Those of you who’ve been marketing on the Internet since the 1990’s will remember the hazy far off days when “meta descriptions” where SEO magic, the biggest news on the news sites was somebody called Monica and a mysterious Presidential stain on her dress, and Linux was going to take over the desktop within 12 to 18 months.

In 2010 things are different, right?  Meta descriptions are out, nobody remembers Monica – or her dress,  and Linux has taken over the desktop.

Actually, that last line is complete bollocks.  It should read nobody cares about Monica, her dress or that President and Linux-ists are still predicting the takeover of the desktop in – just another couple of years (they are lovable idiots).

A preamble on SEO Black/Grey/Blue/White.  If you read this, or any other site with similar content, looking for clues on how to game the system AND STUFF THINGS UP FOR ALL OF US then I am hoping the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits and your chooks (chickens) turn into Emus and peck your dunny (toilet) down.

But Meta Descriptions?

They’re back, in a sense.  So are meta keywords too. Not in the same way we used them in the 1990’s, but more subtle and much, much more powerful for ISV websites.

Meta Descriptions are those snippets of text you see in search results beneath a site link.  Some time back Google said they didn’t use them as a ranking factor and nobody seemed to bother anymore – except me, well, almost.  Meta Keywords are tags embedded in HTML and designed to give a search engine an anchor on which to determine what a site is about.

Search engines evolved, Google in particular, and their methods of parsing text for relevancy evolved right along with them.  It was only natural that as the SEO spammers abused Meta Descriptions and more often Meta Keywords that they’d be relegated to the scrapheap along with pure HTML websites and the “Dancing Baby”.

However a couple of things have changed of late.  Google has started Personalized Search, basically using cookies to show you content you searched and clicked last time, and CMS software such as Joomla and in particular WordPress (there are other platforms of course, but for brevity we’ll call them all CMS).

These two factors turn the table on both of these meta tools.

First – search engine results.  A page that returns a relevant, logical synopsis – genuine sizzle and not fake stuffing – via it’s Meta Description is more likely to be clicked on than those sites who don’t bother or shove a bunch of keywords in there -which mean nothing logical to humans.

Second – CMS software uses the concept of tags and categories.  Both of these, due to “pretty” or “SEO friendly” page naming are rich follows for the search engine IF the content they contain is relevant.  Robots love content and rich links.  Be nice to them, don’t abuse them and they can and do look after you in turn.

Frequently CMS software allows these pages to easily have Meta Descriptions based on their content either auto inserted from the content (best) or entered by the site owner (don’t be tempted to scam here – you’ll loose).

Tags, using plug-ins in a CMS package can be turned into Meta Keywords.  Two years of experimenting with this has paid off.  The formula is simple:

• The Page Link accurately describes the page content.

• The Meta Description accurately describes or summarizes the page content.
• The Meta Tags provide links to other relevant pages and perform a minor role as Meta Tags (requires automation for best results).  The reason here, as far as I can tell, is purely reinforcement.  On their own the Meta Tags are useless – almost.  But combined they seem to have an effect.  Valuable if inserted automaticaly from content.

You’ll notice from the above the word “relevant” is used in each bullet point.  That’s because, at the end of the day, relevancy, hard work and honesty increasingly count more in SEO – though they have always counted for something – than ever before.

In fact, these items probably make up most of the value of content rich websites to the engines.  All of my tags and meta keywords on my sites, and of course meta descriptions, are inserted automatically.  The tags, unless I specify otherwise, are checked via automation with Yahoo and scored on what people are searching for.  Often some odd ball tags/meta keywords are inserted.  But you’d be surprised at the combinations people use when searching.

Keep in mind – at all times though – that irrelevant traffic is irrelevant.  Try and constrain yourself to the people you are trying to market to.  Nobody needs bandwidth soaks from streams of disinterested clicks.

Scott Kane

——————————–

Q. What do you call an xhtml document with a spade in it’s head?
A. <head>a spade</head>

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1. Google Local Search

If you sell local specifically this is critical.  Not going to be helpful for those targeting internationally though.

2 Webpage Load Time

There have been some hints from Google’s Matt Cutts that how fast a website takes to load may affect its ranking.  In other words the faster a site loads the better the chance of getting a decent rank for your niche keywords.  Some things about Google really get my goat.  For small companies server load time can be extremely hard to manage.  Mostly because the majority of small ISV’s are on either VPS’ on overloaded networks, shared hosting or a little dedicated box hidden in the water closet of a datacenter somewhere in downtown Dallas.

However them’s the breaks.  Looks like this could get important with the theory being concocted that fast loading websites are delivered by a “reputable web host and fast internet connection.”  Which says quite a bit about the hosting industry. 

3. Social Media

As the world grapples with the social and moral implications of “social media” you don’t need to be Nostrildamus <misspelling intentional> to see it’s the new shiny thing for 2010, as it was in 2009.  In theory social media has become an essential tool to reach out, communicate, build trust and build relationships with consumers.  It’s also a phenomenal time sink waiting to suck in the unwary into futile exchanges.  Use it carefully – but use it.  Facebook and Twitter in particular are proving so far to be worthwhile sources for secondary results in the engines.  Buzz words emerging = “Micro Targeting” and “Personalization”.

4. Mobile Users

Mobile communications is a still growing market that’s already significant.  Despite Apple’s marketing destroying the definition of the industries abbreviation “App” for application – I’m already meeting consumers correcting me in conversations for saying I’m writing an “app” – “For the iPhone!!”, they shout enthused.  When  I answer “no , for the PC”  they declare “…if it’s not  for an iPhone it’s not an “app”".  Grrrrrrr!

You are going to have to make sure your site loads cleanly at 800×600.  Just as 22” widescreen becomes almost entry level some ning nong shrinks our real estate again.  Some folks seem to be opting for a compromise here and getting and using a sub domain like mobile.xyz.com and sticking something friendly in there.  If you’re running an RSS driven site this is easy – but be careful of duplicate data lest the Google Police get on your case.

5 Analytically

I’m not a fan of Google Analytics as such – mostly because I cringe at the idea of Google having my data and the EULA they wrote to accompany it.  But Google isn’t the only player in town and if you’re like me and hate external data collection of your logs then you can take a look at PIWIK   – Click Here to investigate – It’s free, open source and it runs on your own server.  Adds a load to your MySQL databases and CPU but if you’ve got the resources available it’s quite a good tool (I run it in conjunction with standard Apache logs and some WordPress stats programs).

The idea of analytic tools is to answer the “how” as opposed to the “why”.  What that means is you can see how many and who visited a page on your site but it won’t necessarily tell you why they didn’t actually buy anything.  Don’t hold your breath while waiting for the latter tool. 

Dissecting your data is however, jokes aside, a powerful way of understanding visitor reactions to websites and pages.  Things such as trends, stickiness of a site and geo-location to name but a few can go a long way towards helping us understand our customers.  From this we can improve and test – or rinse and repeat if you like – and improve the visitors experience and with diligence increase sales.

6  www vs. http

Here’s an odd one from the people who brought you “WordPress”.  WordPress MU doesn’t support “www”.  It will redirect you to “http” without the “www” every time.  Sure you can hack the PHP but next update it’ll change back again as your hacks are overwritten.  This doesn’t seem to have surfaced in the single site/blog edition of standard WordPress yet – but as the code is now merged it’s probably only a matter of time.

Why?  Security?  Big Internet wide bug?  Nope.  Because “www” is unnecessary according the FOS Unix-head developers at Automatic.  I love WordPress, don’t get me wrong and have a lot of respect for the team who produce it – but come on!  Why redefine a web convention for the hell of it.  Because it’s “unnecessary” is not a reason.  It’s dunderheaded and bubble headed and an instance of the worst kind of geeky arrogance.

The point of raising this is that if it becomes mainstream in CMS’ such as WordPress it’s going to mess your Google XML sitemaps up as Google gets narky about addresses that redirect.  That means telling Google for every site you run that the site “name” has changed.  For one site it’s not a big deal if you generate your XML sitemap automatically.  It’s a bloody nightmare if you do them by hand or run many sites.

7. Organic Search

Some folks are tipping organic search will become less important as some of the item points above – which only scratch the surface of “emerging” things to watch and do.  Personally I disagree.  Given there are indications of Google, Bing and Yahoo using bits of meta tags in pages again – not like the 90’s, but not ignoring them either, as they told us they were not that long ago – and the proclivity for consumers to gradually become inured to advertising due to seeing Google ads at every other site they visit, it’d be nutty to ignore organic search, in fact, it might just be an edge for some folks.

8. Download Sites

If you’re still trying to use these to “optimize” the engines for your product and, as most do, slack off on the SEO and social networking then you’re going to be overtaken in many instances by those who don’t bother with the download sites and have moved on.  Get over it – the engines recognize these sites for what they are – it’s time we all did too.

Scott Kane

————————-

“A man was running late for  the office one day, so he was exceeding the speed limit along the freeway.

The next thing he knows his wife rings up & says that she’s just seen on the TV that there’s a maniac speeding down the wrong side of the freeway.

The man replies:

“It’s not just one, it’s all of them!!”

————————-

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Regular readers will know, only painfully well, that I consider download sites to be loathsome creatures.  The justifications for this view sprinkle articles in this blog time and time again.

So I’m not going to go into detail, again, on why I consider them to be so.  Please use the search tool above if you seek clarficiation on this – but warning, it’s not pretty.

Some time back (well over twelve months ago now) I stated on several forums and this blog that the day was coming when the search engines started banning these cretinous sites.  While that day hasn’t quite arrived, it would seem we are closer than many, if not most, ISV’s suspected.

I’m a server log reader-aholic.  I religously examine my server logs through a number of tools daily (not all at once) for each website I run.  Imagine my delight today when I see the search term from Yahoo for  “free live sound mixing software” and got the following result, page after page, for the download sites:

Click the images to zoom in…

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

After page six my enthusiasm for looking flagged.

Some notable names in there, many more are not there of course.  But it’s encouraging.  Site Advisors accuracy on such matters is a matter of some dispute, but in this instance I’m not complaining.  Though I do feel for the Adwords advertiser the scumsites download sites are featuring in the listing.

Updated: Forgot to mention, and it’s important, if you’re linking to these places on your website, indeed any download sites at all – PULL THOSE LINKS NOW.  Site Advisor works on the principle of guilt by association.  If they are flagged you’ll end up flagged like this too!  That’s been the scenario in the past.

Scott Kane

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1. Launched CDROO.com Royalty Free Music, aimed at the theater sound cue industry for our product MixAction, but also for podcasters, bloggers, video creators and handy for ISV’s.
2. I posted about content writing for websites being hard work and fun.
3. Posted here I intended to, in a sense, replicate what was done June 2008 here in an effort to bring MixAction to market – goal July 29th as a beta at the minimum.

So how’s all that been going then?

1. and 2. CDROO And Content

Pleased to say my contention in respect of content really paid dividends with CDROO.  The site went live on Sunday 7th of June 2009, previously it was offline, pointing to a “Currently Offline” page with no content, all database driven so therefore invisible to the search engines and no sitemap.xml file to cheat with.  As of yesterday (just on a week later) CDROO has made it to page one in Google for what are, for that site, important keywords.  Money where my mouth is time, so:

You can click the image to the right to zoom in.

Basically the site has begun to appear on page one in Google for a number of competitive keywords and in the example to the left extremely competitive keywords of “Royalty Free Music”.  Not all Google engines in all TLD’s reflect this yet, which is quite common with Google, there’s a bit of catch-up that goes on with the TLD’s.  But it’s a pleasing result and it’s basically down to rich content.

Now, the thing is here that while CDROO has nothing to do with software sites, it’s music, the keywords being targeted are more competitive than most Micro ISV’s software products.  There are domains on page one of that result who’ve been there since the turn of the century.  Some of these players are huge with very large websites.  There are no download sites to help them get there, CDROO has a Google PR value of only 3 (it’s been offline for almost 8 months or more and most of that PR exists due to this blog).  It’s down to the content there, there are no Adwords campaigns for it running now or previously.  I’ve made a point of posting this, not as a pat on the back or even to refute the nonentity who posted a comment last week decrying the article I wrote on content – and to be fair there’s a comment in the same post from an ISV supporting the claims I made on content so it wasn’t all negative.  Rather to illustrate this process is not magic, it’s not about silly coloured SEO hats or anything else.  It’s actually about rolling up your sleeves, being creative with content and putting in the hard yards.

Did WordPress, the engine the site uses for delivery of all content, play a role?  Absolutely.  No question.  The right plug-ins, using it’s rich features such as categories and tags certainly played a role, Google and the other engines are eating it up.  Sales are small, no question, but visits are increasing and as sound and music is to a degree subjective it will take time to turn the SEO result into sales as the collection of available music and sound on the site grows.

3. July 29th Goal For MixAction

OK, this is actually the tougher one of the two.  Unlike this time last year I’m now either running or building six websites, including this blog, so there’s less of me to go round.  But yes, yesterday was a productive day coding and a good start to the self push I started yesterday – and I got an article written for MixAction’s own blog – something I now schedule to do two to three times a week.  MixAction’s website still doesn’t rank number one for every keyword, but it’s nearly always in the top two results there and indeed in most instances does rank number one for main keywords and I’m seeing it overtake those it wasn’t number one for over time as I continue to write content.

The people using the tool Keyword spy and WhoIS lookups that “analyse” the site  that I see in my MixAction site logs daily?

You’re doing it wrong! 

Looking towards an update on coding next post.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use. – Wendell Johnson

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A notable exception to this is Steve McLeod and his Poker Co-pilot who did go to release and who has managed to create a pretty successful product and business as reward for his efforts.  Congrat’s to Steve!

You may also remember that in November last year, after struggling with the terrible and bug ridden implementation of COM inside Delphi I switched to .Net and Visual Studio.  Since then CodeGear have a .Net version of Delphi that looks reasonably good, but I’ve decided to stick with VB.Net and C#.  Yes, both and yes it works very well for me.

Since November 2007 we’ve had a lot of issues with nature (bushfires), a bit of surgery that made my right hand temporarily useless and of course recoding everything into .Net takes a lot of time, given I was a .Net newbie at the time I started.  On the upside I released PerforMixer which I might add is yet to make a sale on the internet, as predicted by me so no surprise there, but encouragingly it’s now had 17 separate IP addresses searching for serials, working codes and torrents.  That’s encouraging because 17 people feel strongly enough about it to steal it and so far, at least for those 17, it’s resisted attempts at tampering.  Will be interesting to see how the Partial Key Verification system survives in the less than opaque environment of .Net compiled code.  In addition to this we put CDROO online this week and while it’s still working it’s way up in the search engines we have had several sales to date – and thank you to those ISV’s who purchased so early on in the sites career!!

In the meantime we’ve been doing a heck of a lot of background work in MixAction.  To say it is an altogether different product to the one shown here last June is an understatement.  It’s even undergone some changes since earlier this year.  But I’m pleased to be able to say I’m now confident I can get it out into full beta (again!!) by the end of July 2009.

To Keep Me On Track

Because I found the whole June 2007 thing enjoyable and the regular daily blog posts a great tool for staying focussed I’ve decided to try to do the same thing starting Monday 15th of June 2009 through to July 29th 2009.  If I fail to do so this time, given the enormous lead up I’ve had, I’m going to be pretty peeved and invite one and all to let me have it in the comments section of this blog! 

No, I still honestly believe time periods of 30 days etc are generally bad news for development cycles.  In this instance I’m literally bringing the pieces together into the UI and connecting them with glue and code.  So I’m not reversing my stand on this.  Rather I’m simply forcing myself to stop iterating without a release.  It’s way past time I did that. So here goes… 

So, barring hospitalization for Swine Flu, or something equally bizarre, my goal is July 29th which was the day I hatched out some, almost, 46 years ago.  A present to me, in a sense I guess.

Let’s see if I can do it.

On a final note, Automatic have released WordPress 2.8 update.  So far I’ve updated all my sites, except this one.  Sunday evening I’ve set aside an hour to ensure I get the update done, experience so far has shown it’s fairly painless with one or two recalcitrant plug-ins here or there.  I’ve left this blog till last as it’s my busiest site and for some reason weekends have been more busy on it recently than weekdays.  So Sunday night (early morning in the USA, arfternoon in Eurpope) this blog will be offline for a short time, hopefully no longer than around five minutes, if the other sites are anything to go by.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Never judge a book by its movie. – J. W. Eagan

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One of the important things of course is the content has to be valid and relevant and not just so much “spam”.

Dennis Crane of Doctor Explain fame wrote a nice little list on his blog, so here it is:

1. Press release archive
2. Product news
3. Blog
4. FAQ & How-To
5. Knowledge base
6. On-line forum
7. Product live tour or demo
8. User testimonials
9. On-line manual
10. . Trouble shooting articles
11. . Product use cases
12. . Sample project list
13. . Freebie add-ons
14. . Industry statistics and news overview
15. . Periodical research reports
16. . White papers
17. . On-topic articles
18. . Press kit
19. . Specials and discounts
20. . Awards and in-press reviews
21. . Review of complementary products and services
22. . Product comparison charts and tables
23. . Your interview to somebody well known
24. . Your bio or your company profile and history
25. . Site map

You can visit Dennis’ blog here:

http://www.drexplain.com/isv-kaizen-blog/website/25-content-ideas-for-your-misv-website/

The trick here is to get creative.  Think outside the squares and not like a square… 

If you know your market, and if you don’t you shouldn’t be selling product into it, then getting ideas isn’t hard with a bit of research (Google is invaluable for this) you’ll find plenty of things to expand the list or for use within the examples.

Another method is to use your server logs.  Search the SE’s with the links recorded in your logs from search engines (keywords and particularly phrases which are if anything becoming more important these days).  These are the issues people are interested in as far as that combination of keywords is concerned.  This not only increases your visibility for that keyword but gives you material to maintain your position if you are already ranking for it.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Realism…has no more to do with reality than anything else. – Hob Broun

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Well.  Actually no.  Kind of, but not exactly.  I am but I’m not.  I could be but I’m not really… 

At least in the sense that I have here previously.  Instead what this article attempts to address is a link between “download sites” and “domain knowledge” and how they have utterly nothing to do with each other and why you should care.

Now that I’ve totally confused you – let me follow it up with:

It’s not hard to influence search engine rankings for your business/product with a sprinkling of common sense and some good old fashioned hard work and never use a PAD file or a download site again.

Better than that – that influence is done using your own information, your own controls and your own time and it does not involve any stupid (or clever for that matter) – pick your colour hat -  “SEO’ techniques at all.

It’s simply common sense and most of the search engines (including Google) welcome it.  It’s pretty powerful and people without any experience can apply it providing they follow some basic common sense – and -  are consistent and diligent and use a plan….

Oh.  A Couple of more things:

You’ll need to either have solid domain knowledge about your product or at least know (or at least try to find and learn about) how to access information that will enhance that knowledge.

You’ll need to stop saying you ‘can’t write” and understand and accept that practice will improve what you do over time – as in all things – and hence how and what you write.

There is no “can’t” if you are bootstrapping.  Instead you compromise, learn and adapt.

You need to consider that people reading your content are not going to be critics considering it for the next Pulitzer prize or expect you to provide a thesis.

Blogs, for example, are best served raw.  Warts and all – and people actually seem to prefer it, even if they disagree with your contention – because it’s coming from the heart. Your heart.

The psychology for this, as far as I can tell, lies somewhere with the popularity of TV soap operas and reality shows.  If they can relate to you then you have a leg up on the competition and for them to relate you’re better off sounding like an average person writing than, say, a professional journalist.

If you can write like a journo then more power to you – but it’s not essential.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I pretty much equate download sites on the level of somewhere between slugs crawling around in the dirt – or gentiles feasting on exposed flesh.

I don’t think they do us any favors.

I don’t think we need them.

I’d love to see them shrivel up and kick the bucket.

There are exceptions like the CNet sites, Tucows and a handful of others – but the rest are total Google spam.

Yet ISV’s and more particularly mISV’s cling to them in desperation and honestly believe they’ll help them in their quest for, well, whatever your personal quest is for your product and business…

Most mISV’s and a good many ISV’s are very much like the kittenpreneur above.  They think this is the key to the kingdom.  Total Google domination that will out click their competitors.  They tend to forget their competitors are probably using PAD files with similar descriptions listed on the same download sites.  From page 1 to page infinity of just about every search engine.

I firmly believe there is a better way.  But as a statement that’s not going to cut it, right?

OK.  An act of faith to a limited extent is needed here.

I’m going to use this blog as a limited example.  It’s early days for this blog.  I’m not Bob Walsh or Seth or Joel.  I don’t get anywhere near their level of traffic – though it’s growing.  So I’m not going to actually state what keywords I’ve used to work my way up onto page one (and higher) for certain ISV and mISV related terms that older more established blogs dominate.

But I will explain the reason – the real reason – for why I started the blog and what it proved to me.  Something I will be taking away to use on my business product website’s.  Having said that – the blog has grown beyond the experiment and it has many more purposes now, including the fact I like to write, people seem to get some value out if it, even if it’s just disagreement, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun! 

I started this blog – and admit I came late to this game – as an experiment only a few months ago in March 2008, to see if content really could influence the search engine results we see.  The blog uses no Adwords, it doesn’t do anything else except consistently discuss issues related to my own mISV business in the making and general ISV issues or subjects of interest.

It uses various tools to enhance those keywords, the very ones we’ve been using for years like meta tags etc.  Because it’s possible to automate this in tools such as WordPress the task is made a lot easier to be sure.

But…  It’s the content that is critical.  The content is relevant to the keywords and it’s paying off in terms of results when it comes to the subject of starting an ISV or mISV.

If you look at the articles I post here they pretty much all have something in common.  The most obvious might not actually be obvious to all.  The subject line for each post.

In most instances they have been chosen for the purpose of testing their impact on search engine results.  You might be surprised to learn that I get around 50 – 100 hits in the logs for “cracks, hacks, keygen’s and torrents” each month due to one article alone.  That I get currently twenty hits a day for “secret herbs and spices” even though this blog has nothing to do with chicken… 

This would be utterly stupid for a product site where you want relevant eyes on relevant content.  But in the nature of an experiment anything goes – OK?  

OK – the point is that the subject plays a critical part and it’s so easy to do.  That the subject is also a meta tag in WordPress by default certainly assists in this.

But  to really make a difference you have to have posts that relate to the subject, my “secret herbs and spices” hits will ultimately wither and die, I have no interest in maintaining those keywords.  I just wanted to see if I could. 

The other, for this blog, more important keywords however are used in blog posts time and time again.  In the subject, in the articles, in the meta tags, in the blog tags, in the categories and so on.  They are more durable, though do require maintenance – frequent posts with content.

I see, in various forums, at times folks asking how often Google spiders a site.  They don’t believe me when I tell them that Google comes into this blog several times a day (other blogger’s will understand this and why it is so), and articles go up within hours and often right to the top of Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft’s various search engine flavors like Live).

The trick is the XML sitemap and  the fact that you can set Google (via a free account from Google) to come at a certain frequency.  That and a WordPress plugin that notifies Google of a new post when it’s posted… 

But without frequent posts Google has nothing new to get (same goes for the other engines).  So clearly if you want to play this game, and I believe firmly you should, you’re going to need information that updates frequently.

There are several ways you could handle this.

1. A blog.
2. A website that incorporates a blog type engine.
3. A CMS like Joomla or similar.
4. Hand written HTML pages (a major PITA – I used to do it this way in the 90′s and trust me, you don’t want to have to do that when the other tools do it so much better).

You don’t have to have a blog, at least not in the sense we think of them.  You can use blog software simply as an article manager.  The idea is to get people to visit.  Information has more “stickiness” than a product page.  The idea is to become a resource.

Alas Usenet is Dead…

Many years back now the accepted wisdom was to join Usenet groups and offer information to people and become a helpful regular using your signature in each post as a sales tool.  Alas Usenet is Dead.

What’s needed, and has been lacking, is a clear alternative.  People are not subscribing to Usenet.  Heck, most these days don’t know what it is, let alone how to use an NNTP client.

Articles are that alternative.

• People use Google as if it is the Internet.  We need to grasp that average people are typing URL’s into Google instead of the address bar and clicking the Google result to go to a specific site.
• People use Google as an encyclopedia.  Why not be the source of information they are looking for?
• People are hungry for information.  The mISV and ISV can fulfill that hunger and in the process expose these people to their product.  Tactfully of course.  One has to resist the urge to blast them with marketing rhetoric in articles unless the product clearly addresses their quest.  Tact…

There are rules here…

Yep, there are rules.  The objective is not to try or succeed in spamming a search engine.  The objective is to become a valid, readable, content rich place that adds value to the search engines themselves, potential customers and as a neat side effect, your business.  The rules are:

If you write crap you’ll be crapped on.

You have to write information with the intent of contributing something of value.  Your opinion is valid, your perspective is valid, your knowledge is valid.  However a half hearted attempt to scam the search engine with unfulfilled keyword stuffing and rubbish will hurt you, not help you.

This is the virtual world and not the physical world.

The same rules do not apply. You can build up your content over time, and get pretty quick results as you go.

Google, for example, can be inexplicable at times.

This is not a get rich quick scheme.  This is about hard work, planning, rolling up your sleeves, analysis and it must be said – sheer determination.

It’s true the Google-dance, the sandboxes and other weird stuff impact on us all.  But content – valid content – can greatly assist.  None of my sites have been sandboxed, for example, ever and I have numerous domain names.  All of them have been indexed and visible within 3 weeks of registration and putting something up.

The old truisms are no longer true…

At least as far as marketing ISV wise goes.  What I’m talking about here is the old “truisms” that were dead set true yesterday are no longer true.  Download sites were essential to our businesses.  Usenet and forum posting was the only way to get the message out.  But the new mitigating factors such as the emergence of Google, blogs, PHP driven content technology (like WordPress, Joomla and similar tools to name but a few) are more effective, within reach of any ISV and have an incredibly low cost.

I’m no soothsayer and I’m not trying to say a sooth.  Waking up and smelling the coffee brewing is part of evolving our business, products and minds however.  There is no doubt we need to wake up and start inhaling those vapors.  Way past time.

I do know, understand and appreciate that many reading will not feel comfortable with what I’m suggesting here.  It does require, for many, the pain of overcoming comfort zones.  But a decision has to be made – do you control your destiny or are you happy to let it meander along with the likes of download sites and your competition controlling it for you?

Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.  But it needs to be asked because time and time again the same objections come up with ISV’s.

“I can’t write.”

You couldn’t program once either – how did that change?

“It’s OK for you.”

No it isn’t.  That’s presumptuous of you.  We all have nagging doubts about ourselves and we all have the capacity to address them.  You are no different to me or anybody else in this regard.

“You’ve had a lot of practice.”

So have you – you’ve just got to change your perspective on how you consider what you’ve written.

“There’s nothing to be said about my product.”

Respectfully – look at the logic of that statement.  Either you don’t know your subject matter (domain knowledge which you can fix) or you wouldn’t say that – or you’re backing the wrong horse and need a different product that you do know something about.

The bouncing cueball…

Steve Ballmer bounced around the stage and yelled “Developers, developers, developers…” and forever made an impression on programmers.  I still haven’t worked out why this is so.  I simply can’t fathom any sincerity out of Steve’s repetitive bouncing athletics in this case.  However – I do believe there is a more important bouncing chant for ISV’s  and it’s this:

“Content, content, content, content, content…”

If you take anything at all away from this article – or even this blog – I’m hoping it will be that. Content.

Thanks for reading!!

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. – Mark Twain

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