Filters:

Human beings have an advanced filtration system to allow us to distinguish between what it is that is important and what can be disregarded. The occipital lobe is where all visual information is processed. It should be noted that these are the smallest lobes found in the brain and process all the information sent from the retina through the optic nerve. The retina is like the focal point of a camera where light is cast on a series of special nerve cells that create the picture we are viewing. This information is then sent to the occipital lobe for processing.

The retina sees all and does not distinguish anything. It cant tell the difference in importance between a tree in the background or that truck that is about to run you over. It is the job of the occipital lobe to decide what is important and this is decided by how it has been programmed.

Ever had a day when everything seemed to go wrong. Even the sun may seem dim or too bright. It wasn’t but your brain had been put in bad day mode and even your perceptional vision had been altered. This is an example of how this information is put to work. Vision is less a function of Biology then it is Psychology for our purposes. It is knowing how things will be translated and how to actively engage the audience in a way that is constructive that must be sorted out.

So whats important:

Well food, sex, shelter are the basics that are biological imperatives. If you have ever wondered why sex is one of the major staples in advertising it is because our eyes and our brain is Biological designed to constantly seek out sexual partners. The reason this is often used in conjunction with alcohol is because alcohol inhibits so called “higher” brain functions. In a sense it inhibits the things we have been taught are wrong our fearful and we are more drawn to do what is basal to our biology. People are not biological designed to buy cars or wear clothing or many of the other things we do though out our day. These are culturally learned and this comes back to what is important.

Culture:

Aside from the basal needs of Homo erectus we are taught ways to meet these needs and these are described by our culture. These are things that we teach each other through modeling, shaming, praising and other forms of behavior modification.

This is why it is an extremely bad idea to hire someone outside of your culture to market to your user base or audience. Many business have gone to countries such as India for cheap design and development work only to find out that the audience is repelled by the design.

example:

If you where trying to sell the idea of Christmas to Aborigines you would not use someone from Northern Ireland who would likely use depictions of snow and reindeer. Your audience has never seen snow so there is some evidence to believe that they would not even see it.  Things that are so completely foreign to our reality are disregarded by the occipital lobe because it has no memory to base it on and subsequently sees it as irrelevant (having no relationship) to getting the persons needs met.

Emotion:

If we can find a way to get the occipital lobe to pay attention to us for five seconds we have now moved into short-term memory. This is not a bad thing but we still have a lot of work to do. The easiest way to move from short-term memory to long term is to evoke a severe emotional response to what we are presenting.

example:

The use of humor is a great way to bridge this gap to long-term memory. Laughing releases endorphins and makes us feel good. This in turn releases polypeptides that are distributed all over the body. These cause reactions on a cellular level communicating to every cell in the body that it is time to feel good. If you don’t believe me and you are over 35 years of age I have on thing to say to you “Wheres the beaf?” Now that’s long term memory… way to go Wendy’s.

Subconscious:

Or more correctly unconscious thought is that which we do not perceive as important but still retain or that which is repressed do to so internalized fear. Regardless it is perception that has crossed the occipital lobes and made it into our reasoning process. This is another tool often used by companies with larger war chests to work with.

example:

Virgin Mobil used this technique when it first hit the market in order to help the brand enter the main stream. The company realized that they were up against ATT and other companies who had become household names and thus had incorporated into how we saw ourselves. You see for many people they spend most of their lives looking outside themselves to define who they are. As apposed to asking how I can come to some form of internalized balance they attempt to become balanced with the things they see around them. This is where Virgin Mobil came in.

They ended up being everywhere. They bought adds all over Myspace. They did extensive product placement in movies and TV. They even purchase landmark building adds to appear part of our environment. It was a brilliant strategy because it was the marketing that never happened.

This form of marketing works well even on a smaller form. The point is not to be overtly recognized but appear important at the same time. This way the visual cortex basically says… “Nothing really to see here but I have been seeing it a lot and so I will hold on to it.” This is also often connected with a mood word or phrase. Something like “Be you!”. And a visual color scheme that adds to the contextually desired emotion. The reason for this is because of how the brain stores information by locating relevant pieces of information together. So the company name stored in close relation to something that invokes a pleasurable feeling will fundamentally link them together. And walla you have a brand!

The real issue is keeping it… as we saw with Virgin Mobil who spent more many on their marketing campaign then their products which always causes a negative back loop.

Conclusion:

This is very relevant to the web since we are using interactive marketing involving several forms of media presentation. Simply remember that it is all magic and the trick is in knowing how it is done. And it is all done by manipulating perception.

Thanks for reading and I hope that it helps.

All of my consulting tips are free to use but of course everyone’s situation is a little different. If you would like consulting on your particular needs feel free to contact me as some of these tips may not be appropriate for your needs.

First the good news.

If you were nice enough to stick to white hat rather then  black hat SEO methods then you are actually benefiting from the misfortune of your competitors. I can actually help your site play nice with search engines like Google. We do not guarantee ranking as some so called “SEO” companies do but a quick look at these companies Google rankings will tell you they are full of (insert inappropriate word choice here). I often have to laugh at the SEO claims of sites on freelance websites were the SEO company site ranks no where on google even after a 50 page spider search. If their company was ranked on the first page they wouldn’t be hitting up freelance websites for work they would be getting plenty of clients through Google.

Unfortunately many companies attempt to use Black hat SEO tactics that will kill your site in the long run by that time they will have cashed your check and moved on. Sometimes the long run is several hours or even minutes but generally its weeks or months down the line. Also Google has a huge algorithm backing their engine. How it ranks and indexes your site is so convoluted and secret that no one can predict exactly what will happen.

A final note on ranking promises…

I have explained this to many clients that seek high ranking for their business. They all want to be found on the first page of the Google search engine. Well there are only ten links on the first page of Google search and there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sites competing for that search position.  Guess what, many of these sites employ SEO specialists to help with their ranking. So with only ten slots its best to play by the rules. Not only will Google like your site more but there are plenty of other ways to market to your audience.

If you are in trouble the following Black hat methods may have been used with your site.

Doorway Pages -

This is a site that has keyword stuffed pages directly linked to it. Basically that means there are pages linked from your home page that have nothing but a long list of keywords or keyword stuffed content.

Keyword Stuffing -

This is where keyword terms are STUFFED throughout your page. Sometimes it looks down right ridiculous and causes the content to be disconnected and unreadable.

Auto-generated content -

This is auto generated content that is placed in pages. The content is scrambled and makes no sense. Guess what Google, like any five year old, can read. It knows about grammatical structure and it knows when its being tricked.

Cloaking -

This is a page presented to search engines that looks nothing like your actual content. Using the no follow method of linking you can prevent Google from indexing certain content on your site. Guess what that does not mean it does not read it.

Hidden Text -

There are several ways to hide content on your page. The first was basically to match the text color with your background color or image. Also there are several ways to utilize CSS to produce hidden content that will appear in the source code but not actually displayed on the page. Google is hip to all these tricks.

Link Exchange -

Hanging with the wrong crowd can get you in trouble. Be careful who you link exchange with because not only can their SEO practices look bad on them but it can come back on you. Also its pointless as Google has severely decreased the weight they place on inbound links and now search extensively for relevancy from the linking page. If the pages linking to you does not have similar content then it is disregarded as an inbound link.

Buying links from spamming farms -

Bad Bad idea. If your linking text is thrown all over and is identical which it usually is when you work with these companies Google will punish you for trying to trick them.

Duplicate content -

This is one everyone has to watch. With dynamically driven sites like Busted Designs  Google will sometimes think you are trying to trick it by posting multiple pages with the exact same content. Most good CMSs have fixed this issue in their systems but some older sites screw up in this regard. Also posting link backs from .com, .org and .net sites will drop your ranking.

Selling links on your site -

This is different from advertising on your site. The Google spiders know not to follow those links and index them. If you are not careful in setting up your advertising or are actually selling links on your site kiss your Goggle ranking bye bye.

Linking out to bad sites -

Liking to link farmers will effect your site ranking. Just don’t do it.

SEO can really help a site and can really hurt one. Although I often tell people not to worry so much about Google and look for other ways to market your site it is a factor and why not work with Google. If you need help please feel free to contact me.

Damn Google

After reading this you may be upset that Google has decide to punish your indexing. You may be feeling upset but remember that Google has to do one thing well in order to stay in business and that is properly index sites. Coming up with ways to trick Google to index you over your competitors is detrimental to Googles business model because i they can not return relative results in the search returns then people will stop using thier service. The fact that Google punishes bad SEO practices is not only good business but it is good for anyone who utilizes the Google search engine. I for one am glad that Googles black lists people who dont play fair because in my mind it is just another form of disohesty that is placing greed over a usable product.

Thanks for reading and I hope that it helps.

All of my consulting tips are free to use but of course everyone’s situation is a little different. If you would like consulting on your particular needs feel free to contact me as some of these tips may not be appropriate for your needs.

Companies in today’s market are having a really hard time gaining any traction on the internet. Gone are the days when you could graduate with a degree in marketing and not end up pulling your hair out over failing campaigns and zero traffic.

I personally out lived two marketing directors at my last position who completely ignored me do to their fear of the web.

I was running a website that generated millions of views a month and they shut it down to advertise with Chrysler or something equally as wasteful and more expensive. Did they sell car parts… nope… not even close.

The company also had a really horrible PR problem. After the CEO was spanked on 60 minutes things pretty much went from bad to worse…

Here are few good reasons to ditch your marketing director for a web PR and marketing expert.

No Formal training available for the WEB.

The fact of the matter is that there is no formal training on how to market successfully on the web. No schools have cracked that nut, and if they claim to have a methodolgy by the time the individual graduates the nut will have gone from a chestnut to a peanut or perhaps an orange.

The problem is that web marketing changes, evolves and mutates at an alarming rate. The reason for this is that the medium is so cheap and anyone can add content. Once something works it is quickly mimicked a thousand times over and it suddenly becomes annoying and your target audience tunes it out. Rule number one don’t annoy your customer.

Most marketing directors are afraid of the internet.

This is a fact because companies lose billions of dollars each year on the web. This is not the Internets fault but is due to lazy and inexperienced web marketers who want to throw money at problem as opposed to thinking outside the box. If your Marketing director is not utilizing the web its not because it isn’t valuable its because he or she has no idea how to utilize it successfully. Also if this persons idea of marketing consists of only buying and tracking Google Adword campaigns be prepared to kiss your budget good bye or at least be completely ignored. Click ratios for Google adwords have pretty much gone through the floor.

If your marketing Director has never used Myspace, wikipedia, twitter, facebook, or an of these other social networking sites then your penetration and stickiness will suffer.

True web marketers know how to utilize all aspects of the web. We don’t just focus on SEO or SEF ( same thing actually) but instead are constantly seeking new areas to find target eyeballs. Sometimes we even find our own ways to create this right out of thin air. Marketing on the web is more an art form then a Science so you need an artist not a lab rat.

Example:

GOOGLE -

Google has a tremendous amount of clout on the web and yet it is not successfully turning these eyeballs into money. The problem is that Google is suffering under its on success. In the infantsy stage of Google it was small and much more able to evolve with the internet. Now it has gotten big and bulky and it has not properly spread around decision making ability. The big money maker for Google has been Adwords but what was initially a great idea has turned on them. The concept that anyone can post adds in an unregulated environment was genius in that it offered to make $ for Google with little or no work. Unregulated and completely Automated was nice at first until Google ads began suffering from a lack of credible advertisers. Finally the ads just where not appealing to the end user and they stopped clicking on them because Google ads where inundated with spam and crap.

Now Google is suffering do to loss of ad revenue and they just don’t know what to do. The company has gotten to big so any fix could be months if not years down the line. Sites are pulling ads cause they are not making any money. I personally ran a site that was receiving 4 million views a month. Google ads even showed 4 million views a month. For 4 million displays I received around $220. Thats .006 cents a view or 5.5 cents per 1000 views. This is down from where it used to be many years ago. The exact number cost per click over time is difficult to follow since Google does not release these statistics. Why does Google not release stats on average CPC over time were adsence account holders can easily gain access to them?  Because they are going down and you just don’t advertise that you are losing money or your product is broken.

There are reasons for Googles troubles and most web marketers can give you some insight but due to the fact that its marketing strategy is so inflexible and run by pedigreed marketing people who have probably never touched Myspace or Twitter it is this persons view that Google will have to restructure or continue to have losses.

Thanks for reading and I hope that it helps.

All of my consulting tips are free to use but of course everyone’s situation is a little different. If you would like consulting on your particular needs feel free to contact me as some of these tips may not be appropriate for your needs.