Branding Your Site: Free Yourself from SERPs!
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Is this topic necessary? After all, it is the Internet; just put up a site, offer content, optimize for search engines, and voila! You have hits. Well, maybe you have hits, and maybe you don’t.

And if you do have hits, how long will your traffic grow? How far can you expand? How big can you become? What is the difference between a small, profitable operation like www.internetmarketingsecrets.com, or www.freewebmasterhelp.com, and a large household name like www.devshed.com. I mean, they all offer great content, they all optimize their sites for the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) but only one of them is a household name, relatively speaking, on the Internet.

The Bad News

In the real (as opposed to virtual) world of traditional marketing, it is the biggest brands that have the largest market share. In fact, market share is not determined by quality of service or excellence of product. It is a question of branding. Does Daimler Chrysler make the best cars? Or does Nokia really make the best phones? If they do, will they still make such great products tomorrow? I answer, who cares? I have my mind made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!

On the Internet, Google has branded itself as the search engine. The terms "google" and "googling" even made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently to signify using the Google search engine to search online. Despite the distinction of using a lower case letter and the fact that it specifically refers to just the Google search engine, Google risks its name becoming like Levis, which I found in the Oxford Advanced Learners dictionary defined as "jeans." Amazon has branded itself for books, and eBay for auctions; devshed has branded itself through its network of sites for content -- specifically, for information about open source software.

A brand will beat a better product or service ALL the time, not once, not nine out of ten times, but all the time. In traditional marketing, if the customer wants to choose any other product apart from the brand, he will easily find an alternative (a second brand that competes in that space, like Coke and Pepsi). In the online world, however, there usually is no second. Second in a category can spell death (read as "dependence on SERPs").

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Comments On: Branding Your Site: Free Yourself from SERPs!

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