Ideas for Business

SEO has received a bit of a bad rap over the years because of the number of companies that have guaranteed rankings to their customers only to leave those customers’ hopes dashed to the wind. Many gullible small business owners and would-be Web entrepreneurs have been sucked in by these false claims and it hurts all of us. Because of that, many reputable SEO companies stay away from “guarantees” because we don’t want to be lumped in with those bad guys.

While reading Rand Fishkin, I ran across a blog post in which he shares some of the claims that some SEO companies have made. Here are some examples:

$399 annual - Guaranteed fast listing on DMOZ, Netscape, Google, MSN, AltaVista, LYCOS, FAST, ASK/Temoa and 100+ other engines and portals! Trace your traffic and guarantee a higher position!

Rand links to the original sources for all of these quotes on his blog and I encourage you to check it out for yourself. This one is pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Guaranteed FAST listing on …. Well, what does “fast” mean? For DMOZ, if you get listed in six months that’s pretty fast. But even taking DMOZ off of this list, be careful about companies that promise fast listings because fast is a relative term and all of the search engines will crawl your website any way so any company that charges you to be listed isn’t really on the up-and-up.

* We guarantee to keep you on 1st-page results each month, or you don’t pay for that month.
* We guarantee to optimize your website for up to 100 different keyword phrases.
* We guarantee to provide monthly reports that document all of your 1st-page positions.

Now, this one is interesting. Guaranteed 1st-page results? For what key phrase? If a company can make that kind of guarantee then it’s likely for a key phrase that isn’t going to get you much traffic. I can guarantee you 1st-page results every day, but all that really means is that I can target a key phrase that no one is searching for and capture it for you. But if no one is searching for it then why would you want it?

The same logic applies to the 100 “different keyword phrases.” Whoop-tee-do! Do you really want to be listed on page 1 for “long-strand camel hair of red”? Especially if you sell whitewall truck tires?

Oh, and thank you for the reports! Now I can see how worthless my rankings are.

When it comes to search engine rankings, keep in mind that they change every day. They will fluctuate. And you’ll bounce from page 1 to page 2 back to page 1. That’s because your competition is doing just like you - they are tweaking their web pages, blogging, marketing through articles, social bookmarking, and trying to influence their rankings through link building. If 15 companies in your industry are all aggressively pursuing the top ranking and half of them are any good at it then it is likely that any of them could appear on page 1 for the best key phrases on any given day.

Search engine optimization isn’t an exact science, but it isn’t rocket science either. Don’t accept loose guarantees and claims from companies like the ones listed above. If an SEO company won’t be honest with you about the results you can expect then you shouldn’t do business with them.

Well, Labor Day is behind us and school has started. That means things are on full force between now and Christmas. Fall hits, we set our clocks back, send the kids to school, and wait for Thanksgiving. Right?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m not waiting. I’m planning. And if you’re smart, you’ll start planning too.

Why? Because it’s just a short hop from here to Christmas. And Halloween will be on you before you know it.

Sell costumes and party supplies? You should be blogging about it and setting up your pay per click campaign now. Sell turkeys and yams? Start planning because online people shop early and research before they buy. I’m not just talking about turkeys either. They research everything and they start their research online. Already, people are thinking about what they’re going to get their Uncle Bob for Christmas. Already. And by Thanksgiving many of them will already have made up their minds. It’s time to start planning.

A quote from Peter Drucker:

(Source)
Where does marketing really begin? As management guru Peter Drucker stated it, “Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Put another way, every single interaction the customer has with your business can and should be seen as marketing.

If this is true, and I believe it is, then there is no beginning or end to marketing. Everything you do is marketing. Customer service. Shipping. Selling. Labeling boxes. Dumping the garbage. And …

OK, did I go overboard?

If marketing is your whole business as seen from the customer’s point of view then everything you do has an impact on that. You can’t minimize any aspect of your business without affecting the whole. That should put a new twist on what is important for your business, right?

Instead of thinking of marketing as communicating with your customers, you should also be thinking about it as your customer hiding behind a tree and watching you work, oblivious to their presence. Would you act that way if your customer was present? Would you throw that item in the garbage if your customer was present? Would you put that item on the half-off shelf if your customer know why you were doing it?

It is important to think about these issues because your customers could find out things about your business you don’t want them to know. There is always somebody watching. And it’s important in this day and age to stay competitive, which means beating your competition in every way possible - even at the Watch Me game.

SEO is getting more complicated all the time. I read a blog post just a while ago where the author said splitting up the components of a web design was a regular pattern for him. But he’s working with larger corporations.

The way he does it is he separates the elements on the page. The template is in one file. The CSS is in one file. The html is in one file. The content is in another file. One reason for doing this, he says, is so people who are not developers can write keyword-rich content without knowing or having to learn html. Then the optimization team can do their thing without messing with the content.

Makes sense except that content is the biggest part of optimization. Sure, templates contribute. CSS contributes. HTML contributes. But if you want to get to the top of Google, you can do it with an off-the-shelf template, no CSS, and just plain great content. That’s the advantage of being a small business, I guess. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on a design team that will get all fancy on you. Just keep it simple and focus on the basics and you’ll do fine - with your SEO and your content.

Time management. Just thinking about it makes us sick, doesn’t it? In truth, we need it. It’s necessary. It keeps us on track and makes us more efficient.

Greater business efficiency boils down to just one thing: How you spend your time. It’s the most important thing in business. Making money is good. You always want to make a profit. But if you lose revenue over a bad decision, you can always turn that around and increase your future revenue. You learn. You turn a loss into a gain. But if you lose time then you can’t get that back. That makes a time a bit more valuable than money, doesn’t it?

Small business owners are typically more strapped for time than their big corporation counterparts. Corporate executives usually have access to free training tools that help them become more efficient managers. Small business people, though we face the same challenges, are on our own. We’ve got to pay to play. Many of us feel that we can’t afford to shell out the dollars for the efficiency training, so we go on and on and on spending our time on things that don’t matter and in the process lose out on ROI. It’s one of the reasons many small businesses go down before the five year mark.

One tip I’d like to share for making your business day more efficient and allowing you get more done is this: Limitation. Grasp it.

Yes, I’m talking about limiting your activities. Let me explain:

Many of us, when we hear of the great new tool that everyone is using, rush over to give it a try. Some of us have so many social media accounts that we don’t use that if we started using them all then we’d only spend one day a month at each one, or less. Stop that!

The key to more efficiency is to learn what is truly important to your business and to focus on that. Do you need all those social media accounts? Maybe not. Maybe you just need one or two. Or maybe more, but who’s going to manage them?

There are two ways to increase your efficiency: Hire someone to handle the tasks that are eating up your time, and that costs money - although, it may not be a bad solution for some of you - or to limit the amount of time that you spend doing unnecessary things. In some cases I’d say hire someone and pay them $8-$10 per hour to handle those menial tasks that you shouldn’t be doing. In other cases, and in a lot of cases, I’d say cut out completely some of those things you are trying to do and just focus on the important ones. I’ll bet you get more done.

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