Notice I didn’t say anything in there about making people buy things?  Why?  Because if you have a great website that attracts the right audience, they will naturally be interested in your product or click your contextual ads.

If you build a website around buy buy buy – unless you are Amazon or Best Buy – you are just going to look like another little website trying to sell them something.  But also, if you aren’t building a quality website and you want to compete with bigger players, you will be lost somewhere in the 1,837,882 results returned in Google for your keywords.  Being 139 is no good. Not many people slog through 14 pages of results to find you. Frankly, I’d say no one does.  In fact, studies show that most people don’t go beyond the first page (which I think is nuts, I’m a big researcher and I often go to page 4 or 5 or further if I really want to dig into a topic).

I am often asked advice by friends who want to know how they can get people to click on their ads on their site more or buy the products they are offering. These are niche sites on a very narrow topic usually.  I say, stop focusing on the ads, and focus on making the site the go-to place for the problem/niche/topic your products purportedly fix.  If you get a big enough audience, you will sell what you’re selling.

Let’s say you have decided you want to sell fish oil – this is a totally random scenario only to illustrate the process of attracting potential customers.

You know that Jack’s Northern Atlantic Fish Oil is the best fish oil on earth. It lowered your cholesterol and your skin and hair look great.  You also know Jack’s willing to give you $10 for every jar of fish oil you sell. Hmmm, I can make money selling something I totally believe in!

So you build a website that goes on and on about how Jack’s fish oil’s the best and you have to get it now – oh you will feel so good, buy this fish oil! Buy it!  Buy the fish oil!

You get one sale, two sales…then three. Oh you are so excited. Your website is just AWEsome.  But then it stays at a trickle. You get a random sale here or there.  You start looking at your analytics.  You find you do really well on “Jack’s fish oil cholesterol”  – ok, that’s a pretty specific phrase, what I call a “buyer’s phrase”, but how many people do you think search that phrase?  Not many based on your sales.

Now you have a dilemma – you can’t write dozens of articles on Jack’s fish oil. It would be ludicrous.

However, you have started to live a healthy lifestyle. You went to the doc and found out you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, maybe even borderline sugar numbers.  So you went on a health kick. You have lost 25 pounds, your cholesterol is almost normal without prescription meds, your blood sugar is awesome, and your blood pressure is well-controlled.

Why not create a blog-like site just about living healthy?  You could talk about your journey – the feelings you went through when the doctor said, “Heart attack waiting to happen.”  You could share your healthy snack ideas, talk about getting over your aversion to exercise.  You could probably post something daily about the challenges and choices you make.

Now you are creating something that might interest people to come to YOUR site rather than just go to the Official JackFishOil site.

There’s a bit more to it than this – focusing certain pages on certain keywords, using tags to categorize your content, various plugins that will allow articles to be indexed within minutes of publishing.  But this is about the big picture:  build a site that interests people, throw your products in the sidebars and pepper them about the site.  You will get more visitors with more useful interesting content, and some of those people will most definitely click your ads.

These cheap techniques to try to improve search engine positioning often work pretty well in the short run. That is, until Google figures it out and starts to downgrade the value of it. In some cases, you could get penalized for participating in this type of spam scam.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing content that is valuable to the public and that will serve a need among a search engine’s customers. You cross the line when you generate tons of garbage that are just re-iterations of the same old, “we create the best X product…most effective…truly amazing…” blah blah blah.

Frankly, anyone using free press release services is putting themselves in the company of low-brow SEO folks. You are better off using quality services that monitor for junk press releases. If your service lets you put out any kind of garbage, journalists are not taking there releases seriously. Face it, how many people take TransWorldNews seriously anymore?

Doorways are a lazy-man’s SEO.

You have to remember one golden rule: If you trick Google’s customers, Google is not going to like you.

If you always keep in mind the fact that search engines do not want to be tricked into showing lousy content, you will produce quality sites with useful content that has value to the people using the search engine.

If you aren’t sure what constitutes this type of page – it’s basically a single page, often on another domain, with a different keyword focus than your main site’s home page then links in to that main website. It’s basically an attempt to use keyword-rich domain names to re-direct search engine traffic from that single page to your main site.

Why not instead write some really strong content on internal pages of your site? Your home page is not your only opportunity for optimization.

The content should be relevant to your target audience

The content should be of enough quality that visitors don’t immediately leave your site

The content should use relevant anchor text for cross-linking with RELATED content

You must recognize that search engines have customers, and they know when their customers leave your site immediately to come back and search again.

There are many factors that influence search engine positions, but quality content definitely reigns supreme. A few things to avoid:

Trying to find ways to use your keyword until the content becomes awkward and unreadable. Don’t bother. They stop counting when they reach a certain “saturation” point.

Trying to hide content – Big NO NO – white text on a white background is old school bad and should not be practiced under any circumstances.

Duplicate content – don’t build twenty sites all with the same content slightly altered for different keywords. First of all, it compromises quality, second, it is rarely unique enough to give you much bang for your buck.

In the end, if you update your site atleast three days a week (more is better, but three is the minimum) with unique, quality content you will be well on your way to having a strong website.

Diverse landscapes influence style. The experience of different places, different faces allows an expansive view of the world that can be expressed in the simplest marketing advertisement or most complex screenplay.

My writing reflects these varied geographies. I can write and edit materials on dramatically different topics, from clinical medicine to parenting advice columns, from opinion on crime and the social landscape to instructional pieces on hand-feeding a baby bird. I can digest information and create compelling copy no matter what the topic.

A co-worker once told me, “People have no idea what you can do by seeing you on paper. They have to work with you to know how committed and creative you are.” I wouldn’t trade that ability for the world. This isn’t arrogance. This is appreciation: for a childhood that was filled with Tchaikovsky and Rembrandt; an adolescence filled with guitar and competitive swimming; and an adulthood filled with new cities, new faces, and new experiments.

I remember in the early days of SEO (pre-2000) there were plenty of tricksters using doorway pages other bad practices.  There was some pressure put on me to do the same: “Oh, why don’t we have hundreds of these single pages each optimized on a keyword?!”  Because it’s a very bad idea.  Anything you are trying to manipulate results rather than simple do the right thing to improve results, you put yourself at risk of being banned from a search engine.  Even BMW got banned at one point – and had to beg it’s way back in (and reportedly had to give Google the name of the culprit – although I can’t confirm that happened.

The best SEO is that done to attract your specific audience in a compelling way.  This is primarily done through well-structured websites and lots and lots and lots of good content (read: not copied from other people).

It takes a little longer and lot more work to achieve a strong Internet marketing presence the RIGHT way, but it has a persistent and powerful impact on the bottom line. SEO has come a long way from doorway pages and keyword stuffing and white words on white background (Note: Never did these silly things), but there are still people who want fast results and fall for short-term SEO strategies. These strategies can be at best ineffective, at worst, get you banned from search engines.

My parrot website led to Barron’s contacting me to write a book about lovebirds, the small African parrots I loved.

Screenwriting Background

Produced: Television Long-Form

Rapture, TriStar TV.

Split Images, TriStar TV (based on novel by Elmore Leonard)

Television Series

Lazarus Man, Castlerock/TNT. Two 1-hour episodes (Starring Robert Urich)

Unproduced Work-for-Hire:

Tales from the Crypt, HBO. Half-hour episode

Shoot-Out, NBC. Long-form (Movie of the Week)

Unloved Crimes, Winkler Films. Created dramatic series; pilot written.

Feature Film Scripts (spec):  Criminal Minds, Tommy Gun, Dream of the Jaguar

I am also taking a stab at a wiki, although it is limited to invited participants.  The Drug Rehab Wiki will be a comprehensive dictionary of sorts on anything related to addiction, drugs, and treatment.

I recently decided to focus on this site and moved it to wordpress. The old site was more a portfolio, and I wanted to focus more on writing about the work I do.  I have over a decade of experience, and so much has changed from the early days of Internet marketing.

Building websites is like building little cities. It can be inspiring, challenging, and a lot of fun.  I hope to convey that in the stories here.