little differently, you know. So what gets you to the Top 10 in Google doesn’t even catch Yahoo’s eye some days…

As important as those ‘off-page factors’ are, you’ve also got to consider your current site’s layout, content and platform. Sure, it’s ‘possible’ to get a new, blank website to rise in the SERP’s… but it’s a whole lot easier to improve the rankings of an established site. One that’s structured with the robots in mind as well as for human readers.

(click for larger image)

Measuring and analysing all of those details is necessary before anyone could even guess what you’d have to do to fix them. A responsible SEO consultant wouldn’t dream of starting without knowing what the job would entail. And the chances for success.

As a business owner, you’d want to know the same things going forward, wouldn’t you?

So give your SEO whiz a fighting chance here. A URL is an absolute MINIMUM to provide, if you don’t know all of the answers yourself yet. Then I can do some digging, and come back to you with an informed answer on getting you where you want to be. Then we’ll create a plan to keep you there, in the competitive and ever-changing online world.

Because buying SEO isn’t quite the same as buying a hamburger…

For a quick online introduction to Headset Express, this short video was created to feature the retailer’s services and some of their most popular products.

This is being used by sales staff on CD and laptop displays, to give clients and potential customers a quick overview of the company during sales calls and tradeshow events. It’s also formatted to be offered on the company website.

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Not your average garage sale…!

Just before graduating from a college marketing program, I helped stage a weekend-long “Attic Sale” with my girlfriend’s family.

And that’s exactly what it was. A chance to clear the attic… and the garage, and the basement, and… you get the idea.

She lived in a pretty well-to-do area, with multi-million-dollar homes even in the late 80’s. So the collection of clothes, home electronics, antique furniture, paintings, even an antique car was…

Definitely out of the ordinary!

We had just bought a computer that came with a fancy ‘dot-matrix’ computer (yeah, it was THAT long ago). So with some sketchy clipart and a little creativity, we bought reams of pastel-coloured paper and photocopied hundreds of letter-sized posters announcing the event.

It was like a top-secret undercover assignment, putting them up on all of the telephone poles around the neighborhood during midnight runs a few weeks before the sale…

But not your average neighborhood sign-plastering…

Most of the posters went up OUTSIDE of the immediate neighborhood where the family lived. Because this exclusive area of Toronto was pretty well-known… so people were dying to see what kinds of things they’d find from the fancy neighborhood.

And then the unthinkable happened…

With just a week to go, all of our posters were cut from their poles in one night by the city’s cleanup crew!

(I don’t know if there were bylaws about ‘no posting’, but there were plenty of others on many of the poles before we got there. Your call…)

Now we knew the signs had already made an impression, since they were taped up at eye-level for both pedestrians and car passengers to read them. And we’d gotten some phone calls already, too… so the barrage of multi-coloured posters had done their job.

Still, with a week to go and just one other little $30 classified ad in the paper for exposure, we weren’t taking any chances. So, with our tape guns and spy gear in hand, we went out and plastered more posters in the surrounding neighborhoods, just to make sure nobody would miss them.

Did it work? Well, that’s an understatement!

I think the first knock on the door came at about 6am that Saturday, while we were still brewing the day’s first pot of coffee. Before we’d even started putting things out on the lawn surrounding the corner-lot house…

Fortunately, everyone in the family was ready with their assigned duties, and weeks of preparation meant almost every item was organized with a price sticker and a selling strategy.

So by the end of Sunday afternoon, almost everything was sold. Even the car — a 1960 Beardmore taxicab from Britain (a lot like the ones you’ve seen in the old Beatles movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’). And a painting from a group of artists that had become a bit of a collector’s item in the years since the family had bought it.

A lot of buyers made some excellent deals on really unusual stuff… and we were SO glad we didn’t have to carry much of it back inside!

All counted, we made over $53,000 that weekend.

I think I slept like a stone for almost 2 days afterwards…

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