Search Engine Optimization: February 2008 Archives

It is easy to assume that search engine optimization and almost all things internet may not be right for your small business. But would that be true? How important is it for you that your potential customers find you?

According to Piper Jaffray (2007) Local search is the second most popular online activity after e-mail and even more significant is that 60% of all local business searches now happen online (33% happen in print yellow pages) and 82% of the people using local search sites follow up their research with offline action. (TMP Directional Marketing-comScore, August 2007)  Using myself as an example, I don't think that I've actually found services, or goods without consulting the internet in years - from my landscaper, to my snow removal service, to babysitting and even restaurant reservations - all "local" in nature, all done online. Web sites now cater to my need to find someone reliable with customer reviews, star ratings, and verification systems that ensure that I can almost trust their listing as much as hearing it from "word of mouth."

So how does this whole thing relate to you as a small business owner?

Matt McGee has his take on this in his post What I love about doing SEO for Small Businesses 

Small businesses are often more personally invested in SEO. A 25% increase in traffic, or a 10% increase in conversions will often have a much more dramatic impact on a small business's bottom line, maybe even its survival, than it would on a multi-million dollar corporation.

What this means is that as a small business, your SEO investment may reap bigger rewards in the long run, since small steps in the right direction will enable you to reach a population of your potential customers that you were not able to reach in the past.

Matt Cutts an engineer from Google explains the process in Website Designers Want Searches to Work for Free (USA Today) 

It's the same thing any small business would do to get started," says Matt Cutts... who writes about the ins and outs of getting noticed by Google on his mattcutts.com/blog. "You would drop fliers all over town. Online it's the same thing. Trying to get links is letting people know about you and what you're doing."

First thing that needs to be done is to assess your capacity for venturing into optimizing your web presence, versus your day to day business needs - in Internet Can Make a Big Impact on Small Business
Evelyn Lee makes this point -

Once a cutting-edge option, Web sites have become a staple in the world of small businesses. Some local entrepreneurs say that having an Internet presence allows them to stay competitive, provide information and market their products and services to potential customers far and wide. At the same time, a lack of time, staff and technical skills can make it challenging for many small businesses to run Web sites.

SEO does get some negative press due to misinformation, Mark Johnson in his post Don't Waste Money on a So-Called SEO Specialist  confronts American Express and their OPEN book article that suggests that SEO is a waste of money for small business owners - he has this to say to doubters-

IT ABSOLUTELY DOES WORK! If you don't believe it, do a Google search for "credit cards" and see who shows up in the natural results. Not AMEX. Not Mastercard/Visa. Not Discover Card. Not ONE of the major companies (well, Bank of America shows #9 for me). Search Engine Optimization is the great equalizer and the small business owner's friend."

In many ways it does come down to this point-- the internet is a great equalizer, sites like YouTube have proven that even nobodys can become somebodys with one home run home made video. In turn, a small business (with the right tools and know-how) has a unique chance to be seen and heard like never before to an ever-widening audience/potential market.

"Black Hat" is a term used to describe search engine optimization strategies that employ tactics that are bordering on, or are unethical. According to Wendy Boswell in Black Hat Search Engine Optimization black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaks search engine rules and regulations
• Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
• Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.
  

Matt Cutts in Gadgets, Google, and SEO  had this to say about companies that use black hat SEO --

I think the search engine optimization industry has made a lot of progress in the last few years. It's a little less common to get cold calls from SEOs that guarantee #1 rankings but won't tell you how they try to do it. And if a large SEO company wants to try something high-risk with a client, they're more likely to explain the potential risks to that client first. There are still issues, of course, but I was looking over a list of 20+ blackhat SEO companies that I compiled back in 2002. The majority either went out of business or have transformed into white-hat SEO companies.
For a while now, I've had a slight hunch that clients that embrace blackhat SEO on their site are willing to cut corners in other areas of business as well. Earlier today I was reviewing an email from 2001 (!) where Google removed a very large company's website from our index for hidden GIF links, machine-generated doorway pages, and cloaking. It's interesting to look back with the benefit of hindsight now. Later on, the company:
- had 10+ employees convicted for inflating revenue
- the CEO was sentenced to 10+ years in jail
- another executive was sentenced to 2+ years in jail

Forbes had an extensive article on black hat SEO called The Saboteurs Of Search,  where Andy Greenberg, described one popular tactic called "Google Bowling".

Search marketers claim they can frame certain competitors as cheaters by posting thousands of links around the Web, making a competing site look like it's engaging in "link spamming," a tactic that draws the disfavor of major search engines. In SEO circles, this technique of setting up a competitor to be punished for link spamming is sometimes called "Google bowling."

What can a targeted business do if it's competitors use black hat SEO? Terri Wells tackles this in Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics 

Diane Aull came up with five possible approaches, based on how one would deal with a schoolyard bully. There is no telling which approach - if any - would be successful. Her suggestions would probably work best when dealing with someone who is not targeting your site with negative SEO, but rather engaging in black hat SEO to increase his or her own site's ranking in the SERPs, thus driving yours down. You might want to consider combining several tactics for the best chance of ameliorating the problem.

• First, you can ignore what is happening ...
  
• Second, you could take up negative SEO yourself ...
  
• Third, you could report the offender to Google ...
  
• Fourth, you could avoid the bully ...
  
• Fifth, you could work at becoming popular ...
  

There is still some controversy around what a black hat practitioner is truly capable of doing and how effective it is in destroying search rankings for targeted sites. Nevertheless, it never hurts to understand what you can of the "dark underbelly" of search, especially given the rapidly growing competitive online business environment.