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27 Dec

SEO is the Yellow Pages Equivalent of Aardvark

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Auckland 2004 Yellow Pages books
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SEO or search engine optimization is a term most people are familiar with.  However for those that are still struggling with the term, an analogy is helpful.

Last century the one of the critical business marketing tools was to have your company listed in the Yellow Pages.

Now from a sales and marketing perspective, the key to Yellow Pages success was to have your Company Name either:

  1. Listed First or
  2. Have a big Advertisement

First Listing Importance

If you still use or can remember using Yellow Pages then you would remember seeing companies with names like Aardvark or AAAAcleaning etc.

Why, because the Yellow Pages listed in alphabetical order.   So if you were in an industry with lots of competitors then being listed in the first few results was really important.  The reason is simple consumers tended to start at the top of a list to find the name and number of a company to contact.

This same tendency still applies with consumers.  However now consumers use the Internet search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo and Bing to find the same information.

And like their Yellow Pages habit, consumers still more likely to select from the first few listings than to keep flicking through the pages of results.

This is what SEO is all about

SEO is about getting your company listed in the few search results.

But this is where the problem starts.  Search Engine results differ from Yellow Pages in a two very different ways.

Alphabetical Listing is not relevant to Search Engines.  Hence having a name like AAAcleaners or Aardvark automotive has no benefit on search results.

Secondly, Yellow pages has/had a strict categorization.  Categories were defined such as Cleaning Services etc.   Consumers checked the index to find the category that best correlated to the service they were looking for.  Then they went to that page with the listing of all companies.

However such categories have no real relevance on search engines.  Instead consumers effectively define the category by selecting the words they think best describes what they are looking for.  The more popular or common words they use to find you business service or type we now refer to as key words.

Ad-words and Yellow Pages Advertisements

If you could afford it, you took could also improve you Yellow Pages effectiveness by taking out an on page Advertisement.  Such advertisements were and still are effective.  They attract the consumer eye over a plain text listing.

Search engines have the equivalent of this through the sponsored and AdWords that appear on each of your search results.  The difference is though, that research has shown that people are more likely though to click on a result that the search engine has returned than an adjoining paid add.  My thoughts are that the reason for this is that people tend to “own” the returned results (organic results) because it was their key words that brought them up.

Social Media Effect could be the New Aardvark

Naming your company by giving it multiple Aa’s etc in front helped to get you listed first in the Yellow Pages.  It was a budget way of overcoming the marketing power of the big companies who could afford to take out the big Advertisements.

Social Media in some ways could be argued as being the new low cost way of neutralising the big budgets of major competitors in SEO.  Corporations and major franchises can afford to spend big to make sure that their companies come up first through SEO and through paid on-line advertising.   Social Media though does appear to have the ability to help neutralize this, through the range of free or low cost tools.

SEO for Beginners

SEO is not a simple science!  The rules change frequently and there are numerous companies that specialize in it.

However here are a couple of starters.

Evaluate your own site using the free tool from WebSEO Analytics, it is excellent;

Secondly, if you are serious about at least understanding it, read through the following slide presentation by Alex Conway:

SEO Basics – The What and Why of SEO

View more presentations from Alex Conway.

Please send back your comments or thoughts.

www.makinglifeezy.com.au

the worlds most innovative hire and rental software

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09 Sep

Meet Our CTO Aaron Holesgrove

Hi, my name is Aaron Holesgrove and I’m the CTO of Making Life Ezy and Ezysoft.Aaron thumbnail

Many of our clients ask our advice on a range of technology matters, from operating systems to even iPhone applications.

Therefore as part of the growth and popularity of this blog (due to the fantastic work of our marketing team) and our software, HireEzy, I’ve decided to contribute to this blog from a technology perspective.   Specifically focusing my thoughts and experience on using technology as the driving force behind the success of your hire or rental business.

Technology Brand Agnostic

In this first post, I thought I would give you all a chance to first learn more about myself, my general thoughts about the IT landscape and to give you a bit of perspective on the kind of things we’re working in on as a team as we continue to innovate in cutting edge software development as well as versatile and powerful online services and solutions.

The first thing I’m often asked when introducing myself as a member of the IT community is of course “so are you a Mac guy or a PC guy?” to which I reply that I’m neither. I believe that to have a true appreciation of the field of IT is to have an objective view of it, otherwise stubbornness will simply lead to you to miss out on things that would otherwise be really fun to be involved with and be a part of. This is particularly true for Making Life Ezy, as we are a platform neutral company working with both Microsoft and Apple database technologies to deliver our technical solutions, whilst using predominantly Adobe development tools and online service tools from Google, Yahoo and Amazon, amongst others.

Unbiased Technology Opinions

With that I mind, I hope that in reading my tips and general advice here that you find them to be similarly unbiased and impartial to any technical platform and simply concentrated on providing the best answer and/or solution to a problem or task. More than ever, diversity in the marketplace is leading to a lot of uncertainty in trying to decide what solution best suits each business and I get asked a lot by our customers about general things such as “is Windows Vista really as bad as everyone says it is?” and “so what do you think about Macs? Is it worth ditching my PC?”. These are fair questions and in my first couple of posts I will be looking to delve into these sorts of topics and many more in great depth to guide you in the right direction and spare you any emotional despair and personal resentment toward the IT companies that have provided us with a lot of our cheers and tears over the past decade or more in the process.

Latest Technology Updates

I am an RSS feed addict and I often spend my nights at home scouring all my favourite IT publications on the web for information about anything and everything. I can argue the merits of any technical platform with the best of them and I enjoy being asked questions that are as broad as “so what do you think will be popular in the next 5 years”, or “who do you think will ultimately have the best mobile phone platform?”. There are so many different things that are truly becoming exciting in IT right now, such as the rise of social media as a marketing platform, the true portability of content with the rapid innovation of the mobile phone as a computer alternative and emerging platforms such as cloud computing and even the continued evolution of development platforms and the sorts of opportunities they provide to both us and our customers.

A lot of these different things are not only technologies that I’m interested in and read about all the time but are areas that we as a company have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies and part of my role in our company is to be the one who can educate the rest of our team on these emerging opportunities and what they mean for us and could mean for our customers, so I look forward to using my blog posts to also help you learn about the sorts of things we’re building that can truly help you in your day to day business activities with case studies of customers who are working with us in our Beta Gold program to develop new systems and services as they evolve.

Feedback or Questions

If you have any questions or queries about areas of IT that you’ve perhaps never understood or would like greater clarity on then by all means I encourage you to write to me with your thoughts and I’ll blog about them here as they arise. I look forward to engaging in greater discussion with you all.

My Background

11 years technical experience in web development technologies and platforms.

Experience includes projects for The Seven Network (formerly i7), Optus Direct, The Movie Network, UKTV, TV1 and The Main Event Wizard Home Loans, I-Max Theatres.

Specialises in the emerging market in Web 2.0 and their application to business problems.

Aaron Holesgrove
Email: aaron@ezysoft.com.au
Twitter: @aholesgrove

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