Well, as it happens, there are three simple and memorable rules that will help you steer clear of most problems.

Rule number one? Keep in mind some folks will tell you almost anything to get you to buy what they’re selling. The worst offenders are the con artists and scammers. If everything they tell you is just what you wanted to hear, your spider-sense should be tingling.

Rule number two? If what they’re telling you sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Remember: there’s fast, there’s cheap and there’s good. You only get to pick two. If they’re promising overnight success for a bargain-basement price, anyone who signs up is facing near certain disappointment.

And rule number three? The ones who really know what they’re doing can explain their techniques and plans in simple terms — and will be glad to do so. They want you to understand what they’re going to do. Anybody who can’t, or won’t, explain clearly what they’re about and what they’re going to do — without technical jargon — is someone to steer clear of.

There are plenty of good SEOs out there. I know a lot of them in person and from the various forums and social networking sites I participate in. And I can tell you something they all find incredibly frustrating is when people willingly sign up for SEO “services” that are pretty obvious frauds.

I dunno why. People just seem to be extra-willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the web. They start believing in leprechauns, fairies and “secret sauce.” You get slick con artists talking about guaranteed rankings, special proprietary methodologies, “latent semantic indexing” and other nonsense… and normally hard-headed businesspeople apparently toss all their common sense out the window.

Now, I understand you might feel a little like a fish out of water with this whole SEO thing. Trust me, it wasn’t that many years ago I was in the same boat. Just keep in mind the three rules I mentioned above and you should be OK.

And if you need further help in separating the good, the bad and the ugly, a whole bunch of skilled, ethical search marketers now share with you the biggest scams they’ve encountered, so you’ll know specifically some of the most egregious scams and spams to look out for.

Read this article and promise me (and yourself) you won’t fall for any of the scams and cons highlighted. And promise to engage your brain every time you talk to anyone offering site optimization services.

Remember, there are out there dedicated, hard-working, ethical SEOs who will bring you real results. But every time you plunk down cash for a scammer or spammer because they’ve offered you a bargain basement price and filled your head with empty promises, you become part of the problem. Your actions encourage even more con artists and incompetents to jump on the bandwagon seeking what seem to be easy pickings. And you make real SEOs cry.

ShareThis

To quote the author:

Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront. At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they’re using social media. While the trends indicate both sexes are using social media in huge numbers, our findings show that women far outpace the men.

According to the survey details, it’s only on LinkedIn that men outnumber women (by about a two-to-one margin). On each of the other sites studied (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Plaxo and Hi5), women outnumber men by about the same two-to-one margin. According to Hoffman, in part the dominance of women in social media stems from their observation that men tend to be more “transactional” while women tend to be more “relationship-driven.”

Indeed, LinkedIn, with its emphasis on job-seeking, making introductions and gathering business intelligence seems to be the most “transactional” of the sites studied. The other sites studied tend to focus more on “friending,” sharing photos and profiles, publishing personal updates, playing casual games with each other — in other words, relationship-building activities.

Some more interesting observations from the survey:

Among twentysomethings, women and men are just as likely to be members of social networks. Facebook, MySpace, and Flixster are extraordinarily popular. But we found that young women are much more active on these sites than young men. And men above 30—especially married men—aren’t even joining social networks. With the notable exceptions of LinkedIn users and venture capitalists in the Bay Area “friending” everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment, especially on MySpace.

So perhaps it wasn’t simply coincidence when Small Business Trends published a set of “point/counterpoint” articles on social media and the “pro” position was taken by a woman, while the “con” position was articulated by a man.

The guy who wrote the “social media is a waste of time” article clearly found social networking a complicated, scary place, and his first reaction was to retreat to old, safe, arms-length ways of doing business (soliciting sales through direct mail, sales calls and trade shows, for example). Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying these things are ineffective. Clearly, they are and will continue to be. What I am saying is: these things have their place, and social networking has its place and writing either one off as worthless is, quite frankly, foolish and short-sighted.

I guess it’s a chicken and egg question — do guys avoid social networking sites because they just don’t feel comfortable with the primarily female communications mode there… or are the social networking sites set up to appeal to women because the men weren’t signing up in the first place? Honestly, I don’t know.

My opinion: perhaps social networking is a waste of time for those who don’t know how to participate appropriately. But there’s plenty of evidence and testimony from others about valuable relationships, useful business intelligence and yes, even direct sales they’ve made through effective social networking.

Perhaps those who don’t “get” social networking simply need to get more in touch with their feminine side.

ShareThis

Yelp is a user-generated content site that allows local customers to enter their own reviews of local businesses. Even in my small town, dozens of businesses including restaurants, banks and stores are listed and have user reviews. You might be in there and not even know it!

With all that content and business information, the site is important for local business visibility. And with a recent announcement of new features by Yelp, it can now be an important tool for opening the lines of communication with your customers.

Yelp has been known up until now as a consumer site. Now, it appears Yelp is offering some new features to make its service more attractive to small business owners. Simply by registering and claiming your business page, you can:

• Message people who leave a review of your business.
• Get stats on how many potential customers have viewed your business page.
• Instantly update your business information.
• Receive e-mail alerts when a new review of your business is posted.

Register for free at Yelp to take advantage of these new features. Of course, they’re hoping you’ll be so pleased with the results, you’ll spring for their paid upgrade options. Which, depending on your business and how active the local residents are on Yelp, might not be such a bad idea.

In any case, it does seem like something worth checking out.

Hat tip to the Kelsey Group Blogs for bringing these new features to my attention!

ShareThis

The first three will help you monitor what’s being said so you can respond appropriately when and if necessary. The next three help you establish a strong, positive online presence that could effectively offset negative information that might turn up. And the last one is just plain old common sense.

1. Keep track of what the blogosphere is saying about you and your competitors using free online tools such as BlogPatrol and Technorati. Don’t just track company names, but also product names and other search terms related to your industry or market.
2. Run a Google search on your company and product names every now and then, and see what comes up at / near the top of the results. Are there any unflattering or negative pages there?
3. Set up Google Alerts to be automatically notified whenever Google indexes a mention of your company, your company’s products or other important search terms.
4. Create entries that help establish your position as an authority in your industry. Create an industry-related “lens” in Squidoo. Write appropriate reviews of products in Amazon. Maintain a corporate or personal blog. Contribute to online forums. Write articles.
5. Make appropriate use of opportunities presented by social networking such as FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube. These can be valuable for posting positive content about your business.
6. Conduct a link building campaign for your positive company information, to build strong search engine rankings for this content. The article recommends buying paid links, but given recent developments at Google to devalue the impact of paid links, I’d approach this tactic with caution. Rather, I suggest building natural links if at all possible. It may take longer and require more work, but in the long run, those links will likely help more than paid links. If you need some hints or ideas for building strong natural links, Debra Matstaler’s blog The Link Spiel is a great place to start.
7. And finally, a bit of common sense. Be careful about what you yourself post online. You don’t want to undermine your own reputation management efforts by posting angry off-topic diatribes on professional forums, rude responses to customer complaints or pictures of drunken antics at your last office party. If you wouldn’t want your mom to see it, or if you wouldn’t want it plastered 30 feet high on a billboard on the busiest highway near your office, then it shouldn’t be posted online, either.

For more information about online reputation management, check out Andy Beal’s free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide, with links to a plethora of additional resources and tools you can use.

ShareThis

Now, I’d like to share another tip from the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference, this time about evaluating your results.

Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself

This tip comes from Jennifer Laycock, a small business marketing expert and the editor at Search Engine Guide. If you want to learn more about effective online marketing for small business, buy and read her e-book The Small Business Guide to Online Marketing. Highly recommended!

So, Jenn’s tip was to make sure you have reasonable expectations for the results of your campaign.

I know too often at one or another of the forums I frequent, small business owners complain about being unable to crack the top five (or maybe even the top 10) for a (highly competitive) search phrase.

Jenn asked: in what other form of marketing would you consider a campaign to be a “failure” if it weren’t among the top 10 in the world? Not many, I’d bet.

• Do you expect your newspaper or radio ad to bring in one of the top 10 response rates ever in the world?
• Do you expect your direct mail to be in the top 10 in the world in terms of generating sales or leads?
• Do you expect your TV ad to be voted one of the 10 most memorable in the world?

Of course not! That would be silly.

So why do so many of us think we should be able to do that sort of thing online?

Because when you complain about not being able to make it to the first page of the search results, that’s what you’re doing.

Fortunately, it isn’t any more necessary to success to be one of the top 10 in the world online than it is in any other area of marketing. There are other, more reliable, more useful criteria for measuring the benefits of a marketing campaign.

Don’t beat yourself up or consider your campaign a “failure” if you don’t crack the top 10 or any other arbitrary threshhold.

No, rather look for improvement. Is your site getting more traffic or making more sales than it did before? Is the improvement at least enough to pay the cost of the changes you made?

If so, your campaign is a success! Celebrate it!

If not, you learned something from the experience and you’ll be able to apply that knowledge to improve your future campaigns. Celebrate that!

Either way, keep moving forward. Each small success builds on the one before. Eventually, you may find you have more business than you can handle, even if you never get that coveted top 10 listing for your most desirable key phrase.

We face enough issues as small businesses without adding the burden of unnecessarily high expectations. Enjoy, learn, apply and grow!

ShareThis

It was an amazing conference — so many terrific people, good fun and lots of information being shared. And now I’m taking this opportunity to share with you the first of two wonderful insights I picked up. I think these are especially important for small business owners to keep in mind when planning an online marketing campaign and evaluating the results.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

The VW Bug versus NASCAR

The first tip comes from Matt Bailey, who did an awesome and entertaining presentation on the subject of web analytics. Web analytics? Sounds pretty dire, right? Well, as it happens, Matt has a way of making web analytics sound not only interesting, but fun. If you ever get the chance to attend one of his presentations, run, do not walk, to sign up. You will not regret it.

At one point, Matt told the story of how he has a vintage VW Beetle that he loves to work on. He said he’s not an expert by any means, but he enjoys it anyway. He calls in some of his “gearhead” relatives when he gets in over his head, but for the most part he’s content to tinker with it himself.

He pointed out the information he needs to work on his old VW Bug is very different from the information a NASCAR pit crew would need to work on a race car. And the types of “fixes” the NASCAR crew would do are very different from the types of things he’s doing.

While he deals with stripped screws and loose door handles, they’re shaving a millimeter or two off the side of one part, or fine-tuning the engine performance to a level of detail he can only dream of.

So how does this relate to small business marketing?

Well, often we small business owners visit forums or read blogs to learn more about search optimization and web marketing. The problem is, sometimes the advice and tips we read are aimed toward advanced SEOs — the NASCAR pit crews of search — when we’re actually at the “working on an old car in the backyard” stage.

The point is, the advanced techniques you might read about are the equivalent of shaving a single millimeter off the right front quarter panel. If you’re in the running for the Winston Cup, a tiny tweak such as that could be enough to make the difference between first and second place.

But if your vintage car can’t do more than 40 miles per hour uphill without a push and a major tailwind, minor adjustments like that won’t make a perceptible difference. And if your website is lacking in core optimization, worrying about advanced techniques is way premature.

You need to have all the basics stone cold nailed before you start to worry about fine-tuning.

Wondering what the basics are? Check out the Tips for Newbies at the High Rankings forum (where both Matt and I are moderators) to learn more about the kinds of things that will make a noticeable difference in your online results.

Next time: Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself

ShareThis

This insightful article by Carrie Hill offers some valuable insights and critera you can use to help clarify your decision.

A few highlights:

• If you’re not passionate about search, or it’s sucking up a lot of time you might better be spending on things like running the business, it may be time to consider offloading at least some search-optimization activities.
• It’s not just a matter of deciding whether you’re going to do search marketing or have someone else do it. You also need to decide if you’re going to outsource to a specialist agency, or if you’re going to hire or train someone in-house to handle search marketing for you. There are advantages to either choice — you need to decide which alternative is a better fit for your business.
• It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing choice. You may enjoy some search marketing activites. Others, not so much. So outsource or delegate the only the ones you don’t like.
• It isn’t an irrevocable decision. If outsourcing doesn’t work out, you can switch to another agency or bring SEO/SEM back in house. If delegating to an employee isn’t cutting the mustard, try hiring an agency instead. The point is, you may have to experiment, try a couple of alternatives, before you hit on the right combination that works best for you.

In any case, this isn’t a “one size fits all” issue. What works for another business may not work for you and vice versa. Whether you do it yourself, hire an employee or contract with an agency, your business will benefit from an effective search marketing campaign.

ShareThis

One of the points we try to make is that it’s probably more important to have a domain name that’s memorable, easy to type and easy to spell — in short, one that’s brandable — rather than trying to stuff the domain with keywords.

Now, I recently came across a blog that drives home the point.

At Good URL Bad URL, Aaron Goldman collects examples of good and bad URLs.

What makes a good URL? Here are just a few of his tips:

• Avoid hyphens. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each word, or display each word in a different color to set them apart.
• Use YourBrandName.com for your main website, and YourSlogan.com for advertising through an integrated media campaign (radio, TV, print, etc.).
• Don’t use all lower case or all upper case, acronyms, abbreviations or numbers (unless your brand is well known that way).
• If you’re putting your URL on a billboard, make it large enough to read.
• Use subdomains instead of slashes (folders) to drive visitors to specific advertising landing pages.

Read the blog to see more, as well as wonderful examples that illustrate the best and worst of domain names.

Whether you agree or disagree with his tips, the good and bad URLs he’s collected are certainly entertaining. Might be a bit embarrassing if you’re doing one of the things he highlights as a “bad” URL, but better to find out now — and, if possible, correct it — than to never know, eh?

ShareThis

You might have even figured out that every page in your site is potentially a landing page (that is, a page through which a new visitor could first enter your site). Which means — work with me here, folks — you should be testing and tuning the performance of every page of your site.

The “why” of testing is pretty obvious if you think about it. Changes to the page layout, the copy, even the images used, can have a tremendous difference on the conversion rate. Even something as subtle as changing the color of a button or adjusting the wording on a call to action link can make a difference.

Getting more traffic can be hard, expensive and time consuming. By testing your pages, you can over time optimize each and every page for maximum performance. If you increase your conversion rate, you can make more money without any increase in traffic. It’s a real no brainer.

Well, at least, it is now.

Used to be it was hard to test effectively. There weren’t many tools to help you, and the ones available either required you to have a degree in advanced math or were terribly expensive (or both).

Not anymore, though. Our good friends at Google have come up with Website Optimizer. It’s easy, it’s powerful, and it’s free. A trifecta!

But seriously, I attended two webinars about it this past week, and it looks like a great tool. You can watch and listen to the first webinar (with the second to be available soon, I’m told), view an introductory demo, look at sample reports and sign up at the Google Website Optimizer page.

Now, don’t freak out when you see AdWords being mentioned — the tool is part of Google AdWords, so you’ll have to set up an AdWords account if you don’t have one already… but you don’t have to spend any money with AdWords to use this tool. It’s completely free.

Plus it works with any (or all) pages on your site, not just AdWords landing pages.

Don’t be fooled by the price. This is a powerful testing tool that supports a number of sophisticated testing methodologies, including multivariate and split path testing (don’t worry if you don’t know what those are yet — they explain all about what they are and how to use them). It seems pretty easy, too. Once you’ve decided what you want to test, you can have a basic A/B test set up and running in a matter of minutes.

The way I see it, Google wants higher quality pages in their search results. That’s what will make searchers happy and keep them coming back to Google. So it’s to their benefit to help you make your pages better. And, of course, you benefit if your pages do a better job of making the sale, too. It’s a classic win-win situation. Check it out!

ShareThis

Hmm. Not sure I can completely agree with his arguments.

Yes, absolutely, an outside firm probably has had more experience in running campaigns than an in-house team, at least at first. But in-house webmasters right out of the box have something the outside firm doesn’t (and likely never will): in-depth day-to-day knowledge of their products, their company, their customers and their industry. And if they put their minds to it, it’s only a matter of time before they have as much (or more) experience in running campaigns in their industry than the outside firm.

Now, I work full time as a webmaster for a small business. Personally, I absolutely would not ever even consider outsourcing everything related to SEO and conversion optimization. My experience tells me there are things I can just do better than some outside firm who almost certainly know way less than I do about my company’s business.

Not Rocket Science

Besides, it’s not as though optimization at the level most businesses need is insanely hard. Let’s face it, folks, this ain’t rocket science. No offense to my many friends who work as full-time freelance or agency-based optimizers, but — no matter what some firms’ sales pitches might claim — the concepts and procedures are not even close to being “too complicated” for the average reasonably experienced webmaster to grasp.

To get you started, the HighRankings forum staff have put together a Tips for New SEOs thread I highly recommend reading, even if you do plan to outsource your optimization.

In-House: More Skilled Than You Might Think

Look, I haven’t exactly been pounding the pavement looking for examples, but I already know off the top of my head about several webmasters who consistently turn in results considerably better than the numbers typically tossed about in ecommerce and search industry publications.

Generally, though, they tend to fly under the radar, so unless you know about them, you probably won’t know about them. There’s little point for them in bragging about their results on the SEO forums or blogs. Just for starters, why go out of your way to tip off your competitors to how well you’re doing?

Of course, if you’re already doing well optimizing your own site, you’re unlikely to seek the aid of an outside optimizer to start with, which can give outside SEOs a skewed perspective on the state of in-house optimization. Just because most companies who contact an optimization firm for help have websites in dire shape, this doesn’t mean in-house teams in general are incapable of effective site optimization. It just means those in-house teams aren’t so good at it.

No Need to be a Lone Ranger

That said, I don’t think it’s necessary to do everything myself, either. As long as there are still only 24 hours in a day, that’s just crazy talk. Naturally there are some aspects of optimization that I can (and have, and likely will again) quite happily outsource. Just the same way some “outside” optimizers themselves subcontract out the bits they don’t have time for or are less comfortable handling for their clients.

So what are these “outsourceable” items? To my mind, good candidates are:

• Things that absorb a ton of time and require expertise but not company-specific knowledge. Like most small business webmasters, I’m often stretched thin to the point of breaking. If I can hire somebody at a reasonable price to do some heavy lifting on my behalf, that’s a good thing. For instance, programming new site features. Spend a few minutes on some functional specs, turn them over to a developer and let her spend the hours or days it takes to actually write the code.
• Things that require the efficient use of specialized, expensive tools. The outside firm can spread the cost of the tools across multiple clients and can put to use their hard-won expertise in using those tools effectively. The client gets high-quality results at a budget-friendly price. I’m thinking things like keyword research, where you need to know all the ins-and-outs of tools like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery to really do it right. Give the keyword research firm some seed terms and the URLs of a few competitors and let them come up with lists of potential target phrases for you.
• Things for which you lack in-house expertise or the potential to develop in-house expertise on a timely basis. Here, I’m thinking of things like PPC campaign management. It takes a long time to learn all the nuances to really do it well, and in the meantime you can blow a truly frightening amount of money on the learning curve. To my mind, it’s way better to hire a company to set up and manage those types of campaigns than to try to carve out the time to become fully proficient on my own.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, and the things that are advantageous for me to hand off to an outside firm aren’t necessarily the things you’d be best farming out. It all depends on what resources and experience you bring to the table. And to be sure, there are some companies that quite simply lack any in-house expertise at all. For them, outsourcing everything may indeed be the best option.

As for my company, anything we can do well on our own, we do on our own. Anything else, we outsource to a specialist in that field. In this way, I’ve found we get excellent quality work at a reasonable cost.

Just Because All Your Friends Decide to Jump Off a Bridge…

My point is, while outsourcing everything can be a good decision for some companies, it isn’t necessarily the best idea for all companies, and may not even always be appropriate for most companies. The assumption that no businesses can effectively handle any aspect of SEO or conversion optimization in-house and should therefore automatically outsource it all just doesn’t match with my experiences and observations. Your mileage may vary, of course.

ShareThis