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.

Flash Problems in SEO - Work-Arounds

Flash content can not be easily optimized for search engines so if you rely too heavily on it you are really putting yourself and your clients at a disadvantage using it. Of course like everything else, there are work-arounds and exceptions.

 As mentioned earlier in this tread the engines can only read words.  This means that any part of the site that uses flash is of no use to you in terms of organic listings in the engines.

 Here is my 2 cents worth about the subject.

 To be optimized properly, the site should be ADAcompatible and include keywords and phrases. Basically if the blind can read it, so can the engines.

 Don’t make the entire page flash.  Use a lot of content outside of the Flash file. Use it to animate just a part of the page. Even though they will ignore the flash file they will still be able to pick up on the page “theme” – they will know what the page is about.

 If you just have to create the page in Flash us the <noembed> tag. Put the html version of what ever flash you are using on the page. This gives the engines something to read and the dinosaurs who don’t have flash installed in their browsers.

 Here is an example of a local company that uses flash. They are not maximizing what they have. The page it’s self has a Google Page Rank of 4.

 The only words that can be read on the entire page are: twistique - web development with a twist

  They have inbound links. http://tinyurl.com/255abj

 This is what a search engine3 sees when they get to the page.

http://tinyurl.com/2ygge3

 So if you search for “twistique” they have a top ranking in Google.

If you search for “web development with a twist” they have a top ranking in Google. http://tinyurl.com/yps38j

 I think you will have a very hard time finding them under any other words or phrases even though they have several sections of the site. This is a great example of a site that is very nice to look at but just does not work for a business that would need to have organic traffic.