Interpreneurs

Small Business Online Advertising Strategies

While professional search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the smartest investments a Website owner could make it does have its limitations. There are other search engine marketing solutions that offer more flexibility than SEO ever could. This article is not meant to suggest that these solutions should be considered above a professional SEO campaign, but because SEO is a long-term process these solutions could be considered as an addition to SEO.

Statistics show that throughout 2005 b2b companies moved up to 40% of their advertising budgets online and b2c companies moved up to 56% of their advertising budget online. Moving this much of advertising budgets towards the Internet may not make sense for many small businesses but we could still learn a few things from observing the larger businesses. One of those observations could be that larger businesses are taking advantage of the same advertising opportunities given to the small business owners by the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. Below are some search engine marketing solutions being used by businesses today.

Pay-Per-Click
Small business owners need to know how to effectively leverage the Internet to their advantage. Investing large portions of their advertising budget into SEO and playing the Google sandbox waiting game really isn’t a smart business practice. Pay-per-click is a great addition to SEO and is an option most businesses should consider. Pay-per-click offers so much flexibility that it’s almost silly for a business not try at least a small test campaign. Pay-per-click offers the flexibility and convenience of setting your own budget and creating your own advertisements. Other conveniences of pay-per-click are that you can create a new advertising campaign in a few minutes and turn the advertisements on and off in an instant. This feature is great for seasonal or holiday campaigns. Other advantages are that pay-per-click can be targeted by geographical region making it is possible to narrow the advertisements within a city location or globally.

Site Targeting
Site Targeting is Google’s new program that allows you to customize text or banner advertisements and display them across specific Websites within the Google network. You can target Websites by suggesting keywords to Google and allowing Google to choose from the network which Websites are relevant to those keywords. Or you could suggest a specific Website URL to Google and Google will let you know if that Website is available within the network. You may even be able to specify which page within the Website you want to advertise your customized advertisements on. This form of advertising is new from Google and the advertising opportunities within the network are slim; therefore, caution should be taken to test your market within the network before throwing a large amount of money at this form of advertising. The payment model for this program is CPM (cost per 1000 impressions).

Behavioral Targeting
The Yahoo! Impulse program provides businesses with the ability to target Internet users based on their past Internet behaviors. With this method of advertising we can target users with text and banner ads customized to whatever the user has recently searched or viewed online. For example, if you sell canoe camping products you could target Internet users who have recently visited canoe camping Websites, or performed canoe camping searches. Yahoo! Behavioral Targeting allows you to display your banner advertisements across the Yahoo! Network and even within the Yahoo! email. Google recently announced they will offer their own behavioral targeting program in the future.

These are just a sample of the online advertising opportunities available to small business owners. Transitioning your small business online may be a smart move for many businesses but be sure to do your homework before diving into these programs. Before taking the leap to online advertising realistic goals need to be established and strategies need to be developed. Don’t be afraid to consult a search engine marketing professional for assistance if you need to. They will save you money in the long run.

About the Author

Darren is located near Philadelphia and provides professional search engine marketing and seo services throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. If you use this article online please keep the links intact.

Best ways to get inbound links by Kritika

SEO One-way Web Links

I’ve only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.

Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies

Yet there’s perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much potential as the five major ways of getting links.

Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down the line. Link farms can get you delisted from search engine indexes, so don’t even try them.

Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use affiliate software that links directly to your site rather than through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing all their affiliate links in redirects of their own invention, to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply apply to the program themselves to get a discount.

Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way inbound links, but they’ll only have search-engine value a small percentage of the time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically encase links in script, or use robot instructions to prevent spiders from following links.

Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into the great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.

Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply chain.)

Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

Unfortunately, “eventually” can be a very long time.

Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can’t get search engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

You need to have more than one website in the same general category of interest or the links won’t be relevant.

The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.

As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is that the links are mostly on “Resources” pages that are just lists of links. There’s only a small chance of getting significant traffic from these links. Plus, any “Resource” page may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn’t happened already.

3. Submitting to Directories

They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing, no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO acquaintance tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of affiliate programs, of websites using a certain content management system, of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it’s a good deal if you can get it. But let’s say you do get links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche directories–now what?

4. Paying for Inbound Links

Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has become big business. Buying good traffic-generating “clean” links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of relying primarily on paid links for SEO:

The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial search engine traffic can become prohibitive.

As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link–you are essentially renting rather than owning, with no “link equity” building up.

Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings. A website can try to mask the fact that the links are paid, but how well it does that is out of your control.

Given Google’s mission to dampen paid links’ effectiveness, paid link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid link partner is “passing PageRank.” But identifying appropriate PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.

Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of any “artificial” links. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your links are “artificial,” since the vast majority of web pages (note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1 or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so little impact on a site’s PageRank that it would not be worth the expense.

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