Web marketing advice for small business owners

Whereas we all know that Google accounts for the vast majority of search traffic (over 75% on all the sites we run) - this shouldn’t mean that web marketing types should ignore all the other search engines and directories in their quest for SEO gold.

Search Engine Land (probably our favourite SEO site) has uploaded a very useful list of B2B sites for business-related site owners to consider in their SEO effort.

This extract from the article explains why, despite Google being the first port of call for most people, having a listing in B2B directories may pay dividends:

“While business searchers may start their quest on a general search engine like Google, as they become more informed and progress further in the buying cycle, they often turn to other sources for additional and more detailed information. Many turn to general B2B search engines or head to niche-oriented search sites, where they hope to find fewer extraneous search results and other types of content, such as white papers, case studies, and other content marketing vehicles. The searcher’s aim is to get better information and to get it more quickly.”

You can read the entire article (and see links to a huge amount of useful Business directories) here.

Following many months of speculation, I was interested to see that Microsoft pulled its $33 per share bid for Yahoo! earlier this month.

According to Steve Bullmer (Microsoft’s CEO), Yahoo! had demanded $37 per share - more than the software giant was prepared to pay.

Many commentators have pointed to the fact that Microsoft are desperate to compete with Google, and that Yahoo! would have provided an excellent platform for them to access the search market.

However, from our experience, Yahoo! hasn’t managed to get anywhere near Google in terms of search traffic. So, if both Yahoo! and Microsoft have had many years in which to compete with Google and provide a viable alternative, why should they be able to now?

Often the best ideas on the web have had lowly beginnings - Facebook, YouTube, and Google of course. I can’t see how a corporate giant is likely to create something appetising for the search market.

Google is far more likely to be challenged by an “outsider” - a search engine (or networking engine) which has true popular appeal and grass roots user base.

James Leckie

You may have noticed that our site has been “unavailable” for a few days.

It seems that our UK webhost, “Fashosts” suffered some kind of hack attack and as a result has reset all its clients passwords. We had to wait a week before our new control panel passwords arrived in the post!

As a direct result, our primary search term - “traffic generation” has disappeared entirely from its No.1 slot on Google!

Let’s hope it returns as soon as it went!

When we’re not enjoying posting on TrafficGeneration.com, we make a living from Bytestart - the UK’s leading small business advice site.

We’ve published our “Top 50 web marketing tips” here.

Here is the first in a series of tips to help you with your Google search engine rankings. The tips are in no particular order of importance, and are based on our daily battle with the world’s favourite search engine over the past 8 or so years.

1. TITLE TAG - Google pays most attention to the text you use in the “TITLE” tag. The KEYWORDS tag is virtually redundant now, so make sure you create a punchy title which is not only relevant to the text within you page, but which encourages Google users to click on your entry.

2. KEYWORD DENSITY - Google’s ranking algorithms are highly complex, but there is little debate over the need to populate each web page with a sensible number of keyword phrases relating to the page as a whole. If your TITLE is “north london bars”, then ensure that you use the same phrase several times within the content. Don’t overdo it though.

3. GOOGLE RANKING CLAIMS - Some SEO companies claim they will get you a No.1 ranking in Google within a day. Don’t listen to these claims for a minute. If you PAY for a Google Adwords sponsored listing, you can be listed within a day - but not in the all-important organic search results. Only hard work will get you a Top 10 ranking these days.

4. KEYWORD PHRASES - Unless your site deals with the most obscure subject ever, with no competition on the web, you should try to compete on 2,3 or 4 work keyword phrases rather than spending all your time trying to compete with the “big boys” who dominate the single word Top 10 rankings. For example, you chance of ranking highly for “buy yoga dvd uk” is much higher than simply trying to optimise for “buy dvd”.

5. RESEARCH KEYWORDS - Don’t guess what people are searching for. There are a number of handy online tools you can use to work out which search phrases you should target on your website - Wordtracker (paid), and the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. Of course, you should always make use of the keyword suggestion tools within Google Adwords too.

We’ll Publish the next 5 shortly…

I came across a very useful, and easy to understand source of web ranking expertise. A new site for small business people (Guru.tv) has literally hundreds of online video tutorials on topics as diverse and creating a business plan, making money out of a business, and of course technology - including web marketing.

I’d recommend starting with this one (”How to improve your rankings and get to the top”). You can navigate to other similar topics when you arrive at the site. The video expert explains a whole variety of search engine marketing topics very simply - so it’s worth watching the whole thing even if you reckon you are already a web marketing “expert” yourself!

Ever since we re-launched this site, after being offline for a year or so, I’ve tried to keep a blog record of how Google has treated us since our return.

For some reason, I neglected to provide an update since August, but then again - having seen our traffic stats, I doubt too many people will have noticed.

During September and October, we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of daily visitors - 50% up on August, but nothing spectacular yet (mainly as I haven’t got my act together in the link exchange department).

The term “traffic generation” and quite a few related phrases are doing well on all the search engines, but due to the nature of the industry we’re competing with, I’m expecting to benefit from long tail search phrases rather than one or two work SEO terms!

According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the number of “in links” we have has drastically fallen from over 700 in August, to just 155 today. I expect this may be due to large numbers of “old” links dropping away as Yahoo! has discovered our new site structure. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this.

Our Google Pagerank remains at 4 - which is no surprise, as Google hasn’t updated its Toolbar PageRank for 180 days!

As we’ve not yet had time to get our link building campaign underway (yet), our Pagerank is very unlikely to have risen since we relaunched the site earlier this year!

If you are concerned about other sites ‘lifting’ your site content without your permission, simply type in the URL of your own page into a great site called Copyscape.

Copyscape will then list all other sites which are displaying pages with the same (or very similar content).

Copyscape is also extremely useful for detecting any duplicate content in your own site. If you publish content which already exists on another section of your site (or elsewhere on the web), Google is fairly likely to banish the duplicate content to its ’supplemental index’. This means that the page is unlikely ever to show up in Google searches.

If you are going to publish content which already exists elsewhere on the web, try to re-write it to avoid the duplicate content penalty. You can use Copyscape before publishing to ensure that Google views your content as ‘unique’.

When most people talk about SEO, they mention the keywords or keyword phrases they would like to be ranked highly on Google. They will check week after week to see if their hard work priming webpages for their favoured words has paid off.

Of course, unless they are in an uncompetitive search area, they are unlikely ever to see their pages ranking in the Top 10 for their favourite word, without a lot of hard work.

Instead of focusing on the obvious search phrases (like “web marketing”, or “SEO” for a site like this one), you may well find that the sum of the searches on less targeted phrases is far greater than the number of referrals you get for those competitive keywords.

In the graph below, you’ll see a small extract of the keyword phrases used to find a leading UK business site in the UK. The lines on the far left of the graph correspond to highly competitive keyword phrases which have taken 2 years to reach the Top 10 in Google. The other lines (and literally thousands more each week) correspond to less competitive keyword phrases. In most cases, these phrases have ranked organically and have not been targeted for any SEO work!

Once again, this graph shows that honest, organic web marketing can work. The business site has over 1000 articles relating to setting up and running a small business - it has many links to and from sites and has well written, relevant content.

As I’ve always said on this site (and others) - make sure you target keyword phrases which directly relate to the pages on your website.

Don’t bother creating a TITLE tag, e.g. “Working from Home Opportunities” if the page is, in fact, an affiliate page for an online bookstore.

Google’s ranking algorithms are so precise now, that the page in the example will be lucky to hit the Top 1000 for that keyword phrase, let alone the Top 10.

Unless your web marketing effort is true to the real content of your site, you simply will never do well on Google.

Target phrases which relate directly to well written, unique content, and if your overall SEO effort works, then you should automatically benefit from the “long tail” and attract people who type in phrases you had never even thought of!

You could, of course, deliberately target 1000’s of uncompetitive phrases related to area of business your site is in. It depends how much time you have, and how clever you think you are.

If you have a good, well written and unique site, and follow solid and honest SEO practices - the “tail” could well create itself in time!

You can read an interesting 2005 article on how Google has harnessed the power of the “long tail” in its results-based advertising system.

The term “long tail”was first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 to describe how companies can make more money by distributing small numbers of a wide array of harder to find products, than simply shifting large numbers of bestselling products (hence the search engine referral analogy above). You can read more at Wikipedia.

James Leckie

I was browsing the Webmaster World forums earlier today and came across an interesting post on site valuation.

During the dot com boom, sites were being sold for stupid money, whereas these days more traditional valuation methods seem to be coming back in fashion.

In my experience, unless you have had multiple offers for your site, it is probably worth what someone is willing to pay.

Valuations of, say, 5 to 7 times gross profit are fair enough for traditional businesses, but there is greater risk on the web - particularly if a site is very dependent on Google traffic for visitors.

I have sold several sites in the past - one sold for a traditional 3.5 times gross profit (a profitable niche news site), and the other sold for just one years’ revenue as it could easily be copied and was therefore worth less.