This session covered things from what a small business owner should be paying attention to, what you shouldn’t, and gave ideas, tips an information for the small business owner. All great tips to consider when trying to compete with the larger companies.
- Stop algorithm chasing and forget about magic formulas like % of keywords on the page.
- Link age is becoming more and more important.
- Click backs becoming more important. Example: If someone clicks on your listing in Google, then returns seconds later to the Google results, it tells the engine that that ranking wasn’t a good match for that person.
- Latent Semantic indexing is becoming more important.
- Speak the customers language and don’t just optimize for search engines.
- If using PPC, analyze your data and use that to buy customers, not clicks.
- Work smarter and be more creative.
- Don’t wait for customers, go find them in forums, groups and social networking sites.
- Don’t sell to those mentioned above, but become an informant and help answer questions and build credibility.
- Use social sites like Flickr to get added exposure and links.
- Set reasonable goals.
It was a good session and one thing that I liked was the idea of work smarter and be more creative. I can’t help but think of Apple vs Microsoft. Apple is much smaller and yet they are more creative and smarter intheir marketing and by all means successful. Apple’s goal can’t be to outsell Microsoft next year but they can compete on things like brand awareness, innovative ideas and customer support.
Thomas,
Nice succinct wrap up on the session. On “click backs”, did you know who mentioned this and what evidence is there of this? “Click Backs” has been talked about often as a possible future metric, but it was thought impractical in terms of actual use (too easy to abuse). Just wondering if that abuse issue has been solved.
Thanks,
Daniel
Daniel – I think it was said by Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide. The idea is that if 2 or 3 people click though, then back to the search results, that’s normal. But if 3000 people a day do it, all at different IPs and different locations and different browser, then that might put up a red flag. If one spammer does it 3000 times a day, there is probably a way of detecting that as to not abuse the system.
How would Google or any other search engine, be able to track “click backs”?
I’m not exactly sure. But, stats can measure how much time a person is on a page of a site and I believe it’s kind of the same. If you are on the search results page and leave, then come back (via the back button) in only a few seconds engines can probably tell. Maybe though cookies or javascript or what I’m not exactly sure.
Can a site acheive viral marketing when it doesn’t sell or advertsing anything? That’s exactly what http://www.KeyFess.com has done. An online confession site that offers its visitors a ad free anonymous site where they can post, read & vote on confessions, rants and secrets. After only two months this site receives almost 10k new visitors a day and has reached addictive levels. I must “keyfess”, it is refreshing to frequent a site that strictly wants to entertain its visitors and asks for nothing in return. All this while it has a zero page rank? Well, it is only 2 months old, it will be interesting to see where it is on its anniversary!