Buy me a scotch for helping you with SEO? Sure. Why Not!

Katie May, founder of http://www.seek.com.au/ and now growing http://www.kidspot.com.au/ (at a rate that would put a Japanese bullet train to shame) was interviewed by Online Magazine http://www.smartcompany.com.au/ (coincidentally where I contribute weekly!)

Here's an excerpt of what she said to SmartCo. I love her comments, she's saying all the things I've been pushing for years...

Katie May - permanent marketing priorities.

It’s all about getting the traffic then building the brand. “I don’t want to be a slave to Google for the rest of my life,” she says.

1. Make really, really, really good friends in the area of search engine optimisation (SEO). “Buy them a bottle of scotch,” says May. “If you get that (SEO) wrong, you will have to spend a bomb to get it right.
   
   Build your web pages in ways that are easy to index, have good page titles, key words for each page, all the links you need to boost your Google rankings. Get the basics right and you’ll do fine. We invest in it every month.”
   
2. Try and cut a deal to reduce search engine marketing costs. To avoid those 15% commission fees on search engine marketing, try and negotiate a deal to grow the fee as you get the results. Kidspot buys 100,000 keywords (some keywords cost 1c, others a lot more), often buying expensive keywords for a day or so, then concentrating on cheaper, related search terms.
   
3. Build links. Use contra to build links, affiliates and online partnerships.
   
4. Get outdoors to build the brand. Billboards are the best way to build a brand, May says. “Experience and research tells me this works to build a brand,” she says.
   
5. Cultivate word of mouth. “Everything we do, we ask ourselves ‘Can we get word of mouth?’. Anyway to get people to send information about us on to friends and colleagues, we do it — and it’s free.”