SEO Rants and Resources

Small Business Gets An Extra $100M

Link: Small Business Gets An Extra $100M | SmallBusinessNewz.

By David A. Utter - Mon, 03/17/2008 - 9:53am.

The White House wanted to eliminate a few programs

John Kerry's Small Business & Entrepreneurship committee wrangled over $100 million more on top of prior requests from the federal budget to support more small business initiatives.

The Small Business Administration received a boost from Senate Democrats last week with an assortment of gains above the White House's requested SBA's budget. Senator Kerry's committee announced they added funding for several initiatives, several of which the Bush Administration tried to eliminate.

Winners among the budget items included increased loan oversight and reduced fees, microloans, contracting assistance, Small Business Development Centers, Women's Business Centers, veterans outreach programs, and technical assistance programs, among others.

"Small businesses create more than two-thirds of all new jobs, yet by refusing to fund important small business programs the Bush Administration has starved entrepreneurs of the resources they need to grow their firms," Kerry said in a statement.

The White House sought to eliminate microloans and the Microloan Technical Assistance program from the budget. The Committee said the $31 million loaned through the program in 2007 helped more woman and minorities in small business than any other program.

New Markets Venture Capital, and Technical Assistance, each received $5 million under the reworked budget blueprint. Both work with job creation and equity investment in low income areas.

Veterans' programs received a greater boost than the original budget offered, as those increased from $743,000 in funding to $2.3 million. With soldiers returning from overseas duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, the change looks like a necessary one for helping them reintegrate into the private sector.

When the small businesses that take advantage of federal programs get to work on marketing themselves, they may be contributors to a big increase in local online advertising over the next three years.

A report from Marchex about local online advertising claimed the $8 billion local online ad market would hit $20 billion in three years.

When they do, Marchex suggested those ads should motivate an action locally. Major brand name companies in particular should be doing this for their local resellers, and those smaller businesses should engage the brand company to build their campaigns with this intent.

Google's Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners

Excellent Interview discusses all sorts of search engine optimization strategies.

Social Media Overview

As online communications keep growing, businesses need to stay up to date with the latest methods of marketing. Social media applications such as blogs, podcasts, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies are massively popular with individuals and businesses of all sizes. The term 'social media' refers to new types of online media that can be used to share knowledge, information, experiences and ideas. Social media applications are different from traditional media in that they share most of the same characteristics.

Some of the most common types of social media include several different applications. Such as, blogs which are a regularly updated web page, which may either stand alone or be attached to a particular website. Used like a forum, blog entries ('posts') are brief and reflect the thoughts, opinions and interests of the people or persons writing it. Another type of social media is social networking sites. They allow users to build personal websites and connect with other users to communicate and share information. Myspace and Facebook are perfect examples of social networking sites. Next there is, content communities which are websites that organize and share particular types of content, such as photos, videos, and book marking links. Also, there are podcasts & webcasts. A podcast is a digital and/or video file that can be downloaded over the internet and played back on portable media players and personal computers. A webcast is a live media file similar to a broadcast TV program but designed specifically to be transmitted over the internet using streaming technology. Another social media type is wikis. Wikis are collaborative websites that allow anyone to add content or edit existing content, acting as a simple communal database. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by thousands of worldwide contributors, is one of the best known wikis. Lastly, there are forums, which are standalone websites or areas on websites for online discussion, usually based on particular topics or areas of interest. Forums can provide employees with a platform for sharing ideas, experiences, and opinions. Unlike wikis, forum posts may not be edited by other users.

There are several different business benefits of social media. According to a 2007 report by Melcrum those benefits are improved employee engagement, improved internal collaboration, improved internal community development, and improved two-way dialogue between employees and senior executives. The new social media applications are especially valuable for organizations with remote workforces, as they can help remote workers collaborate and communicate with colleagues much more easily.

There are still some concerns about social media, a few do not understand it fully. They aren't too clear about how they can be used effectively for internal and external communication. According to the Melcrum report, less than a third of professional communicators are confident about integrating social media into their communication strategy. However, many of them are still establishing social media tools in their organization.

Social media tools are all about networking, communicating and collaborating quickly and efficiently. While social media applications may not be suitable for every organisation, they are most useful in those organizations where communication and collaboration are the keys to success.

This article is based on an article written by GoodPractice.net and can be found in their Knowledge Bank product under Communication - Organisational - Models and Strategies

Improve the Link Structure of your Website and improve your Search Engine Rankings

The internal link structure of a website is a search engine optimization factor that is often overlooked by webmasters. Why does the link structure of your website have an effect on your ranking?

The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site. The more link power a page receives, the more likely it is that the page will get high rankings on search engines. Your internal link structure allows you to direct search engines to your most important pages.

There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website. First, make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines. Then, link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page.

The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.

Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted. Show search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.

Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to products.htm but to http://www.pageviews.com/products.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you'll get backlinks from these sites. Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Add a no follow attribute to all links that aren't important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn't be listed in search engines. The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages.

Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don't have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked.

Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages.

By optimizing the structure of how your web pages pass their link power, you can influence how search engines treat the content of your website. It's hard to beat a website with a great internal and external link structure.

Strategies for Quickly Building an Audience with Social Media

The social media revolution is happening. Are people finding your website?

As a business, how do you make your business website stand out amongst 435 million other websites and more than 1 million blogs competing for your audience's attention? It's not as hard as you might think. Internet readers want information from the Internet. They don't want advertising, marketing, or a "pitch". The solution is to become a social media "Maven". A Maven is a trusted authority. One who becomes like a friend on the social media websites. I like to equate it to being a "hub" in the offline world of word of mouth networking. As you gain your audience's trust, they will return to you over and over again wanting to invest in your advice. There are five steps to becoming a social media maven:

1. Get in the Game. Begin blogging immediately.
2. Share your passion. Build your website, blog and online presence around your passions.
3. Be controversial. Don't just follow the leader and rehash the same old thing that everyone else is writing about. Challenge the status quo.
4. Create world class content. You will drive repeat traffic to your website by offering top notch "how to" information. In thins new world of information delivery this can be written, audio or even video.
5. Engage in the conversation. Encourage your audience to ask questions.

How to Get People Commenting On Your Blog

1. Collect Email Addresses - Do you have enough people reading your blog? Use VerticalResponse's free opt-in form, it's just a few clicks if you use Their integration with TypePad. Then as soon as you publish your post send an email marketing campaign to your list with a snippet of your new posts. Sometimes simply publishing your post won't drive traffic if your readers don't know about it or aren't subscribed via RSS.

2. Ask for The Comment! - At the end of each blog post ask your readers to comment on something you wrote about. Make it simple, maybe have a comment box right there and ready.

3. Ask Your Friends to Comment - Sometimes people are shy but if they see others commenting they might add a comment also.

4. Write Some Good Content - Not everything you write is going to be Pulitzer worthy, however there are easy ways to see what people are excited about reading. Install Google Analytics on your blog to see what people are most interested in, then write more of that particular topic or in that particular fashion. For example, it was pretty clear that many readers like things formatted so that it's easy to read but also a quick one. For example, "5 Quick Things..." or "10 Ways to a Better...".

5. Write Often - Get your readers used to you publishing on a regular basis so that there is enough for them to read when they haven't been to your blog in a while. They may find something in the past few weeks that inspire them to comment.

6. Get Your Readers Riled Up! - From time to time be crazy and take a different stance. Write about something controversial to get them commenting or point to another blog and tell your readers how you feel about it. Then ask them how they feel. When writing a controversial article make sure you never condescend the view point you are not choosing to write about.