AB: All-Round Nice Guy

Search engine *what*? Yes, yes, sorry if I use too many ‘big words’ this month, but for a lot of businesses, ‘optimising’ your site so that it appears higher in the big search engines is well worth the effort.

So, up front: what is search engine optimisation?

SEO (*much* easier to write than ’search engine optimisation’) is the process of preparing your web site so that it ranks higher on the search results page of a search engine. The aim is to be seen before your competition - and even though it may or may not result in more clicks through to your web site, at least you were *found* - from that position, you can work on ways to increase your conversion/click-through rate. If you consider the reverse position, where your web site does not feature at all for a given search, then trivial things like your conversion rate won’t matter at all if no-one can find you.

So how the heck to we make sure our site is featured prominently for any given search? And how do I make sure my site is listed before my competitor’s site?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Read on…

The basic idea of My Perfect comes the fact that traditional search engines (yes, Google!) are getting harder and harder to use, as they return many thousands or millions of results for even a fairly specific search.

My Perfect turns that idea around completely: instead of typing in one word and finding thousands or millions of results, we *start* with thousands of products, and we play a very smart game of 20 Questions, until you end up with just one, perfect product. We’ve coined the phrase ‘choice engine’ to describe it.

For you as a consumer, it’s a very smart way of finding out what suits you best, in non-technical language, whether you’re in early research mode, or whether you’re wanting to buy something right now. The best part is that the amount spent on marketing by the big companies doesn’t affect your choices - it only uses hard and fast tech specs to decide what stays, and what goes - so you’re more able to find the hidden gems amongst the noisy crowd.

For businesses, it’s the ultimate in marketing: we allow businesses to list themselves against products only if they can actually supply that product, which gives that business a perfectly qualified sales lead. No more advertising to the masses with low success rates - this way, we match one person to their perfect product, to a business that can actually fulfill that product.

You know that I love to talk about marketing, especially for small businesses and solo business people - and, in general, how important it is, but in a ‘big cloud’ kind of way. That’s because marketing is vital for any business - it’s simply the act of getting your name out there in a controlled and positive way.

Nine times out of ten, though, marketing is almost impossible to measure: apart from focus groups, surveys and TV ratings, any effort you spend on marketing tends to pay off as a rather long term positive ‘aura’ surrounding your business. It’s all a bit ‘woofy’, but it does add up eventually.

Enter web site statistics: whether you have a tiny one-page ‘contact me’ web site, or a small brochure online, or a larger ecommerce or content-based web site, every person that visits your web site leaves their own individual, indelible mark.

Don’t panic - any one person can’t be identified exactly, but an awful lot can be inferred from the patterns of even just a few site visitors over time, and an awful lot more can be inferred from the patterns of many hundreds or thousands of visitors to your site, giving you - and this is important - absolute knowledge of the effectiveness of your web site, and absolute knowledge of the location, size and trends of your market.

Interested in learning more then? I thought so - you don’t hear the words ‘absolute’ and ‘marketing’ together very often!

There’s no secret that the word ‘google’ has gone from an obscure mathematical reference to an internet phenomenon, to the point where it is has now joined the ranks of other marketing heroes such as Hoover and Biro. The word ‘google’ can be considered a noun (’google it’), a verb (’to google’ something), and often, an adjective (’I'm going googling’).

The main touch point most of have with the Google megacompany is their search engine - either google.com, google.com.au, or the search field built in to our browser.

Google is certainly the largest and most impressive search engine on the planet, and with it’s minimalist design, it’s both highly accessible and usable.

But (you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?) searching for things on Google is still a hit-and-miss affair: many, many times you get search results numbering in the tens of millions, while other times, your results can be few and far between, and totally removed from your original intentions of your search.

In the end, Google does the best job it can, but then it leaves us mere humans to filter the results until we find exactly what it is we’re looking for. Humans are good at filtering things - Google isn’t always the best at it.

So, just like getting to know your way around your local library, you realy have to get to know Google if you want to find things faster and easier - the good news is that there are many tips, tricks and techniques to getting the most out of searching for things on the internet - so sit back, and I’ll show you some of the best ones.