The Online Sunshine Plan

Myth: You have to be at the top of the search engines.
Truth: They are just one of many, many ways to find your business. If you have other bases covered, search engines aren’t a necessity. McDonald’s relies on locations, as does Wal-Mart. A local car repair shop relies on ultra-high-quality service, as most of their traffic comes from repeat customers and word of mouth. There are also postcards, radio interviews,  and dozens of others you can use. (I’ve got a list of over 101 offline promotional activities as a small ebook on the companion CD.)

Myth: There’s a lot of competition for the top spots.
Truth: In some areas where they know and use SEO, yes. Otherwise, it’s less than 1 percent of the sites actually optimized. When you do optimize a site for search engines and use the social media, you wind up on top within minutes (less than an hour.)  And even if the top spot seems permanently entrenched in that spot, the other 9 spots on the front page usually aren’t. See Charles Heflin’s article on this again.

Myth: You need search engine traffic to get consumers.
Truth: This is wrong on several counts. You get search engine traffic for a minority of your viewers – only the new ones. The bulk of your traffic after you’ve built up your site is referrals and direct access, preferably the latter. Second, you don’t want consumers – which by definition only consume what you have to offer. You want clients, who you are directly helping to singly help to improve their quality of living.

Myth: It’s hard to optimize your site for the search engines.
Truth: Nope. There are five on-page points to cover (which I’ve already mentioned in this book and will cover more below) and a simple strategy of posting content on multiple social media sites (which is also below.) These on-page points should be built into your site and into every single piece of content you create. It will actually become semi-automatic after awhile. And re-purposing your content for other social media is a simple strategy to schedule in – once you have the tools set up for this, it only takes a few hours once a week.

Myth: Inbound links are king.
Truth: Valuable content is king. Not any old content, but really expert stuff. An old algorithm, which is being slowly replaced, said that the amount of inbound link determined Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP). But it’s now the social value of that in-bound link content more than anything else. Social Value of Content. How much you contribute to your community. Elsewhere I’ve covered  how I saw a scam-site be nudged out of top spaces it held simply because complaint forums provided a real outlet for its community of vocal scam-victims that it created. Heflin covers how a huge site with over 3300 back-links is being beat out by another smaller, less linked-into site with similar products, but more conscientious SEO.

Myth: You can game the social media to maintain top search engine rankings.
Truth: That is anti-social, and while you might get a top rank immediately (especially for a keyword which has no monetization, like a company name) if you keep it up, people will get annoyed and you soon will be critiqued to death on social sites, particularly blogs. And while some (ahem) companies can pay these bloggers to take their sites down, if that company doesn’t start contributing real value to that community, it goes beyond simply being shunned – they will take you down. Especially in these days of Schwartz’ and others’ “Conversation Domination”, you have to contribute real and consistent valuable content.