Before starting my own SEO company I worked in the corporate world. Being an entrepreneur at heart, I worked in the corporate world only for the training and experience that working for larger companies can provide. I was a highly successful salesperson and had even worked on the side as a sales trainer for small to medium sized businesses. The money was incredible at times (I once received a $200,000+  commission check for one month of work) but no matter how much success I had I didn’t want to work for other people anymore. Nothing beats working for yourself.  Unless you can’t make enough money to pay the bills and your forced to be a man whore  (or just a regular whore…I’m not sexist)  just to make ends meet.  Lucky for me I’ve never had to deal with that.  Sales have always come natural to me. Of course, there are plenty of great SEO’s that don’t need to sell their services because they have a great reputation. I’m sure Aaron, Todd, Rand and other high profile SEO’s can pick and choose their clients without ever having to make a single sales call. The reality is that if you do  good work, you will get plenty of referrals and/or your existing clients will increase their spend with you. I’ve only been in busines for a year and a half and I no longer have to make sales calls because of the amount of referrals I get. If you are in the position that you are looking to grow your business, then like it or not (I know many of you hate the sales thing) you are a sales person. You have to be one at some point if you have your own business. This post is aimed at helping the SEO’s who target small to medium sized businesses.

 1. Target the right clients

Whether in the corporate world, or in the beginning stages of my company, I always carefully select who I’m targeting as a prospective client. Most importantly, they need to have the money to pay for my services. There are many ways to find out which businesses will spend money on advertising. TV advertisers, radio advertisers, Yellow Page advertisers, etc. One example would be to look at your local Yellow Pages and find those companies who do full page ads. Those advertisers may be ripe for the picking considering the use of Yellow Pages has steadily decreased while Internet usage continues to grow. Many Yellow Page advertisers have seen a decline in sales over the past few years.

Also, make sure that you can actually help their business. There’s nothing worse than somebody trying to sell something to someone that doesn’t need it. Ever heard someone referred to as someone that “could sell ice to an eskimo“? I’ve always hated those sales people. DON’T SELL SOMETHING TO SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T NEED YOUR SERVICES. It’s called need based selling. Only sell something if it’s needed by your prospective client. Also, don’t offer SEO services if you can’t do the job. There’s nothing worse than someone who over-promises and under-delivers. There’s enough bad so called “SEO’s” out there that give the good ones a bad name. Or even clueless morons who trash what we do.

2. Find out who the “decision maker” is.

The decision maker is not the receptionist. It’s not an assistant. It’s not the administrator. You want to speak to the owner, president, Director of Marketing,… someone like that. Do research online or just call and find out who makes the marketing decisions. In small companies it’s almost always the owner.

3. Set up the appointment.

 You have a few options here:

A. Stop in
B. Call
C. Email
D. Write a letter

If you stop in: Make sure you bring something in with you. Do something different that other sales people don’t do!  Otherwise your just another sales person and most receptionists or “gate keepers” are trained to dispose of sales people. Drop off a simple web analysis report for them (speak to them in normal human speak, not SEO talk. Most people don’t know what an ALT tag or even what link popularity is). SPEAK TO THEM IN THEIR LANGUAGE!! Or print out some Google searches that show the top 10 results for a term you know they want. Business owners hate seeing their competition ahead of them! If you are just stopping in, don’t expect to see the owner but be prepared if you do.

If you call: In almost every business, the receptionist will answer so be prepared. Write a little script if you have to. Be clear about why you’re calling.  You’re an Internet marketing consultant who works to help small businesses to improve their visibility on the Internet. Their website can’t be found by those consumers looking for (example) “a girls boarding school.” You noticed that their website is missing many of the things that Google requires in order to rank on the 1st page of Google and you’d like to schedule an appointment with Mr. X to show him how you can help their company be found. “Did you know that over 1,000 searches a month are done for people looking for a school like yours?”.

If you email: Make sure you title the email “Name - Meeting Request” (or something similar to get thier attention). Many of these will never be read because of spam blockers and other reasons but use the same basic info from the phone call but with more detail.  Make sure you provide some examples of your work. At the end of the message, ask what time works best for them?

Send a letter: If you do send a letter, again, use the same basic content in the letter as the email. Use a hand written manilla envelope. Not the regular postate sized envelope but the kind that you can stuff an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet without having to fold. They are much more likely to open this than some envelope that looks like everything else they receive that goes straight to trash can. At the end of this message, let them know you will be calling to set up an apointment at X:XX am/pm. Use an irregular time like 9:13am or 3:28pm.  Make sure you call them EXACTLY when you said you would. THIS MAY BE THE MOST EFFECTIVE METHOD OF ALL (especially if you’re not good on the phones).

 One of the most important rules in sales is you cannot sell anything to anyone unless that person realizes they have a need. What’s the most important thing to any business? Sales! Sales are the life blood of any organization. There are some businesses that can’t take any more business but those are far and few between. Make sure you make it clear to them how you can help them grow their business. Give examples of other businesses you’ve helped. Success stories are always a plus.

 Follow these steps and this will help you set up the appointment.  On my next post I’ll be talking about what to do on the appointment.

 So those who have used Wikipedia in the past to build links will be dissapointed to learn that they will now us using the “nofollow” tag on outbound links.  To quote the people over at Wikipedia: 

“At Jimbo Wales’ directive, all external links within the English language Wikipedia are now coded “nofollow” — this should help cut spamming immensely once word gets out in the SEO community.”

Wikipedia was one of the sites where you could get a high quality inbound link by contributing good content. I’ve used it to build links before (legitimately). However, I think we’ve all seen people abuse the system which is why Wikipedia is making the move to the “nofolllow” tag.  Bottom line is that those outbound links will no longer pass any “link juice” to the sites they’re linking to. Of course, certain pages of Wikipedia are so heavily trafficked  that it’s still worth it to get a link just for the traffic alone. Seems to me that Wikipedia is getting stronger all the time. In many occasions, there is no way they should be ranked as high as they are (for example “search engine optimization” shows Wikipedia ranked # 1 on Google??? C’mon).  With this move, their site will get even more powerful as their PR will all be passed internally.

The move to nofollow will not eliminate link spam. Has it really reduced the amount of link spam you see on your blogs? No. Not really.  We all have to deal with link spam every single day. It will reduce it some but absolutely it will not solve the problem. Is it the right move? Yes. If I were running Wikipedia I’d have done the same. You get the benefit of reduced spam while also making your site more powerful.  The people most pissed off are probably the link spammers. At least Matt Cutts will be happy.

Search technology improves everyday. It’s in the search engines best interest of course to ensure that happens if they want to grow their revenues. Users of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or any other search engine use those engines because they feel they produce the most relevant results for their queries. Google dominates search because most Internet users (as I do) feel they produce the best search results. Most of the time anyways. Of course, we often times see spam sites dominate search results and nobody except the spammers themselves likes to see those results. As Google and the other search engines try to improve their algorithms to ensure better results for users, this means that many of those sites out on the web using techniques that go against Google’s guidelines will be at risk for penalization or deletion from their index. One of the most easily abused techniques is the use of invisible text (text that a search engine spider sees but visitors can’t). Most commonly, text is hidden by using the same colored text as the background. There are other ways of hiding text of course, stacking layers, in external CSS files, etc. Previously Google didn’t crawl through external CSS (not to my knowledge anyways) but Disney’s fan blog recent delisting proves that things are changing in that regard. Obviously, Google is trying to crack down on SEO techniques that they feel unfairly manipulate their results. It got me thinking and this leads me to the point of this post: Are the SEO techniques that you’re using on your sites (or your client’s site) safe?

As search engines like Google improve their algorithm, certain SEO techniques that have worked in the past may not work in the future. Whether it’s invisible text on something like your link building efforts, it would be wise to try to prevent your site from being smacked by the newest algorithms if you care about long term rankings. For a long time now, site owners have known the power of inbound links in improving site rankings.  This is why we all see those incredibly well written reciprocal link requests in our email box every morning. That whole process has been completely abused so sites that only gain links through link exchanges will be at risk. In a recent blog post after a recent SES, Matt Cutts said “…our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links.”  He didn’t say “reciprocal links are bad” but why would their algorithm be attempting to detect reciprocal links?  Obviously they don’t approve when it’s done to excess. He did say “excessive reciprocal linking”. There’s nothing wrong with reciprocal linking but when Google detects that you have an outgoing link to all sites that are linking to you, it’s pretty obvious. When all your inbound links have the same anchor text, it’s pretty obvious. So what can you do to help ensure your sites are not in jeopardy? Don’t make your link building obvious and easy to detect. Some tips:

• When you do exchange links, make sure to link only to content related sites 
• Stay away from bad link neighborhoods. Always analyze the link profile of anyone you plan on linking to. Link to someone who is linking to a bad neighborhod, and essentially you’re linking to those sites as well.
• Make sure you have plenty of one way links to your site (at the very least buy some listings in some of the better directories).
• Make sure you deep link (get inbound links to internal pages of your site, not just your home page).
• Link to other sites that are helpful to your site visitors. Stop worrying about “leaking Page Rank”. Seriously. Share the link love if you ever want it in return.
• Vary your anchor text. The same text all the time is an obvious indicator. Make your link building look natural by using variation.
• Link Bait (or find someone to help you link bait).
• A significant jump in the amount of inbound links can be a red flag (If you’re link baiting you have nothing to worry about. If you’re spamming blogs you should be worried.)

Taking these steps should help to improve the chances that your site(s) do not face the wrath of the Google gods.