While I don’t sell paid text links on this site, but many people do. If you have a fairly high ranking site it’s a great way to make more money with your site than with Google ads alone.
The best way to improve your ranking with the search engines is to have high ranking sites point their text links to your site. High ranking sites are not in the habit of just giving out links to just any site, especially lower ranking or new ones. One of the best ways to get one of these links is to buy one on the higher ranking site, preferably inside their content.
As you may or may not know Google wants all website owners to disclose all paid links and insert a “nofollow” tag into the link so they know what it is and they will devalue the link. That will in effect remove most of the incentive for someone to buy the ad from you.
What Google is in effect saying is that we own “Page Rank”. Only we are allowed to use it as we please and if you try to profit from it (only Google is allowed to do that) we will punish you by lowering your rankings.
While that is their prerogative I have always believed that prohibition just doesn’t work. It just serves to drive prices up, especially for the small business website owner who won’t know who to turn to in order to buy these stealthly.
What many site owners have done is to take this practice underground. Unfortunately, Google may have turned this into a war and I believe it will always be very difficult for them to detect this practice, although apparently they will try and by doing that they also get “false positives”. I also believe that by devaluing sites that offer good content only to improve their own revenue will ultimately lead to lower quality search results and in the end be bad for Google.
There are already many good instructional posts to help site owners who want to get around this prohibition. One of the best that I have seen so far is by Jeremy Luebke on the Marketing Pilgrim site called “7.5 Rules of Selling Links – How Not to Get Penalized”. I’m also sure that there will also be more new and better ideas almost every day. I think that this is a war that Google cannot win.
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The Wall Street Journal has added a great new small business section to their website that’s free to use for anyone. They cover a wide range of topics from financing to advertising and promotion.
I just recently found this site and started to explore. I had thought that WSJ was a subscription only site and had never bothered with it, but this new section is completely free and doesn’t require any sign up.
I have written many times before (here – here – here – here) that I believe that giving away free information can be more lucrative for a business than charging for it.
My local paper The Pittsburgh Post Gazette has been freely giving away their content for a long time and I visit them at least once a day.
Even the New York Times seems to have discovered this. Although they require a free sign up (for the advertising demographics I guess) which I’m not sure that I agree with. Many people have criticized their move to free content as they were making quite a bit of money from subscriptions, but I believe this will make them even more. Their biggest hurdle seems to be how to appease the folks that have already paid for their content. I don’t expect that they will lose them, though.
So check out the new Wall Street Journal’s “Small Business News – Small Business Resources – Small Business Help” section. There seems to be a wealth of good information here and is growing daily.
It’s free so what do you have to lose?
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There is a very interesting discussion going on in a post on the search engine land site by Stoney deGeyter called Can Small Businesses Really Afford SEO?
I’m thinking that small business can’t afford not use SEO for their sites. It’s the only thing that really levels the playing field with the big boys. Even as the big players are putting up more and more pages and sites in order to build more links to themselves in order to build up their Page Rank, search engines are probably already thinking about neutralizing this. The search engines are always working to provide their customers (the people searching) with the most relevant results and that could be you. Your job is to let them know about exactly what you have to offer and present it in a way that will appeal to both your human visitors, as well as the spiders. There are so many things about SEO that are just simple common sense and are fairly easy and inexpensive to implement.I have written a couple of articles that may help
Why Should A Search Engine Trust You?
SEO is Really Pretty Simple
Wikipedia in an effort to combat posting spam changed all of their links to “nofollow”. What that means is that search engines will no longer apply any page rankings from the Wikipedia site to the linked site. Whether the spiders follow those links or not is not known for sure.
Does that mean it’s not worth getting your site mentioned on Wikipedia? Absolutely not! One of my customers (All American Roadside Assistance) has several links from Wikipedia to their site. If you check the logs almost all of the visitors to their site from Wikipedia will either buy or add to their favorites (which means they will probably be back).
Also many other websites will use content from Wikipedia as reference on their sites and there is a good discussion on Small Business SEM about whether those links also carry the “nofollow” tag.
I am always on the lookout for good ideas to market my small business.
One of the first thing that I advise my clients is to start a mailing list. When I first started this business all I had was a list of names of people that I had kept in touch with through e-mails. My family was mostly across the country, so I started writing weekly e-mails describing the exploits of my over 30 (now over 40) hockey team.
Over the years I have added names from all walks of life and work to my address book. When I realized I was going to start a business I wanted to try to contact all of them and start a friendly conversation to tell them about my business. I also included some of them in on my hockey updates and others just occasionally sharing some good information just to keep in touch. I also attached a small signature file to every email asking people to visit my site. This has helped me get several referrals. You never know who will pass on your email.
Keep in mind that your own mailing list is ALWAYS your most valuable marketing tool. These people are your friends who are inclined to listen to you. Don’t abuse this privilege.
No matter what form of marketing that you are using the most important thing to do is to test the results. Maybe you could tweak your signature file a bit or vary what you are sending to who, but you need to know what is working so you can do more and what is not working so you can stop wasting your limited resources.
Craig Valine has a good article on his site called “Marketing Insanity: Stop the Madness!” he has some good thoughts on the matter.
One of the best ways to help a site improve in the search rankings is to add new content on a regular basis. One of the best tools for doing this is to add a blog. A blog adds new content to your site every time that you post. If you are lucky enough to have visitors add comments that relate to your post that adds even more to your content, even though it was written by someone else.
Today I was reading a post by randfish on his SEOmoz blog. It’s called “Reasons Why Corporate Blogging Fails”. He points out many reasons why a corporate blog will not work.
“In many cases, a blog is NOT right for your company. Some companies simply don’t have the flexibility to tolerate a human voice – their rigidity is a closely guarded asset and one they’re unwilling or unable to loosen.”
There are many good points that I haven’t considered before. All in all it shows me another good reason that small business can have an effective edge on the web if they are willing to work at it.
Read this post and if you think that these negatives don’t apply to you or your company then you should consider having a blog on your site.
Michael Gray has put together a great post of thirteen ways that small businesses can promote themselves for free at his Graywolf SEO Blog.
While most of his suggestions apply to businesses with a local presence, there are still quite a few on there that will apply to any small business. I have recommended to several of my customers that they register with both Google Local and Yahoo Local, as well as create coupons for Google Local and I am always big on writing articles.
Small businesses are always struggling to find ways to promote themselves and all of these are free so you can try them out and see if they help without any risk.
When I’m looking for help for my business the first place I usually go is to the Small Business Administration Website. They have so much help for free including, taxes, advertising and many other resources. You could spend days just poking around their site.
I have found that you can usually trust the US government’s websites for accurate information, but when you find free information from other sites on the web there is always the chance that it is self serving, useless or just plain wrong. I believe when you allow open discussion about your info it is much easier for the visitor to decide what will work and what probably won’t.
Recently, I surfed into smallbusinessbrief.com. I found so many useful resources that I thought I would recommend them to you. I especially liked their Small Business Ideas Forum.
“A friendly place to share small business ideas & knowledge, ask questions & find help and encourage others that are involved in the small business industry. Topics include small business marketing, generating revenue and small business computing.”
Networking can be a very valuable tool for any small business. I have written about this before. If it’s done right it can be the single most economical way to get you new and repeat business.
Networking and word of mouth advertising together are seven times more likely to bring in business than all forms of traditional advertising and direct mail combined. How does it work? More importantly, how can you make it work for your business? Janet Attard of the site “Business Know-How” has written a good post on the subject. I always have said that the most important thing about attending any network event is to be prepared to help unconditionally and help will come back to you proportionately.
Sara Holoubek of Search Engine Watch has written a post about just how far SEO has come in a short time. Major companies are adding VP’s of Search, she says it’s “the hottest new title in town”. Well, if the big players are doing it shouldn’t small companies at least recognize that search is something that is much more than an afterthought?
Small businesses can have an advantage over big ones in this regard. Search is constantly changing and evolving on the web and a small company can appear to be much bigger and more relevant just by being flexible enough to keep up with the changes, but first they must be aware of them.
I’m not saying that you need to devote a huge amount of resources to this, but I do believe that it’s a good idea to at least have someone either inside the company or perhaps contracted out to keep up on the trends and to keep the management apprised of what’s involved in search engine marketing and optimization, what the future is looking like and where your company stands in regards to both.
