Good afternoon. While I'm pleased you posted news about our recent new business win, I'm confused by your comment about OLSON being absent from Google. Out site, www.oco.com is working and you search "olson" in Google it's the first hit. Can you expound on your comment?

Christiana -- your an advertising agency --- why don't you rank for Advertising Agency?

http://www.google.com/search?q=advertising+agency

Olson is your name... do you simply want your clients to rank for their name.. or the industry and work that they do?

SEO is more than 'ranking for your domain name" it includes keyword researching, finding out what the clients needs are.. and ranking them for it...

Ranking Oracle for the word "Oracle" isn't the challenge.. it's ranking it for "database"

Ranking KBToy Store for "KBtoy store" wasn't hard ... it was ranking it for "toy store"

I think you get the point... you need to rank for the industry and work that you do to generate a positive ROI...

Your New Client should have no problem ranking for 'ohio banking' -- as well as at least dozens of other keywords.

Christina,

First, congrats on the new account. I am sure you company will do a good job. The point being made here is simple. Your whole company's website has no text on it. You only rank for your name because other sites have linked to you using your comapny's name. Type in olson in google. Now, click on the little word cached to the right of the green 3k underneath your company's name. Now click on the term cached text only. Do you see this...

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:-XC_zZbF_2I...

And do you see that you only have backlinks pointing to this site for the term olson? Your site is entirely in flash and this is why you will NEVER rank for anything other than your name(luckily, you have enough backlinks to even rank for your name). If this is what your website looks like, why would I trust you to help me rank for anything related to my services/products? Flash is fine, just not built or designed as the whole website. Never was meant for that, it was meant to be the eye catcher. Let me gues...you spent 100K on this site...

Actually, even if your site is all flash, there are ways you can get descriptions and search results in google. If you use Meta Tags (description, keyword, etc...) you will be pleasantly surprised.

... which it seems they are using. But google results have a lot more to do with text on page. Links to your site (along with text accompanying those links) weighs heavily on how you rank.

Maybe after all of this linking and chatter, the site will get bumped up.

Though Olson’s Flash-designed website hampers it in terms of searchability of its content (like if a prospective client wanted to find the agency that did that great launch of Phillips UV vodka, as an example relevant to Olson), does it really need to rank on “advertising agency” as much as KB Toys might for “toy store”?

Is any prospective client doing an agency search by Googling “ad agency” and then calling the top shops? Is any prospective client searching for an agency by searching any general Google terms?

A focus on design over SEO for an agency website just isn't that bad of a trade-off.

http://dailybiz.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/ignori...

"Is any prospective client doing an agency search by Googling “ad agency” and then calling the top shops? Is any prospective client searching for an agency by searching any general Google terms?"

Uhhh.. yea... many of them actually.. Some with budgets in the millions per year... I know this for a fact because some of them went with us.

Yooter, if we are going with anecdotal evidence, my agency doesn't even have a functional website (long, sad story) and the phones are ringing from clients who want to work with us (big, blue-chip clients) because of the work we do, the awards we have won, etc and so on.

I guess there are many ways to skin a cat, at least anecdotally, but if the point of an agency website is to show off your creative abilities and your top work then there higher priorities for the website (if you have one) than SEO.

Not that you should ignore it, but it's hardly the most important thing to consider.

Of course it's not the most important.. the most important is word of mouth.

The last thing ANY agency needs is a former client running his mouth about how bad their former agency was to another firm.

FYI -- there was a reply here from Olson's 'web geek' ... however at the time we were working on the database... so we made a backup... he posted.. then we restored... total turnaround time 5 minutes.. it just happened to be the 5 minutes he posted.

We apologize for that....

In short he argued that the world Olson was a hard word to rank for. We strongly disagree..