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.
