It used to be that you would find special niche businesses with an exceptional online presence. This was especially true with record labels, niche book publishers, used book sellers, such as Powell’s and a variety of other businesses that found great growth opportunity through the interconnectedness of the Web when they couldn’t find sustainable means in their respective locale. However, things have begun to shift in recent years as energy and sustainability issues have become more and more of an issue.

Scientists, universities, and businesses alike are all investigating sustainable means for producing energy and/or just making less expensive and less environmentally toxic means of transport. However, on all accounts we’re a long way from the energy silver bullet. What’s happened because of this is that local has become the new exotic. As we move towards this emphasis on local goods and services, including locally grown food, locally made goods, local entertainment, stay-cations and the like, small business is faced with huge opportunity on the Web.

Historically only a precious small percentage of small, local, businesses have bothered with the most basic Web presence. The thing is as more and more folks are using iPhones, Blackberries, Twitter, Facebook, and Google to find family restaurants rather than national franchises, and small boutiques over big-box stores, or just trying to find something unique and different in their locale they’re turning to the Web. More and more, I’m telling small business owners and would-be small business owners to get their company online before you worry about the Yellow Pages and the like. Even a basic, professionally done Web presence is better than no Web presence at all, especially if you’re doing something truly local and truly unique to your community.

Came across an interesting article here about a local Michigan company, Oneupweb from Traverse City, traveling around the state in a motor home offering up free advice on digital strategy, SEO and online marketing in general.

My initial reaction to this article was two-fold: First, what a great idea and second, this such an excellent example of a socially responsible Michigan firm doing their part to try and help those struggling in the Michigan economy.

However, what Oneupweb teaches here isn’t just about helping Michigan, but really it’s about outreach and social responsibility. As I said in my post here, the Web has always been social and it’s always been about sharing with others. It’s one thing to to do this only in the digital domain of the Web, from the comfort of one’s office or living room, such as I’m doing now, but it’s something else entirely to take this sharing and exchange on the road to meet the man on the street where he lives. Very inspiring.

For many years, I’ve been inspired by the Taoist concept called Wei Wu Wei, doing by not doing. This philosophy can be applied in many ways, but since the focus of this site is digital strategy, let’s focus on that: When you’re doing digital strategy the greatest success is found when you’re working with the Tao, or loosely translated, the unseen current of the universe. If you’re working against the Tao, then somehow, you just won’t succeed, or succeed for very long. Why? Because you can force anything, but forcing, by its very nature infers opposition, or opposing something… many dollars and much energy can be spent to force things, but eventually dollars and energy run out and whatever was being opposed prevails. If you’re working with the Tao, then there’s no need for force, because there’s no opposition.

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…

I started doing this blog as an outlet for sharing my experiences, best practices, and things I’ve learned working in the field of electronic communications and digital strategy. The one thing that I didn’t realize, each time I sat down to write a post, was just how much my education in and feelings on leadership would play in the creation of the posts, particularly with regard to publically taking a position in my personal life that might have direct repercussions to my professional life.

One such item that I’ve come to terms with is my belief in marketing as a way of developing long-term awareness rather than a tool for short-term business growth. Some folks might consider this two sides of the same coin, but I don’t. For those people focused on short-term metrics and the bottom-line it’s difficult to imagine that marketing *only* creates an awareness. However, this makes me think of an old adage: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Some marketers prefer the alternative ending: You can lead a horse to water, and when marketed well, the horse will drink, and drink, and drink. I don’t believe this.

I believe marketing creates awareness. If the universe wants what you’re marketing then awareness will reel those folks in. If the product or service provides lasting value then the product/service will retain them.

Too often marketing or the creation of awarness around a product/service is viewed in the short-term. Without immediate results the marketing is considered a failure, and with great short-term conversion and sales the marketing is considered a success. This makes pretty flimsy criteria for determing success or failure, but to many folks things are just that black and white; for these folks, sadly, reality doesn’t coincide.

Marketing needs to stay focused on the long-term. Creating awarness, opening and changing people’s minds is an extremely slow process. I would argue that there’s no shortcut, and it’s something that an organization must take their time with.

Site Pro News is a great resource, and one that I look at daily. Late last week, I came across a great story on linking and SEO, two things that confuse a lot of folks. So in an attempt to provide value to readers of this blog, as a digital concierge, of sorts, I wanted to add a link to this site. The story is called Links 101 – Puritans, The Puerile & The Pragmatic by Ben Kemp, who also maintains his own blog called The SEO Guy, and as far as I can tell, this is the most brief and definitive discussion on the place of links and SEO I’ve come across. I’ve wanted to take the time to discuss these same things, but when I read Ben’s article, I decided why should I reinvent the wheel, I’ll just repost this article. I highly recommend that anybody interested in linking and SEO, or for those just confused by the whole things, read this story.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as author Robert Pirsig put it, had little to do with Zen Buddhism, and in the early 1970s, when the book was published that might have been true. However, in the nearly four decades that have passed a new definition of Zen emerged. While Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a discussion of what quality means, the sub-text of the book pointed at a non-controlling, and mindful approach to life and the universe where things were allowed to unfold without resistance. This is what makes me think of the title for this post, Zen and the Art of Web Strategy.

In my mind, the egalitarian nature of the Web and Web strategy has always been closely linked to Zen. With the Web, like Zen, anybody can get started any time. The barriers, if any, are few, so everyone has an equal opportunity to become a Zen or Web master. The Web, like Zen, encourages openness, because sharing isn’t a means to an end, it is the end itself, and that’s what has always driven the Web. The Web, like Zen, is allusive; when you think you’ve got it, either the next great business idea or the riddle of the universe, that’s precisely the problem and serves to illustrate that you don’t.

This is an unorthodox perspective when viewed from the traditional business paradigm because it seems as though everything is out of control, and just out of reach. To some extent it is, but that’s what makes the strategy fun, challenging, and quite a bit like a Zen koan.

I’ll use the concept of viral marketing to illustrate this point. Viral marketing is a relatively new spin on a concept that’s surely as old as time itself. Marketing 101 would say that anything that gets passed on by word-of-mouth, through email forwarding, or other comparable means of person-to-person dissemination qualifies as having gone “viral”. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is the attempt by marketers to manufacture this kind of response through the use of a variety of media, media platforms and sometimes unethical means. Sometimes it works, but mostly it’s hard to replicate.

Case in point, with regard to the Grateful Dead; it was unprecedented, and nobody could have ever foreseen that thousands of people would be trading tapes of Grateful Dead shows. In the earliest of times, we’re talking about badly reproduced and noisy recordings that were nothing more than an allusion to the music being played; nevertheless, it took off. Eventually, many live shows were put up for sale and Grateful Dead tape traders have become Web file traders who use the Web rather than the outmoded media of tape, and surely that will evolve into something else, but nobody could have bet on that, nobody!

Another great example is YouTube. One of the things that has gotten YouTube off the ground is the proliferation of clumsy and silly videos, some well-intentioned, some not so much that have made their way around the Web. YouTube has created something special and greatly diminished the barriers for getting video (and yourself) on the Web. With the amount of video that has been posted to YouTube it makes sense that some of these have taken off and gone “viral”, whether it is because of foolishness, incredibility or just because of the hilarity factor; and with 10-65,000 videos per day being posted it only increases the likelihood that something is going to go “viral”. YouTube has grown because of these “viral” videos being passed around. However, YouTube’s growth (and probably existence) would have been doubtful if it wasn’t totally open; YouTube’s parent company, Google, really, really get this.

In the examples above neither could have happened if left to traditional business paradigm means. And, anybody who you have believed that they could would have been laughed out of the room. However, in an open environment that fosters quality, and is willing to be patient, and let things unfold, naturally, anything can happen… frequently nothing happens, but while nothing is happening something is growing out of the stillness… Truly, this is Zen and the art of Web strategy… I’ll be talking about this more…

Alright, so the series seems to be taking off, see my last post here, because this morning, even with all the coffee in the world, I couldn’t shake the idea of talking about keywords.

Back in the pre-Google era SEO was wholly dependent on keywords, specifically, meta tags. Meta tags ruled; you could put them anywhere, but the head tag was where the most scrupulous Web master put them, as they would only be seen by bots, not humans; however, the system game approach was to put them EVERYWHERE… particularly, you would see them in the body of the Web page, dozens and dozens, sometimes hundreds of keywords that attracted the bots of the day to what may have amounted to one paragraph of content, that frequently wasn’t relevant, or had a page full of ads, or a link to an affiliate program or something… The search engine would get you to a page like this, but you would never come back, because it was a bust, a waste of time.

Enter the Google era… keywords still ruled, meta tags didn’t hurt, but wait there’s more! This is where the SEO content writer piece comes in that I talked about in the previous installment. As I said before, in the old days you just wrote and if the writing was good, and the site had a good search ranking over all (probably due to the intersection of keyword placement and keyword-infused content), it would probably get picked up, but Google changed the game; not only did you have to write good content, and have a pretty good ranking, but now a contributor to your ranking was indicated by folks who linked or referenced you, kind of an early form of the wisdom of the crowds, before the term had been established.

Keywords are still very important, but they play a slightly different role, or rather the writer has a slightly different role when it comes to the placement of the keywords in the narrative; I’ve found that there are two basic rules of thumb:

• Write good content
• Infuse good content with keywords

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there’s no shortcut to getting a good search ranking, but these two rules greatly diminish the time it takes to get picked up. For instance, let’s look at this post. This post has numerous references to the terms: keywords, SEO and Google. These get the post half-way home as far as ranking is concerned, if someone happens to be looking for info on these items, but if people start to link to this page or reference it, Google will say, ‘hey, wait a minute, we need to give this page a higher ranking’… I can’t emphasize the two basic rules of content and keywords enough…

This is part 1 of an on-going, but not particularly linear, series on SEO.

The world of Web is steeped in jargon that leaves many entry-level common folk scratching their head first in wonder, then awe, and then irritation. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one such term. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about SEO; you want folks to find your site, you need to get listed it in search engines, because that’s where people go to comb through the mass of data that is the Web. However, the problem begins when you get people gaming the system.

Case in point: A few months back I took an interest in doing some freelance music journalism on the Web. I did this in the last couple years of college (1999 – 2002ish). At the time I found that the Web was a burgeoning source of information that generally paid — bonus and bonus. So I decided that I would look into this again to exercise my writing skills and make some cash on the side. I have to tell you I was blown away to see that along with various writing requirements, you had to be versed in SEO content writing. Huh? What’s that? Of course I knew what that meant, but I was a little shocked to see that as a requirement for freelance music writers. I did a little research and found that there was a new breed of Web writer, SEO content writers (click here for a link to a quick Google search where I plugged in “SEO content writers”).

Back in the innocent days of my previous web content sojourn there was just writing, and if the site had a good presence, and the content was good, it would get picked up by search engines… that was also kind of the beginning of the Google search revolution… A different time to be sure, but this illustrated a significant change… Web content had grown up into a real and valuable thing, and this was an eye-opener for me.

So where am I going with this? Basically, in my professional life I can appreciate how one might like to fast-track their Google rankings with slick SEO styled content, but at the end of the day, that will only get people to your site, it won’t make them continue to come back. There’s no shortcut. If you want a site that brings people back time and again, there’s only tried and true way, and that’s to deliver valuable content on a continuous basis. This won’t only get people to your site; it will get people sharing the value that they’ve found on your site, which in turn could make your site more valuable than you ever imagined. More on SEO to come…