Spider Simulator

Here's a neat tool that I ran across which can be used as "quickie" evaluator of the "searchability" of pages on your website. It works by mimicking the search engine spiders that are constantly out on the Web, evaluating and indexing Web pages for inclusion in search results. The tool is provided by Summit Media out of the UK, and it's free for all to use.

To use Summit Media's tool, you simply enter the name your company and the web page URL you'd like it to evaluate. It quickly returns a basic analysis of your page, with respect to important attributes that the spiders are looking for. If you want your pages to move up in the rankings, potentially driving considerable more traffic to your site, this is a great place to start.

I've found it to be a really handly little part of my SEO toolbox. For the heavy lifting I use a dedicated SEO software package, WebPosition. But for an easy, free, fast check of of a web page or two, you can't go wrong with Spider Simulator.

Click on this link to access the spider simulator.

Do you know of other great tools available on the web? If so, post a comment and let us all know about them.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

Strategic Advantage

How does a company compete in the long run? I’m not talking about day to day stuff—but what sets your company apart, and gives it a place in the marketplace that allows it to survive, and hopefully, thrive?

There are a lot of different terms used to describe the ability to compete: strategic advantage, differential advantage, competitive advantage, unique value proposition, etc. But all these terms mean essentially the same thing—what have you got that the market wants, that other don’t?

Drinking the Kool-Aid

At PJM Consulting I have the opportunity to talk to a great many technology company CEOs, many which are of the early stage variety. I’m taken aback that some of them don’t even understand the concept of strategic advantage. To start a company, and not have thought about what is going to allow you to break into an existing market, seems pretty strange to me. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

A far greater number of CEOs understand the concept of strategic advantage, but have a tendency to fall in love with their company’s sales pitch—also referred to as “drinking the Kool-Aid”. This is natural, but really unfortunate. Lack of realism as to what your company brings to the table, is not helpful in creating a company that will break through market noise and become successful. I would argue that realism, even skepticism, about a company’s advantage is an attribute that is important to every startup CEO. Don’t get me wrong; I don‘t mean to imply that a CEO should walk through the halls of his company, spouting “whoa is me, how will we ever make it”! But at least in internal thinking, he or she should be constantly questioning and testing whether his company’s advantage is real, and not fading. A bit of healthy paranoia can be very useful when it comes to strategic issues.

What is a Real Strategic Advantage?

So what does it take to have a real, sustainable competitive advantage? Let’s look at some of the things that are—and some that are not—what I’ll call “mirages”.

REAL ADVANTAGES

First Mover
The first mover advantage has led to some of the great success stories in high tech. Apple in PCs, Cisco in Routers, IBM in Mainframes, Adobe in Document Standards, Intuit in Personal Financial Software, SalesForce.com in Hosted CRM—just to name a few. What is important to mention here, is that while the first mover advantage is real—it isn’t necessarily sustainable for very long. First movers that don’t develop another, more sustainable advantage, often end up as road kill in the long term.

Critical Mass
Being big can be great—as long as the mass is muscle—not fat (see the large company discussion below). Being big can allow you the resources to build a great brand, spread your fixed costs over a large number of unit sales to provide a cost advantage, and enable you to attract and pay very smart people. Yes, size can be an enormous advantage, particularly in manufacturing market segments where scale is so important. As long as the company keeps its eye on the ball and uses its mass to its advantage, this can be one of the strongest, most sustainable strategic advantages.

Patents
I have mixed feeling about this one. Patents can of course become a major strategic advantage, over the very long period that the patent is enforceable. If you have a strong patent portfolio backing a product that has achieved market success—this is one of the most powerful, sustainable advantages available. But I believe that the pursuit of patents can often be “fool’s gold” for many young technology companies. First of all, they really aren’t that important, unless you have success in the market. If you aren’t successful in the market, sometimes you can become “patent troll”, suing others for infringing your patents—but that is truly a business plan of last resort. In software markets, in particular, I’m of the belief that almost anything can be “coded around”. Also, with the wide variety of stuff available for patent these days, coupled with great confusion about what is truly enforceable, it’s gotten harder to obtain a patent that you are certain you can count on. I’ve seen a lot of early stage companies dump too many scarce dollars into the patent process, which could have been very useful in that critical time window available to make a new product successful. I’m suggesting a balance here. Using the patent system can have huge payoffs, but this should be balanced with the need for capital in achieving market success.

Low Cost Producer
This is another major strategic advantage if you can achieve it. It can allow you to essentially control how much profit is made by an entire market segment. It is a lot more realistic to gain a significant cost advantage in hardware than in software. But with rapid globalization and the constant emergence of lower cost labor markets throughout the world, even current low cost producers cannot allow complacency to set in. Years ago, if you achieved the low cost producer position, you were probably set for a while. But not anymore.

Brand
This is the ultimate strategic advantage, and arguably, the only one that is sustainable in the very long term. If you establish your company as the leading brand in your market segment, it will allow you to charge higher prices, get away with somewhat higher costs, smooth over your slower decision-making, and much more. A great brand covers up many sins in the short run, and gives you additional time to recover from your mistakes, which competitors with lesser brands won’t get. In the long run, brand is practically everything.

MIRAGES

First Mover
Wait—“First Mover” already appeared in the “Real Advantage” column above! That’s right, it did. I think of being a First Mover as an advantage, but one that can quickly turn into a mirage, and often does. Think of VisiCalc in Spreadsheets, Ashton-Tate in databases, 3Com in networking hardware, Novell in network operating systems, Digital Research in microcomputer operating Systems, even Apple in PCs (they’re up now, but haven’t always been)—the list could go on and on. Many of you may not know the names of some of these companies, but they were all industry pioneers, and at one time dominant in their market segments. The message here is that being a first mover is a means to an end. It can assist you greatly in establishing a position in the market—but if that position isn’t quickly backed by some more sustainable advantage—ultimately the company may serve as a case study for some fast follower to “go to school”, and ultimately “eat their lunch”.

Technological Superiority
This is one I hear all the time from technically-oriented CEOs, talking about why their startup will win—vs. the 50 other startups and 5 established market leaders in their segment. First of all, they are usually kidding themselves—it s often not really true. They just have their head in the sand, or don’t know what’s in their competitor’s labs. And even if they do have unusually smart engineers, or a great technology platform, that in itself isn’t enough to guarantee initial success, let alone sustain it. The technology must be somehow be protected either via patents or trade secrets, and it must still be translated into an easy-to-use product that can demonstrate productivity benefits of some sort, to the target customer. Except for early adopters, no one buys products due to the wiz-bang technology inside.

Market Leadership
This is similar to the “First Mover” discussion above. Market leadership, by itself, is not a true competitive advantage. Your company may be in the lead at the moment, but why, and for how long? Maybe there is a technological innovation in a competitor’s lab that will soon make your solution obsolete, from a performance or cost perspective. In High Tech markets, leadership can be very fleeting—unless there is some substantial, sustainable competitive advantage behind it.

Large Company
This one kills many good companies. Senior management gets complacent thinking they are one of the giants of the industry—who could possibly challenge them? This complacency is often accompanied by bloated cost structures, slow decision making, lack of “smart” risk-taking, and political/bureaucratic business processes. All of these things allow the nimble innovator in a high tech market to outflank the slow-moving large company. Having critical mass can be great—but not if you implode under your own fat.


So that’s my opinion on competitive advantage. I’m sure that you may be able to come up with many more “Real Advantages and “Mirages”. Or you may disagree with the points I’ve made. Either way—let’s talk! Post a comment on my Blog, or send me an email message.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com
info@pjmconsult.com

Search Engine Optimization

Marketing on the Internet has been quite a hot topic for some time. That means different things to different people—Banner advertising, pay-per-click ads, email newsletters, direct marketing via email, affiliate marketing, Electronic Press Releases, etc. Any and all of these may be an important part of your optimal online marketing mix, depending upon the specifics of your business and resources.

However, there is one online marketing method that nearly EVERYONE should be pursuing. In my consulting practice at PJM Consulting, I find that too many technology companies are not actively utilizing this marketing method, and it’s very surprising to me. I’m referring to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the practice of modifying the content and infrastructure of your website, to ensure that the Search Engines find it, when someone enters a keyword search that is highly relevant to your site. This just doesn’t happen automatically—unfortunately.

Offline Marketing Analogies

Most of you are familiar with the use of Press Releases and magazine advertising as “staples” of technology marketing. Of the two, Press Releases are the “free”, and more credible method of publicizing your products or services. There is no guarantee that a press release or a story derived from it will actually be published, but if it is, the credibility is very high with the reader—and of course the expense may have been very low to garner this exposure. Magazine advertising, on the other hand, is guaranteed to give you exposure, but is much more expensive, and somewhat less credible with the reader, than PR is on the same topic.

I like to use an analogy from offline marketing to explain the importance and relative position that SEO should take in your marketing mix. In the online world, you can think of SEO as the PR of the Internet, while Pay-per-Click advertising such as Google Adwords or Overture is analogous to the magazine advertising that appears in the offline media (more on pay-per-click advertising in a future column). SEO appears in the “Organic” listing when doing a search in an engine like Google or Yahoo, and as a result it is highly credible. Tremendous amounts of targeted potential customers can be driven to your site via Search Engines. This is a competitive issue as well—I guarantee that your savvy competitors are investing in this area.

As long as I’m using analogies, here’s another way of looking at this topic: Would you build a beautiful retailer store out in the middle of a cornfield, 50 miles from the nearest consumer? I hope that any business person reading this would answer “No”. Yet, I find many senior executives in High Tech companies are oblivious to the strategic importance of having a website highly optimized for Search—which is the Internet equivalent to “Location, Location, Location” in the retail business world. Websites are usually built by Graphics Designers who put great effort into the “look and feel” of the site (the beautiful retail store)—and NO effort into enabling someone to find the site through search engines (built in a cornfield).

The most recent research on SEO says that appearing among the first six sites in the results of a search can lead to enormous increases in traffic to your site. For searches containing the targeted keywords specific to your business, getting your site to appear in the top six sites of the results should be your goal. If you are able to accomplish this, the visibility among your target customer will increase substantially—possibly exponentially.

Now, I don’t want to pretend that maximizing your results is easy. But at least the initial steps that you should take are not that hard. I believe that this important topic doesn’t get the play it should in executive suites, because of a “fear factor.” SEO is viewed as a highly technical field, understandable only to “geeks.” A lot of times, people just don’t know where to start. But once you delve into it, most of the steps are pretty straightforward.

So how should you go about enhancing SEO on your website? Just like most other things in technology marketing, it depends upon the skills within your company, the competitiveness of your marketplace, and the company’s financial resources.

It’s Important

To go back to our example in the offline marketing world, how people conduct their press relations varies widely. Companies with large financial resources, as well as fast-moving & competitive markets, often hire external PR firms to spearhead their campaigns, with retainers of $10-15K/month or more. For these companies, having outside experts focus on this important activity is viewed as critical, and isn’t a problem within the budget. Other companies feel more comfortable hiring an in-house PR person, both from a productivity and budget perspective. And smaller companies can’t hire PR expertise at all—but they know they need press coverage, and still find a way to write press releases and promote them to the important editors in their vertical market. Because they realize that it’s IMPORTANT.

SEO is the same. If you are in a highly competitive market and are flush with money, it may make sense to hire one of the hundreds of agencies focused specifically on search engine marketing, to optimize your site. Or you may have a webmaster in-house that has the skills and interest to take on the task. But even if you have no in-house expertise, and can’t afford to hire any—by all means, do it yourself. Buy an SEO book or one of the modestly priced SEO software packages available to walk you through it. Do it because it’s IMPORTANT.

What NOT to do

The one thing I DON’T recommend is to just “throw money at it,” and walk away. SEO is an on-going, critical activity that needs to be managed for the long haul. It is important that someone at a senior level in-house gain enough knowledge about what is important, to be able to monitor it from a management perspective. Otherwise, you risk really going off track, regardless how you decide to handle the implementation. In particular, there is a tendency to simply “outsource” activities that management isn’t comfortable with. The problem is that there are a number of “quick fix” artists in SEO, who claim to bring you a lot of traffic fast. They use questionable practices that can get you in trouble with the Search Engines, and in the long run have the opposite effect from what you are seeking. If you don’t have a senior manager that understands the implications of what’s being done, you can get burned.

Recommendations

So let’s say that you’ve decided to “do it yourself”, or at least want to get a basic understanding of the SEO process. Where do you start?

Here’s what I recommend:

• Buy and read a popular Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing book to become conversant


• Purchase one of the Search Engine Optimization Software Packages which are available for a few hundred dollars—I use Web Position from Webtrends

Once you’ve become familiar, here are the important basic steps that you’ll want to make sure that you understand:

1. Select keywords to optimize you site for, ones that are important to your potential clients and your business. Look at your own website and other marketing materials, look at your competitor’s sites, and use tools like WordTracker and the Overture and Google Adwords Keyword tools. This is a critical part of the process—you need to select keywords that are both relevant, and not so competitive that you are still able to “own them”—in other words, appear in the top 6 listings when they are searched.


2. Make sure that your Page titles and Page URLs are rich with the selected keywords. This is very important, and is why new websites should be optimized for search, when they are initially built (which usually doesn’t’ happen, unfortunately).


3. Include keyword-rich “link text” in your content, and make sure to label all images with keyword-rich text.


4. Make your main body text keyword rich—and probably more text intensive than your graphics designers would like. Even though the designers (and senior executives) may think its ugly, search engines love—and only understand—text. Some engines will even completely ignore pages with less than 300 words. If your pages appear too “clean and pretty”, there’s a good chance they will be ignored by the search engine bots when they do their indexing. So you need to make some compromises between SEO and look and feel.


5. Start a “never-ending” campaign to get external websites to create links into your site. This is also critical, because search engines use this is a measure of how “important” your site is, relative to your competitors. The more relevant and popular the linking site is, the better, but any link is better than no link. PR is a great way to build relevant links—but you can also have a clerk trolling for simple opportunities to list your company’s website, in the myriad directories available on the Internet.

SEO is actually a very complex field with lots of important, but mundane technical details. Much more can be done past this process to optimize your site. But these are the basics—if you run through this process, you will as a senior manager, be much better prepared to buy external SEO services, or hire people for your internal staff. As a C-level manager, you wouldn’t feel comfortable being ignorant as to how the PR process works, would you?

In the Internet age, neither can you afford to be ignorant about SEO!

As always, your feedback is welcomed.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/