The Value of Offline Publicity (Page 1 of 4 )
Do you think you've done enough for your web site by optimizing it for the search engines and engaging in an online marketing campaign? Think again. If you're not looking offline, you're overlooking one of your most important ways of building traffic.
"If people don't talk about you, you are better off dead"
Akinola E.O
People Power
The web sites that get the most hits, the key words that get the most search queries, the things people want to know about...there is no surer way to score high in the SERPs than providing people with what they want to know about. No SEO can beat content when it comes to these indices. Writers have always known it, that is why it is all they write about. Talk shows get huge ratings because of it. It is so basic, but few web sites use it. The only ones that use it effectively are search engines. What is it that people want to know about? It is people.
Users want to know about people, they want information about people. They want to hear about people. Yes, users search for information about products and prices, but when it comes to the majority of sites that get mentioned, they are the news sites that talk about people.
People stuff
Donald Trump built a billion dollar business around his name. Steve Jobs brought Apple computers back with the iPod. Every day, the biggest news and queries online are about people. Celebrities routinely get hundreds of thousands of search queries. On the Internet, Jeff Bezos is inexorably linked to Amazon, Yang to Yahoo, and Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt to Google.
What does that have to do with SEO?
The sequence is inescapable. People do not hear about people online first; they hear about them in offline media, mostly television, or in the papers. Curiosity now drives the user to the Internet; s/he loads Google and types in a search query related to a name.
It is not advertising. Most of the offline news is just that, news, free publicity. And anybody can generate publicity. The Americans even have a saying about it, "everyone is famous for fifteen minutes." Your "fifteen minutes" can translate into not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of hits daily. How do I know this? Yahoo lists the top searches for the day; these are queries that run into the hundreds of thousands. What are the searches about? People who were in the news that day, or the day before, or the week before. These are celebrities and personalities who got free publicity.
Next: How do you do it? >>
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