Famous words from a famous man. That's the kind of unsettling thing you say to yourself when you know you're screwed. That thought - that sickening feeling comes over you when you know you stepped in over the line and got yourself immersed in an overwhelming feeling of ill.
The same kind of feeling happens when you hire the wrong web guy, marketer or "Gurus". For the record we don't need any more gurus. We have too many of them and they, including myself, are all looking to empty your pockets Mr. Business Owner. Only thing is some of us are actually good... and some of us are slime balls and I have illustrated that fact INTENSELY on this blog and pointed out a few unsavory undesirables. These unloveables are sometimes hard to spot. They come with smiles on their faces.
THE CHALLENGING FACE OF MICHIGANSomething is seriously wrong when you go through Birmingham, Michigan. At 5PM the only advertising group in the city is done for the day. People go home and the lights go off. This isn't Chicago and I am well aware of that. People go to bed really early around here and its been like that for over a decade. Now that the web has diversified and has gotten smarter a lot of gurus work out of their homes. It is no longer necessary to be part of a big advertising agency. Still.... I find it awkward that the driving force of our economy -- big ticket advertising has taken a permanent dirt nap. I remember the way it used to be.... big advertising agencies staying up all night and delivering high end media to large outlets like radio, and television.
The streets are too quiet and people are too settled in their own ways in Michigan but there is something that is happening under their very noses. The habits of the reading public is changing. So much in fact that there have been recent reports that state that people really would rather get their news off of the web. That means news sites, online magazines and interesting segments that speak to the population in real time.
There are many "experts" out there now that claim to have been part of the dot com movement or key players in the advertising new media boom in the mid 90's. Of course a lot of this is bunk and only a select few were actually admitted into that scene and I am one of them. I worked with the likes of Carlos Segura, Foote Cone, the WWE, and Capital Records. The advertising scene was very selective of who they picked and many of the gurus that you see charging an arm and a leg for their services would never get selected. It is rare that one person would actually learn how to play all of the spots in the advertising environment. In a typical agency situation one person is kept away from the graphics people, the graphics people are separated from the copywriters, the copywriters were kept separate from the sales people and so on. One person would never know what the other department was all about. Every department in the agency had their own culture. This was all before the web and I am pretty sure it is that way today.
Now the rules are blurred. Some people would look upon that as a blessing and others will see it as a curse. Just as online typography ruined many print shops digital video has destroyed a vibrant post house industry. People are able to do this kind of work out of their homes and as a result this creates an influx of more "experts". I have a serious problem with overnight experts because of all the fluf involved. This sort of thing can be tricky to spot on the web. Some websites are complicated and it is difficult to spot where the mistakes are. In any business mistakes, (and the act of allowing them to continue) can be a very costly experience. Paying attention to certain aspects of details becomes critical and making sure that the right pieces fall into play becomes a very important issue. That becomes especially true technical SEO, search engine optimization.
It is easy for some of the mass media companies like phone directories, IT companies, and generic business card / media companies to push the important stuff under the carpet so most of them do. Yet the details of a website construction is so vital to a company. It means the matter of you being found or you being invisible. I see a lot of shoddy sites and many of them come from a large institution that services a large populace. There are many mistakes that are made and I will just illustrate a couple....
A lot of the websites are all living on the same IP address or server. This becomes a problem when it comes to ranking a site to a its full potential. I see a lot of real estate and insurance companies take this route. You could potentially have 300 real estate agents living on one website. The only difference between any of them is that they all have a unique website URL. These are not true websites by definition but web PAGES..... The business owner is at a disadvantage here.
THE TRUTH: Most websites are only optimized up to 40% if they are even optimized at all. Most optimization is the result of an accident. A lot of your websites that are out there are only occupying the top spots of Google, Yahoo and Bing by default. Simply said nobody has ever made a substantial effort to top them. When you optimize a website you can literally jump over them in a matter of two weeks. Some of our best campaigns illustrate this fact very strongly. We have jumped over 39 million web pages in just two weeks because we came on very strong.
Get the low down on SEO and web site optimization by visiting http://www.seowah.com. Once you get there you will see a whole collection of informative articles that explains how the big picture works.
Ted Cantu posted this on Oct. 16, 2012 in Detroit, Michigan and can be found at http://www.tedcantu.com http://www.1seomichigan.com
