What does a university professor and a small business owner have in common with SEO?

iSmart clients are small to medium sized organisations and for the past 15 years our web design service and our CMS product have been the cornerstone for our business. Up until 5 years ago clients were keen to own a WOW website, one that when their prospects (or competitors) visited the first reaction would be WOW.

In 2011 small business owners are much savvier and realise that, yes it is great to have a WOW website, but more importantly what they need is to be on page one of Google.

I often tell the story of a client we have in the UK. A Mum and Dad distributor who started up 18 months ago from their garage. When the couple had sufficient sales to put on a sales rep they looked at the expenditure and came to a crossroads. Do we spend 70,000 per annum on a real person who works five days a week or do we spend 70,000 per annum on search engine optimisation which works 24x7 days a week? In the end they decided to go with the SEO option which was the right choice for their business. I recently checked their shopping cart turnover and in 12 months it has topped 1.5 million, clearly their strategy is working.

Once they made the decision to use their 70,000 a year on SEO their next question was where to now? Wisely they employed SEO exports to execute their strategy, but honestly, any small business owner can do this themselves if they have the time and line their ducks up in a row.

I have been refreshing my reading on SEO to make sure a new 'trick' hasn't slipped me by and found I could barely understand the terms being used by experts today regarding search engine optimisation (and I live on the Internet 16 hours a day). I like to explain it simply to my clients like this.

Google was built by two university students for university. As such they decided that the best methodology was that when a student went onto the Internet to find information then they would be presented with links to papers published by the professors who were experts in their field.

The way the Google algorithm worked out if they were experts in their field was because students referred to the professor's research from within their own papers. Just like in books or white papers or assignments. If you refer to an expert's research then you always cite it with a reference back to the research for further reading.

I then go on to explain that if they want their website to be on page one of Google then they need to be seen as an expert in their field and other people [websites] need to link back to their published research/articles. [Referred to as backlinks.]

Easy?

I think so. All it takes is the time and passion for a small business owner to put the knowledge they have accumulated over the years onto paper.

Often of course this is crunch time. Small business owners are so busy running their business that it is a big task to find the time to articulate and publish their knowledge. Which is a whole other discussion for another day.

Sue Wickenden
CEO, iSmart Software

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