Jessica Knobbe

Throughout my education in Internet Marketing one of the first things I embraced was the potential strength of the personal brand. Brand reputation management is a hot button topic right now with companies and businesses but what have you done to make sure that you as a brand are being portrayed in the best light? I started out my self optimization with the old standby- I Googled myself. What came up was pretty sad. First of all, I didn’t even know there was another Jessica Knobbe (from the St. Louis Knobbe branch I assume) so that was a bit of a shock. She runs marathons. Definitely not me. I also got results of a friends wedding I was in, my senior art exhibit from college and the obligatory classmates.com result “We found Jessica Knobbe!” None of those results are necessarily bad or damaging but they are not really very compelling for a personal brand.

So, in the next few blog posts I will lay out what I did to own page one (and two!) of my Google results and create not only a personal online brand but one that moves with me in the real world at networking events, educational opportunities and even on a Friday night out with my friends.

I am putting an internet marketing strategy pitch together for a local pet store.  After searching keyword phrases to see if they were indexed at all (more on that later) I finally reached their current website and was greeted with…. a splash page.  Ugh, why?  Yes I want to enter your site that is why I came here.  Look, I understand that there are a couple of situations where this might be appropriate: if your website contains adult content or if your website is in multiple languages.  But splash pages are typically a search engine optimization no- no- they are invisible to the search spiders.  They lack keyword rich text. They lack internal links. Even if the spider could see your website, it couldn’t travel to where the good stuff, aka your content, is hiding.  Also keep in mind those with slower browsing speeds are just sitting there, growing impatient as this page loads as it’s most likely stuffed with ginormous graphics and music that I’m going to shut off anyway because I work in cubeland and for what? Just so that I can hit a button to enter?  Not a very compelling call to action. 
Granted we can expect to see advances in indexing flash especially with the new Adobe/Omniture partnership but until that happens remember a splash page is really just a wall between your website and the world.  Also, increasingly people are entering websites from many angles based on long tail keyword search phrases and the idea of a homepage is even becoming obsolete.  Consumers want direct, fast and relevant results.  You might want to re-evaluate whether a splash page provides any real value to your consumers and your SEO strategy.