“You lie.”  Say it with me; say it out loud in your home or at work in front of your computer.  Yell it with conviction. Good taste and decorum be damned.

Never before in the history of American politics has two simple words meant so much to the recognition and identification of a U.S. Congressman.  Or for that matter Senator, President or any politician.  Two simple words perfectly placed uttered in the most prestigious of forums in the most vilifying of manners.  On September 9^th 2009, Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) made his presence know the world with those two small but powerful worlds.  Up until that point, less than 1% of the American population could have told you anything about Congressman Joe Wilson.  Fast forward 1 week, and the man is practically a household name.

Look at that shit eating grin. That is the smug face of a marketing madman.

Was it staged?  Was it the brainchild of G.O.P. leader Michael Steele?  Or perhaps an idea contrived by a Conservative Washington Think Tank?  Was it a true and visceral emotional response by an outraged congressman?  Truth of the matter is that no one knows, no one cares and quite frankly no one gives a shit.  The cause is always far less important or regarded than the effect.  The only thing that matters now is that Congressman Joe Wilson has become the figurehead for the conservative party and “You Lie” has become its war cry.

What did Congressman Wilson do when he said those words?  He branded himself.  He created an instantaneous and remarkable identity that has carried throughout the mass media with the speed and veracity of a California wildfire.  There are corporations that pay $5 million dollars for a 30 SECOND ad during the Super Bowl and have far less return.  By yelling 2 simple words, Congressman Wilson became the Coca-Cola or Microsoft of the Republican party.  He’s a T-Shirt and a YouTube Video and an infomercial all wrapped into one smug son of a bitch.

In a world where Government elections are decided by Q factor, public recognition and the number of registered voters you can get to sign up for text alerts, Congressman Wilson has scored a coup.  The likes of which we have not seen for some time.  Politics aside, I have to tip my hat off to the crazy bastard.  Seriously, there are about 434 other Senators who wish that they had the forethought and testicular fortitude to think of doing the same thing.  Even the Deomcrats are wondering why in the hell they hadn’t done such an outburst when President Bush was laying out the groundwork for invading Iraq.  Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, Congressman Wilson has mad crazy skills as marketing guru. You don’t have to like him but you sure as hell have to respect him.

Sure there exists the slight possibility that there was no forethought to the matter, that he just up and yelled it because it was a gut reaction to what he thought was a con on the American public.  I’m less inclined to believe so, but even still.  Even if it was an ‘uncontrolled motor response’,  the inner workings of that mans mind ( synapses working at lightning speed, the subconscious brain producing a level of cause and effect / risk vs. reward scenarios) understood what was happening even if he himself did not.  Deep down it was known what would happen when those words flew out of his mouth through the calls of Congress and into the eyes and ears of the ravenous media craving American public.  The alternative to is that this was a well planned calculated decision.  Either way someone somewhere knew the end game to this opening salvo.  They knew what was as stake and they knew the reward.  In the end, two small words created a new Conservative Icon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, f or your viewing pleasure, I present to you the next Senator from the great state of South Carolina…. you know him, you love him…. “The Distinguished Gentleman, Mr. Wilson.”  Congrats to you sir!  Well played.

SEQFAQ - SEO Frequently Asked Questions

So this is something new here at WDYGU, it’s a series of articles that I’d like to help use as a reference.  Somewhere to tell a current or potential client… “Hey you know what?  I’ve got a perfect place for you to find an answer for that………. my blog!”

I think that I’m going to call it SEOFAQ.  Why?  Because I think I’m witty, that’s why.   Any given day, I might be asked any of a myriad of questions that pertain to SEO.  A great number of these questions can be asked a great number of ways and can be asked a great number of times.  It’s not that I get tired answering them.  Honestly, I really enjoy talking SEO.  Just ask my wife, her friends, my family, or random people I meet on the street.  I’d just like to have somewhere that I can send them to get the rundown without having to hear me speak at length and in semi-pleasing metaphors.

So since this is the first post I think that it’s prudent to begin with the most oft posed question that myself or any SEO firm is asked by a client.  “How long is it going to take me to rank?”

I love this question.  When I’m asked this question I am instantly queued into a number of factors about the person who has posed it.   Firstly, I know that they are interested in SEO, that they have goals in mind, and that they actually need my services.  Secondly, I know that they don’t have enough SEO knowledge to do their business or website any justice.  And lastly, I know that they’re looking to me to help them out.  When this question is posed during a “pitch”, my mouth begins to water as the prospect of the sale.  This is the area where really earn my keep.  As I told Todd the other day, “I could sell a Ketchup Popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves in the middle of August.”  But PLEASE don’t get me wrong here; I’m not Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glennross.”  I’m only interested in making the sale if what I’m doing can honestly help me improve a client’s bottom line.

For the rest of this article, I am going to pull a Mr. Rogers here and play pretend.  I’m going to talk directly to you, faithful reader, as if you are my perspective client and I’m shooting straight from the hip.  So here goes.

You’ve asked me ‘how long is it going to take you to rank?’  The answer is that there is no answer.  I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to rank.  I’m not being coy here.

I get it.  You’re looking at potentially spending thousands of dollars a month with me and I can’t tell you how long it will be until you get to where you want.  But let me tell you this.  If you show me an SEO who will give you a concrete time frame, I’ll show you an SEO who is full of shit.  Pardon my French.  But that’s the truth.  I’m speaking from experience here.  I’ve worked with clients targeting GLOBALLY COMPETITIVE phrases and seen No. 1 rankings in less than 8 weeks, and I’ve worked with Mom and Pop local sites in non-competitive industries work for months to show up on the front SERP page.  And the reason for this is the reason that I make a good living… SEO is neither quick nor simple.  It’s a complex process, always evolving with literally hundreds of factors that go in to how you will rank.  But trust me when I tell you that we understand them all.

I’m not going to look you in the face and tell you what you want to hear so you’ll sign on the bottom line.  What does that accomplish?  I get your money for a few months, and then you’re left with a bad taste in your mouth and our brand suffers when we don’t hit a goal that we never should have given you.  That’s not the way that we operate.

But I understand that you want some sort of answer, something to make you feel better about giving me your hard earned money.  I’ll say it this way.  We’ll get you there in the quickest way as is reasonably possible.  We’ll use every single tool in the book.  We’ll take a long hard look at your site and give you the most earnest assessment that we can.  Do you need to change your title tags?  We’ll let you know.  Do you have zero backlinks?  We’ll get you a bunch of good ones.  Can using Social Media work for you?  We’ll give you an honest answer.  We’ll do what it takes to get you to the top of your best phrases in the quickest time possible and we’re going to do it in a way that is going to keep Google happy and greatly piss off your competitors.

We want you to be happy.  If you’re happy, then you’ll stay with us.  What’s more, you’ll tell your friends about us.  Our job is to get you where you want to be, and to do it in a fashion and at a speed that you are happy with.  How long that is going to take is a question that I cannot and will not reasonably answer today.  But if you sign with me, and you stick with us… you’ll get your answer shortly enough.  I’m willing to bet that it’s an answer that’s going to make your wallet fatter.

Microsoft's Bing Search / Decision Engine Just Don't Belong

“Friends” was a great show.  It had an incredible run, and when it was at the top of its game, it could be called the best show on television.  I like to think that I’m a witty guy with an acerbic wit and I’ve been called Chandler a number of times by friends and acquaintances.  The reference is to Matthew Perry’s character on “Friends”… Chandler Bing.  And to be honest, that particular Bing is probably the only Bing that will make it into the historical pantheon of pop culture.  I’m afraid that Microsoft’s new ‘Bing’ will pale in comparison.

I use the reference in pop culture to help me address the true issue that Microsoft faces.  You see, Google is much more than a search engine.  It’s a verb.  It’s part of the vernacular.  It’s become a household word.  So much so, that my Grandmother (God bless her soul) knew what it meant.  And isn’t that the litmus test for the true popularity of anything?  If your Nana knows about it, then everyone must.  This is the problem that Microsoft’s Bing must face, and the obstacle that it must overcome.  In my very modest opinion, I just don’t think that it can.

Estimates are coming in that Microsoft is employing a marketing campaign with a budget upwards of $100 million.  It seems that Microsoft subscribes to Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder’s business philosophy.  “If you throw enough money at it, no problem is too big.”  They’ve taken the lackluster search engine, Live, and they’ve reengineered and rebranded it in an attempt to sell it to the mass population as a fresh new take on internet search.  And while it may in fact be a ‘Decision Engine’, the problem is that it’s just not Google.

I recall taking a sales management course some years ago and the lecturer discussed the fact that there exists a keyboard with a layout that is dramatically different than the standard QWERTY layout.  The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was so efficient and successful that it was adopted by the American National Standards Institute in 1982.  Why then, you ask yourself, has it not become the standard keyboard on all PC’s?  The answer is because of one universal and predictable concept.  Human beings are generally averse to change.  Even if something is far more difficult and cumbersome, if we’ve become accustomed to it, then we will likely continue to have it that way.  Now I’m not suggesting that Bing represents a more streamlined and efficient approach to search engines.  I’m just saying that even if it did, chances are that few people would navigate away from using Google.

Bing is going after the fact that the Google algorithm is not perfectly effective.  According to Abbey Klaassen,  in a recent AdAge article, Microsoft found that 42% of searches require refinement, and 25% of clicks are the back button.   But do searchers REALLY CARE about a slightly more effective SERP?  Probably not.  Going further in the article, Klaassen reports that Google conducted their own research by presenting searchers with results from other engines but presented them as their own by placing their logo and formatting on the page.  The end result?  Regardless of the query returns, consumers still preferred those results which were presented as ‘Google results’.  The lesson here is that most people are enamored with brands.

You know that a brand has become too big for competition when its name has taken a life of its own.  When you need to clean your ears you don’t use a cotton swab, you use a Q-Tip.  Whether or not it is actually made by Q-Tip is irrelevant… that’s just want you call it.  And when you blow your nose, you use a Kleenex.  Different product, same point.  When a brand becomes that big, it really doesn’t have any contemporaries.  When the name of a company or product has become a synecdoche for an entire industry the no amount of marketing dollars can do anything but scratch the surface of the market share.

I don’t know how well Bing works.  As of presstime for this article, I haven’t yet used it, not even for curiosity’s sake.  I imagine that given the amount of R&D and Marketing dollars thrown at it, it probably works quite well.  But what I do know with a clear certainty and evidential proof is this;  When I was looking up facts for this article I didn’t Bing the queries… I Google’d them.   And that’s the point.

You know, the thing about being an entrepreneur is that you’re the Captain of your own destiny. Or so I thought. When you think about starting your own business, you’re confident in your own skills and your ability to sell those skills to potential clients. You imagine that when you walk in the door and show them your wealth of knowledge, clients will line up for your services and throw giant wads of cash your way. The truth of it is rather cold. It’s a tough economy, and most clients aren’t ready to devote large portions of their marketing budget to an upstart company. You find that you have to put feet to pavement, press the flesh, and send out e-mails to whoever will receive them. You get your foot in the door, and you work with the companies that will have you. After that, you know that you’ll knock their socks off and the process starts over. You find that you’re happy to be working with them, helping them achieve their goals and gaining valuable experience. You relish a client with a challenging business model who poses difficulties you hadn’t imagined. But sometimes, while your newest client might be a rich and rewarding experience, it’s not what you would call the ‘ideal situation.’

Your mind begins to wander and you start to think of your dream stable of clients. Maybe it’s a little local company that you know you help to destroy their competition in rapid succession. Or perhaps is the giant whale of a company who would love the attention of the little guy. Or maybe it’s the site that you’ve loved for years who you just know, that if given the opportunity, you could help them hoist their bottom line.

So while I drove my Prius home, with the fresh air of a New York Spring flooding the cabin of my car through windows that have been firmly rolled up for the mandatory hibernation period of the last 6 months, I thought about who I’d like to work with more than any other site. And with that in mind, I’d like to present to the very first in my ongoing series of dream clients.

W.B. Mason on the Green Monster - Photo taken from Flickr

W.B. Mason – I’m a Red Sox fan, born and raised. I have photos of the Fenway Park strewn throughout my home and office, with the grand plans of one day creating a to-scale replica of the Green Monster in the Still-Exists-Only-In-My-Mind sportsbar in my yet-to-be-finished basement. It would be impossible create a true to live replica without a giant W.B. Mason advertisement flanking the left field side of the Monster.

“Who But” W.B. Mason is one of the nation’s largest office supply retailers. They sponsor Major League Baseball, including my beloved Red Sox and the Yankees as well. They have a seemingly unlimited marketing budget including presenting ‘The Encore’ post game show on the Yankees’ flagship network, Y.E.S. Through various creative television, radio and print advertisement they have done an excellent job in creating brand awareness. Which is why it was shocking to me to see that they have seemingly neglected their web presence.

A search for “Office Supplies” in Google shows WB Mason somewhere in the range of the 3^rd or 4^th page of results. Not great for a company competing on a national level. Now I know a little bit about this company and I’m certain that the lion’s share of their sales come from regional sales associates who have face to face meetings with clients. They’re an old fashioned company that believes in good service and loyal customers. But why then spend so much on advertising and sponsorship? The answer is simple, to create new clients. This is why they are a dream client. They fit one of my all important criteria for a dream client… the ability to do something great and accomplish tangible results with a high R.O.I. for them. I could work with a client that already has No. 1 positioning in all of their rankings, and while that might pay the bills, it wouldn’t bring me any satisfaction and eventually they’d cease to pay us. Now, a company like W.B. Mason, that’s a company I could do something with.

I think about their annual marketing budget, how ridiculous that might be. And then I think that if they took less than 1/10^th of 1 percent of the budget they spend, on say television commercials, and invested that with us I begin to salivate at all that could be accomplished. With a budget in that range, my little firm and I could do wonders, heck we could accomplish seemingly miraculous results. We could devote countless hours to developing and fostering a rich linkbuilding campaign and optimizing the site for exceptional organic rankings. We could tap into creative Social Media outlets to help further the brand recognition through numerous online communities. We would be constructing a new highway to their online retail venue that they hadn’t thought possible, with traffic that would rival the 405. I hear the phrase R.O.I. bantered about every day, but the return on this investment would be exponential. And my little firm and I would have the utter satisfaction of knowing that we had helped a good company tap into a giant market for nothing more than pocket change.

And as proud as they were of us getting the results and themselves for choosing us, well just maybe then they’d get us box seats to Sox/Yankees in late September. I know, I know… I’m dreaming. But it doesn’t hurt to dream does it? And wasn’t that the point of this post?

I’ll be back with my next dream company. “The Little Local Site that could…”

I’m a Firefox kind of guy. Long before IE7, I was in love with the functionality of multiple tabs in the same window. I was introduced to Firefox by Todd when we first started working together some years ago. I was lustful for all the add-ons, and I relished the rapidly vanishing programs cluttering my taskbar that inevitably accompanied any long day of using IE. My love affair with Firefox has lasted for quite some time. But as much as the functionality of multiple tabs has engrained itself into my psyche, there was a wonderful tool out there that had eluded my attention until recently. And having recently begun this labor of love of a company, I came to realize that this beautiful, buxom tool had seduced its way onto my computer; and into my heart. That tool, my friends, is Digsby. And like any true love, what started out as an infatuation has rapidly become a soul-mate. I’m starting to wonder how I ever lived and loved without it.

A few weeks back I was chatting on AIM with Shawn, our resident Social Media Manager. I don’t recall exactly how the conversation came about, but I was mentioning something about the confusion of having multiple chat windows open in multiple messengers. Shawn mentioned something about Digsby. Little did I know that this small conversation would be my introduction with the love of my life. Shawn went on to discuss what Digsby was essentially explaining that it was a one stop portal for each and nearly every e-mail, messenger and social media account that one could ask for. I began to salivate when thinking about just my hotmail accounts alone. I have one that I created nearly 15 years ago while in the Navy, one created by my College, one that I run various fantasy leagues on, one that I …. you get the point. For this reason alone, I was looking forward to not having to log in and then out to check multiple accounts. It was only after I downloaded and began running Digsby did I realize that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

I downloaded Digsby and began the set up process. I started adding my accounts. The process to me was reminiscent of a third date after you’ve had a great meal, enjoyed a nice film, and have gone back to her apartment for “coffee”… it was really starting to get hot and heavy. I was telling Digsby all my innermost personal secrets. I was letting her into all of my e-mail accounts, and my Social Media Profiles. She in turn undressed to reveal to me everything that she was made of. Within minutes, I was ready to propose. Short of packing me a lunch with a cute note for work the next day and rubbing my back after a tough day, Digsby appeared to be to be the perfect Soul-Mate.

A great visual interface aside, the true beauty of Digsby is the fact that I have everything in front of me in real time. One click. That’s it. One single click. With that lone solitary click, I had in front of me a real time view of every e-mail account, Social Media profile and instant messenger. I was flabbergasted. In real time, the virtual world of contact and Social Media was presenting itself to me in a number of innocuous pop up windows. Instant message from Shawn_Rosko about an upcoming presentation… check. @WebMasterRadio is now following me on Twitter… check, check!! I have an e-mail from my pop mail server from a perspective client… check, check, check!!! All of my accounts were right there, neatly displayed on a sidebar with great functionality. A simple mouseover showed me my message. A click allowed me to reply, or tweet. Now, I’m not going to lie here, I started to cry a little bit. The same kind of “triumph of the human spirit” victorious tears that one may find upon watching the final 10 minutes of “Rudy.” I was in love with a girl named Digsby and she was treating me right.

I tried to quantify what kind of tool Digsby really was, so I did some timing. Using a Dell Latitude D520 on a Cable DSL connection, I found that it took me 40 seconds or so to log in to one Hotmail account, browse my inbox, log out, and log back in to a 2^nd account. I had been doing this approximately 3 or 4 times a day for a total of 3 minutes. Logging into Twtter from the same tab and scanning that inbox added another 20 seconds. Moving over to LinkedIn took another… you know what, nevermind. I’m not going to bore you. The bottom line is that I was saving 10-15 minutes a day for simply logging in and logging out. That’s about 60-90 hours a year! Seriously, that’s between 2-4 days of your life every year spent logging in and out of accounts! I wondered what to do with that extra time that Digsby has afforded me. So I decided: I’m going to take a long weekend and go to Sandals and I’m going to propose to Digsby!

My neighbor has his own pest control business. He does quite well for himself. Owns a small fleet of trucks, doesn’t hurt for business, and has a small stable of regular clients. He helped me a few weeks back get a picnic table into my back yard. We got to talking and he started asking me about what I do. I told him about WhyDontYouGoogle.us and gave him the shorthand version of SEO. He seemed pretty interested and spoke of how he’s been thinking about creating a website for his business for some time. Now since he was helping me with my picnic table, I didn’t want to throw out my pitch to him. Chances are he’d see that I was trying to sell him something and he’d go into shutdown mode. I know the feeling. As a Director of Marketing for a large Real Estate firm, I field pitch calls every day of the week. Someone trying to sell me a spot on their Restaurant place matt… that sort of thing. So I told him that I thought a website would be a great idea and let that be that. The trouble was I could have actually helped him and helped his business.

The fact is, more and more people are using the internet to do a great number of things, not the least of which includes local business searches. I do know that my neighbor has a nice little ad in the Yellow Pages, and I imagine that the cost of that ad is the bulk, if not the entirety, of his marketing budget. And I thought about all the potential sales that he was missing out on by not having a presence on the web.

I recalled a speech given by Bill Gates in 2007 where he suggested that “Yellow Page usage amongst people in their, say below 50, will drop to near zero over the next five years.” Now I know that Bill Gates is a smart guy, but I think that he might have been the victim of hyperbole. I don’t think that Yellow Pages is going to die any time soon, but that’s not the point is it? The point is that neglecting your web presence is to deny a rapidly grown section of your consumer base to the detriment of your business. It’s as if some business owners pretend that web searches don’t exist when the stark reality is that they are rapidly on their way to becoming the number 1 way that clients find a business.

I am reminded of another local business. This time it’s a Pizza shop. They’ve recently begun running some very creative commercials on television, quite catchy. And they point people to their website. What’s truly innovative is the fact that they actually take orders from their website for pizza deliveries. I’d say that they’re ahead of their time at least on a local level. I checked out the site, which was beautifully designed, and then for laughs I decided to do a Google search for “Latham Pizza”. Lo and behold, amongst all the Local Business listings, this company was nowhere to be found. Did a quick scan of the SERP and again, the site was lost. I started to imagine what kind of capital this business was investing in local television spots, and creating a dynamic website…. all the while completely ignoring any type of Search Engine marketing. I began to wonder how many potential sales were being lost to competitors by ignoring a critical aspect of their marketing plan. If this business were to spend just a small portion of what they’re spending on television ads, they’d have the market cornered on the local pizza biz.

I guess what I’m getting at here is this. Internet Marketing for local business, as much as we might like to deny it, has become not just important, but critical. Can your business survive without it? Sure. Can it flourish? Likely not. If you’re going to take the time, money and wherewithal to create a website, isn’t it simply neglectful not to market it on the internet. It is, after all, a website. And for all the big huge Yellow Page ads and funny television commercials you do, in the end, the greatest number of people who are going to find your business on the web are going to find your business on the web! You can choose to ignore this facet of marketing if you’d like, but I can assure you that your competitor is not.