Google secrets? Fahgedaboutit...

Yesterday Single Throw spent a very worthwhile morning at a Memory Training Seminar sponsored by business, sales and marketing seminar promoter Move Ahead 1. At our booth, the question always seemed to evolve around the same thing: "How do we show up for XYZ in Google." (Replacing XYZ, of course, with what you feel is the be-all-end-all phrase that everyone that needs your product or service is madly typing in right at this very minute.)

Everyone wants that "secret." No matter how many times you try to explain, "There is no secret," they still think you're holding out. I imagine they're thinking, "Hey, they have a successful business doing just that. Of course there's a secret." Wrong.

I can understand why people think there's a "secret." It's in the news, both in business categories and consumer headlines. There's huge conferences built around it, with next week welcoming one of the leading annuals right here in New York City. Each conference, article, book, news headline and email spam makes us want to know...Search Engine Strategies, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google, 20 Great Google Secrets, Google Secrets from Information Week, and I can go on adding some of the great resources out there as well as the never ending list of misinformation, but I won't. (Just do a search in Google for Google secrets!)

Here's the point. All these conferences, articles, books, news headlines, and spam emails exist for one main reason: there is NO secret! There are lots of tips, techniques, great ideas and almost daily revelations but there's no single tip or secret. And there is no answer of how your site can be number one for this, or even show up for that.

There are things you should be doing that will help though. First and foremost, understand it's not about being number one in Google, or Yahoo! or MSN for that matter. It IS about your viewers. Finding out exactly what they are looking for is a step in the right direction, because showing up in Google for XYZ means nothing if your target customer isn't even looking for that.

So we've said it before and we'll say it again. You can find all kinds of tips about showing up in the search engines. To make that have a positive effect on your bottom line is whole nothing column, or 10 or 100...

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