We all know that there are some very legitimate awards and competitions. Probably the first to come into mind are the Nobel Prizes. Since 1901, the Nobel Foundation, presents awards for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The Nobel Foundation has a nominating committee, and recipients receive a significant cash award (that many recipients, in turn, donate to charitable causes). There may be public disagreement regarding the worthiness of individual award recipients. For example, I find it incongruous for Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat to have been awarded the same Peace Prize as was far more deservedly presented to Mother Teresa and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. That aside, the Nobel Prizes are very real. If you are a journalist, the Pulitzer Prize is the ultimate recognition. If you work in the film industry, it is an honor for your film to be presented in a major film festival from Cannes to Venice to Tribeca to Sundance, and one of the ultimate honors is to be presented an Academy Award.

Yes, there are many very legitimate awards; however, for every legitimate award, there are probably 100 scams, and scams breed on the Internet. The scams have been proliferating recently. If you are told that you or your business is being nominated for an award – or is being presented with an award – it is probably best to think twice before you run out to buy a new tuxedo or evening dress.

How do you know if an award is a scam?
Follow a few guidelines, and ask a few questions.

Who is presenting the award? Do a Google search for the award. As you are typing in the name of the alleged award, is Google suggesting that it be followed by the word “scam”? I remember being called a few years ago (not coincidentally, during an election cycle) and being told that I was a small business leader who had been selected to be part of a recognition ceremony to be held in Washington. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Not exactly. It turns out that the “award” had been concocted by a PAC (political action committee) that was designed to generate support (in other words, financial contributions) for the National Republican Party. (Anybody who knows me realizes that dog was barking up the wrong tree!) Ironically, I know people who fell for the “award” and took the trip to be exploited in Washington, DC.

Is there an entry fee? We received a direct mail piece a few weeks ago, inviting us to enter our work for the Davey Awards. The direct mail piece looked like it was designed by an untalented 9 year old, but that was just the first tell-tale sign that something was fishy. To enter the competition, you need to pay a $99.00 single entry fee, a $185.00 campaign entry fee, or $270.00 to enter a so-called integrated campaign, or go all out and pay $305.00 to enter a marketing effectiveness category. The “final entry deadline” is July 29, 2011; however, you can request a deadline extension (presumably as long as you are capable of paying the entry fee or fees). Adding insult to injury, if you win one of the dubious awards, you will be billed a $175.00 “acceptance fee” for your statuette and certificate. We also received a similar direct mail piece from the Telly Awards. According to their website, they received 14,000 entries last year from small agencies that were hoping to promote their businesses, each paying a minimum entry fee of $85.00. Do the math. That means that this questionable award generated at least $1,190,000.00 for its promoters! Want to, once again, add insult to injury? If you “win” one of these dubious awards, you will be automatically charged an additional $170.00 for your award statuette (probably plastic) and your certificate. I guess this is a bargain compared to the Davey Awards, since the minimum entry fee is slightly less, and you will pay $5.00 less for your statuette if you “win”. It is no surprise that, if you search for “Telly Awards scam” on Google, there are currently 24,400 search results. The Telly Awards and Davey Awards are not alone in preying upon start-up companies that are eager (or desperate) to broaden their exposure. They are joined by the Webby Awards and many, many other questionable enterprises that appear to be in the business of generating entry fees and selling statuettes. Do you think that anyone who wins an Emmy, Academy Award, or Grammy pays for their award?

Are winners asked to make purchases? In addition to obvious scams like the Telly Awards statuettes and the RNC PAC, there are many other so-called “awards” where the winners are presented with the opportunity to spend money with the award presenters. Among my favorites are the various Who’s Who directories. Do not be thrown off by what appears to be a recognizable and once-respected name. For years, I have been asked to validate my nomination to “Who’s Who among Executives and Professionals”. The congratulatory letters read, “The Publishing Committee selected you as a potential candidate based not only upon your current standing, but focusing as well on criteria from executive and professional directories, associations, and trade journals. Given your background, the Director believes your profile makes a fitting addition to our publication. There is no fee nor obligation to be listed. As we are working off of secondary sources, we must receive verification from you that your profile is accurate. After receiving verification, we will validate your registry listing within seven business days. Once finalized, your listing will share prominent registry space with thousands of fellow accomplished individuals across the globe, each representing accomplishment within their own geographical area.”

I do not know a single successful businessperson who needs to be included in a directory of this nature. Despite what the promoters say, there will be a fee to be listed and, of course, you will be presented with the opportunity to purchase one or more of the (very expensive) printed directories. As useless as these directories are in these days of online reference sources, even public library reference departments no longer purchase these worthless volumes. About the only buyers are the same suckers who are proud to be listed therein. Go to Wikipedia to learn more about various Who’s Who scams. There are also 21,100,000 search results for the term “Who’s Who scam” on Google.

Does the award require a reciprocal link to the award website? If you remember the early days of the World Wide Web, there were an abundance of website awards that stroked the egos of early webmasters. Others attempted to enhance the SEO of the award-winning sites. In fact, in its early days, my own company presented the “Campground of the Month” awards. These were only presented to our clients, and they helped to enhance the recipient’s search engine ranking “back in the day”. We discontinued this site years ago. Today, if you search for “website awards” on Google, there are 350,000,000 search results. Most of these awards are totally worthless, randomly selecting “winners” who are encouraged to “proudly display” the award badge on their website, linking it back to the award website. Basically, these award sites are link farms that are trying to enhance their own SEO through a network of links. As time goes on, Google and the other search engine robots have gotten much better at ignoring these sites – and even penalizing the sites that are linked to or from them.

Is the award organizer the primary recipient of value from the award? Many regional newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations present annual “Best Of” awards, covering a wide range of categories. The categories all happen to consist of potential advertisers, and the awards are almost universally run by the advertising departments of the publications or broadcast organizations. The awards that are compiled based upon the votes of readers or viewers at least carry a bit of credibility. Even in those instances, the voting process may require a visit to the sponsor’s website (and all of its accompanying self-promotional messages). In almost every instance, the business that is presenting the awards will supply certificates that winners are encouraged to display at their places of business, badges that may be displayed on their websites, and award icons that may be added to their print advertising. All of that awareness does more to promote the businesses that are presenting the awards than the award recipients themselves. Is it any surprise that these awards have been concocted by advertising departments, and that winners are encouraged to buy advertising to help to promote their awards? This type of award is not an outright scam, but I would caution recipients against being overly manipulated in the process of engaging in their own part of the self-promotion.

Is the award presenter and the award recipient the same organization? There are also many thinly-veiled attempts to cross-promote one’s business ventures by having one organization present an “award” to what is essentially another arm of the same organization. This is somewhat along the lines of having General Motors present an award to its Buick division as the “Automobile Manufacturer of the Year”. Nobody would fall for that. Or would they?

Let the Winner Beware

The bottom line is that we all like to be recognized for our efforts, but beware of being exploited by people who prey upon that fact. At my company, our efforts are acknowledged on a daily basis by the success that we generate on behalf of our clients. This is the best recognition possible … and all that we need.

One of our clients contacted me recently because she had received an e-mail (which she didn’t recognize as spam) that promoted services that would enhance her search engine ranking for keywords where she was said to be lacking. The client owns a campground in the Thousand Islands region of New York State. The salutation of the spammer’s e-mail was “Hi Business Owner” (very professional), and the name of the spammer’s own business was spelled incorrectly in the signature. (I think that the keyword here is “red flag”!) The company is located across the border in Canada. (Good luck in getting a refund from another country after you get ripped off.)

Anyway, the client pointed out that she gets similar solicitations (via both spam and telemarketing) on a weekly basis. To her credit, she questioned how they repeatedly find her site if is allegedly so hard to find. Good point! She also questioned how it could be possible for everybody to always be in the top ten search results. The answers are that software robots are used to harvest search results and then to harvest either an e-mail address that is linked directly from the site or is associated with the site’s registration. The spam usually starts with the statement that the sender has “just visited your site”, and that is somewhat true, except that they don’t ever point out that it was actually software on autopilot that found your site.

In the pitch to our client, it was pointed out that her campground “ranked in position 53 in Google for the phrase ‘Campgrounds New York’”. (Gee, I wonder if every New York campground received this same spam solicitation.) As I pointed out to our client, the very broad term “Campgrounds New York” that was used for the example is absurd. Nobody can expect to be at the top of that page of results other than CONY (the Campground Owners of New York) and similar directories of New York Campgrounds. For her business to come in at # 53 for such a broad term is actually quite good when one considers that there are over 200 CONY members.

What the spammers didn’t point out was that our client’s website is the #4 result (and the very first actual campground result) for the logical terms “Thousand Islands Camping” and “Thousand Islands Campground”? Of course not! That wouldn’t suit the effectiveness of their sales pitch. They would be happy to take the client’s money to improve her search position for terms that could only possibly come at the expense of her site’s position for the most important terms.

My advice to my client, and to the readers of this post, is to be very skeptical in reacting to spam like this. Anybody can come up with a set of keyword phrases that can make any business look very bad while ignoring any relevant keyword phrases that might not serve their purposes. Please do not even think of responding to people who conduct their business in this fashion because that is why we all continually get spammed. If even 1% of the people who receive spam like this respond to the “offer”, the spammers are making money and will continue in their practices.

Just when most of us thought that search couldn’t get better than Google, Microsoft has introduced its own new search engine, calling Bing. Didn’t Microsoft already have Live Search? Well, yes, but we all know that it never gained any traction in the market that was dominated by Google and Yahoo!. Type in http://www.live.com, and the URL redirects to http://www.bing.com. No surprise there. Is this actually Microsoft’s response to Google’s development of the Chrome browser. Two of the biggest forces in the industry fighting fire with fire? Maybe.

For you, the bottom line is to be certain that your website is indexed on Bing. It’s simple enough. Go to http://www.bing.com, and enter the name of your business into the search box. Hopefully, your site is already indexed and will come up at the top of the list. If not, submitting your site is as easy as entering a captcha and your URL at:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

Remember, every link to your site counts, particularly one from a site that, in theory at least, could become the next big search engine. On the other hand, it has been pointed out that Bing is also an acronym for “But It’s Not Google”.

There is a great deal of confusion about Google PageRank, one of the key – but optional – components of the Google Toolbar that you should have installed on each of your Web browsers. Pared down to the basics, PageRank is a numerical value, on a scale from 0 to 10, that indicates the importance of any page of content on the Web, based upon the concept that one page linking to another is essentially casting a “vote” for the importance of the second page. Not a truly democratic process, more “important” pages, based upon their own PageRank, carry more weight than pages that have been deemed to be less important, but the bottom line is that Google calculates each page’s relative importance from the “votes” that it has received. Certainly, anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of SEO (search engine optimization) can understand the importance of inbound links to a site.

You might ask, “Who cares?” You should! Those websites that you need to provide links to yours will often make their decisions based upon your the PageRank of your site’s Home page (or other linking page). Every webmaster would like to exchange links with a site with a PageRank of 7 or 8, but nobody wants to waste their time linking to a site with a PageRank of 1 or 2 (or even zero). More importantly, PageRank is an important factor in helping to determine a site’s ranking in the overall organic search results.

On the same token, you (or your webmaster) will want to take PageRank into consideration when you consider linking to other sites. Again, this is not a truly democratic process, and not all links are treated equally. For example, Google will filter out links from known link farms. Because incoming links from link farms are beyond any webmaster’s control (and link farms are more likely to try to capitalize upon a link to you if your site has a higher PageRank), Google will not penalize you for inbound links; however, you will be penalized for any outbound links to link farms or other penalized sites (often represented by a PageRank of zero).

What other factors come into play in determining the relative importance of one link versus another? For one, the number of links on a page. All else being equal, a link to your site from a page with only that one link is far more valuable than a link to your site from a page with 50 links. Basically, the more links on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from a link.

A few other points:

• PageRank values are not arithmetic. Nobody outside of Google’s upper echelons knows the formulae, but it is generally agreed that the scale is logarithmic. In other words, it takes a lot more to advance from PR4 to PR5 than it takes to advance from PR1 to PR2.
• A site’s total PageRank (the combined PageRanks of each of its component pages) is also an important measurement. More than anything else, this is determined by the number of unique pages within a site, clearly benefiting larger sites. New pages (“orphans”) should be directly linked to existing pages in order to yield any benefit for the PageRank of the overall site.
• Links to pages with no outbound links of their own (or pages that Google has not indexed) are known as “dangling” links and have little or no value.
• There are many experts who agree that outbound links that are not reciprocated can be a drain on a site’s total PageRank.

Because the Internet is constantly growing, the logarithmic scales that determine PageRank, by definition, must be continually evolving. This results in frequent changes in a page’s PageRank, where the measure will either increase or (more likely) decrease by a numerical value of 1 for no apparent reason, typically on a three-month basis. This phenomenon is referred to as the “Google dance” and is one more reason why it is important to continually build a site (by adding to its content) and to continually work on building the site’s number of inbound links from other highly-ranked sites.

Interesting tidbits:

• According to Wikipedia, the name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented; however, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares in Google in exchange for use of the patent – shares that were sold in 2005 for $336 million.
• The name “PageRank” is derived from the name of its developer, Larry Page, one of the two founders, along with Sergey Brin, of what would become Google in 1998. The original search engine that Page and Brin developed as part of their research project at Stanford University in 1995 was called “Backrub”.

Learn more. The following references are listed in order of increasing complexity, ending with Page and Brin’s original research paper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Google Page Rank

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

One of the most effective ways to improve your website’s organic search engine position is to increase the quantity and quality of both inbound and outbound links to established, highly rated sites. As an added benefit, any inbound links are going to directly increase the amount of traffic from the referring sites which provide the links. Too many people obsess over the concept of “reciprocal links”, and this is unfortunate. Whether or not another site provides a reciprocal link is not nearly as important as the links themselves, even if they are one-way links. Let us take a separate look at inbound and outbound links.

Outbound links from your site to another site should provide your visitors with sources of additional information that relates to your business or your site’s content. Let’s say that you own a business that sells small kitchen appliances, it would be a good idea to provide links to the manufacturers that you represent, independent product reviews, and general consumer information on the various appliances. By doing so, you are enhancing the usefulness of your site to its visitors (and lessening the likelihood that they might choose to turn elsewhere … perhaps a competitor … for that same information). Simply by association with these sites, your site’s own search engine ranking will improve.

There are a few guidelines when setting up outbound links:
1) Setup the links to open in new tabs or browser windows so that your visitors do not lose track of their point of origin.
2) When choosing outbound links, try to find sites that are, in themselves, highly search rated. A good reference is a site’s “PageRank”, as indicated by the Google Toolbar that you should have installed on your browser. (It’s free!) Try to choose businesses that have a PageRank that is as high or higher than your own.
3) Links that are anchored to text (such as my Google Toolbar link, above) are more valuable than links that are anchored to graphics. If possible, use the two in conjunction.
4) Links that relate to the content that appears on the linking page is more valuable than more general links.
5) Do not include more than a maximum of 50 outbound links on a page.

Inbound links from other sites to yours are even more important. Most of the same guidelines still apply. Every link counts when determining your search engine ranking, as long as it appears on a recognized page of a highly rated site. What you don’t want (but probably cannot prevent) are incoming links from so-called “link farms” which are trying to build their own search engine ranking by capitalizing upon their outbound links to your sites and hundreds of others, typically with totally unrelated content. Obtaining inbound links from the same websites to which you are supplying outbound links should be one of your top priorities, particularly if their websites are more highly rated than your own. The appliance manufacturers, for example, may have links to “where to buy our products”. Try to insure that your business is not only listed but that there is a link to your website. Inbound links from any directories that relate to your business should be your next priority. Don’t forget to include blogs, and even appropriate MySpace and Facebook pages. Whatever effort you put into link creation today will pay dividends tomorrow. In difficult economic times, I can’t think of a better way of helping to insure your continuing success.

Author’s Note: The Wikia Search project ended on March 31, 2009, due to a lack of funding. Click here for more information.

I first became aware of the Wikia Search project when I read a couple of articles in a January 2008 issue of eWeek Magazine. An alpha version of Wikia Search was launched in early January by the same folks who brought us Wikipedia. The idea was to provide a socially driven, open-source alternative to Google, Yahoo, and the other major search engines. (Sounds a bit like the inspiration for the Open Directory Project, doesn’t it?) With Wikia Search, users filter sites and rank search results, influencing subsequent searches.

Wikia Search uses the Grub web crawler, acquired from the old LookSmart search engine last year, in order to build content. Individuals can donate unused bandwidth on their computers to help Grub to search for new content, in a similar fashion to the better known SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Project.

The project started modestly, by search standards, indexing between 50 million and 100 million pages. The hope is that users will then rank the relevance of the search results and feed data back into the search process. Needless to say, this is not the way that conventional search engines have worked. Even the Open Directory Project, with its thousands of editors, was not directly open to user input in this manner. According to eWeek, other search startups are attempting to develop similar concepts, including Eurekster, Mahalo and Lijit, but none of these starts out with the social computing experience or resources of Wikia. This type of search could be the wave of the future.

Six months later, where is Wikia Search today? Good question. If you type www.wikiasearch.com into your browser, you will not find the site. (What kind of logic does that demonstrate?) Already re-launched on June 3, 2008, it is said that the project is now in its “second alpha” release. In other words, it is not yet in even the beta stage of development. All criticisms aside, Wikia Search holds tremendous potential, and there is no reason not to embrace the engine early on.

Go to Wikia Search, enter the name of your business into the search box, then wait for the results. If your business does not appear, click on the “add suggestions” link at the top of the search results or enter your URL into the “Add to this result” text entry box to the right. If your business already appears, but appears on down the list of results, you can influence the sequence of the search results by passing your cursor over your listing and adding a rating to the options that will appear. Of course, you can also be socially responsible and add relevant content that has nothing to do with your business or personal interests.

As I write this, there have been 740,925 contributions to the search results on Wikia Search. If you go to the menu and choose Recent Changes > Live Changes, you will actually see the changes that you have entered, along with your IP address or (if you have signed up), your user ID.

If you go to the Wikia Search community pages, you can read more about the project and its admirable organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality.

Everybody is familiar with MySpace, Facebook, and the other social networking sites. One that I use and recommend is the more business-oriented LinkedIn. If you are either not using LinkedIn yet or are using it but know that you are not realizing its full potential, I hope to offer you the stimulus to get moving. Here are a few reasons to use LinkedIn and ways that it can work for you:

• LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to provide one more direct link to your website, from your profile page on an established site which is considered important by the search engines. In addition to providing a route for new traffic to reach your site, the inbound link in itself will contribute toward the enhancement your site’s search engine ranking.
• LinkedIn provides multiple opportunities to grow your business and to reach out to both old and new contacts. The contact network which you build can help you to get in touch with decision-makes across the full range of industries. You can start to grow your network by unleashing LinkedIn’s robot to search through your address book (in Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or other e-mail client) for people who already have their own LinkedIn profiles. For most of us, this is an instant means of inviting hundreds of your existing associates to join your network. By listing the schools which you have attended and former places of employment, you will also generate lists which might include fellow students and co-workers who have also moved on in new directions and might be willing to re-kindle the contact.
• By building a list of contacts, you also have indirect access to their networks of contacts, as well as the contacts of those contacts. Sort of like second cousins. If you need to get in touch with the CEO of Echo Industries International, you can search for someone who is connected, either directly or indirectly, to a person within your network, then ask that contact for a formal introduction. Ideally, the connection is just one degree away (from someone to whom you are directly connected). Think this is far-fetched? The fact is that all 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented on LinkedIn, either through their CEO’s themselves or upper level management. Through your listing on LinkedIn, they can also, in turn, find you.
• You can use your LinkedIn profile as a virtual resume, particularly if you request and receive recommendations from associates, former employers, and co-workers. In fact, if you are in the job market, you should include your LinkedIn link as part of your e-mail signature and include it on your primary resume. The best way to generate recommendations is to start by recommending people yourself. You will then feel no hesitancy about asking for your own recommendations in return, either from the same people or others. Most people are more than happy to provide recommendations if they are asked.
• Finally, use LinkedIn Answers to either gain business advice from experts throughout the LinkedIn community or to establish yourself as an expert within your field. Either way is a fast and efficient way to expand your network.

For more information on using LinkedIn to your advantage, I highly recommend the LinkedIn blog, particularly the “Tips & Tricks” category of posts. I also recommend the “Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn” post on entrepreneurial guru Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Finally, here is a link to my own LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pelland

So much emphasis is placed on the SEO value of inbound links (also known as backlinks) these days that it is often easy to neglect the importance of outbound links on your site. Outbound links, first and foremost, serve to make your site a more useful and comprehensive resource for its users. As an example, let’s presume that you are a small manufacturer of bicycles, your visitors would certainly expect to find a list of local dealers where your products can be purchased. By providing this information, you are also helping to establish the value of your site as an informational “hub”, one of several factors that come into play in determining your site’s overall search engine positioning.

To maximize the value of the links (and, consequently, the impact upon your search engine ranking), any such outbound links should follow certain rules of thumb:

• The outbound links should be relevant to the content of your site and the page upon which they appear.
• The links should be anchored to keywords within the text within the page. For example, either “Pelland Advertising provides website development services for small businesses” or “Pelland Advertising provides website development services for small businesses” is preferable to “Click here to learn more about Pelland Advertising’s website development services for small businesses.”
• Links that are anchored to text are more valuable than links that are anchored to graphics.
• Do not include more than a maximum of 50 outbound links on a page.
• Linking to high ranking sites will do you far more good than linking to sites which are relatively unknown to the major search engines.
• Do not buy links or exchange links with “link farms”.
• Be sure that your links are active and up-to-date.

This last point is often overlooked. A fine page of links which is put together in January may be full of errors by July. It is important to check your link pages on a periodic basis and to make corrections as they become necessary. Fortunately, there is a very easy way to accomplish this. The W3C Link Checker is an excellent freeware tool which will find all of the broken links within a page, including graphics and URL’s which refresh to other pages. This online validator from the W3 Consortium is able to recursively check your document for dead links. Simply go to the W3C Link Checker site, enter the full URL of the page that you want to check, and click the “Check” button. It will check every link on the page, generating a color-keyed report that will show you the corrections that need to be made.

Aside from the SEO advantages and the site usability benefits which you will be offering to your visitors, keeping broken links off of your site simply makes your business look more professional and perceptive.

One last note: If you have a robots.txt file within the meta tags on your page, it will typically show the “index,follow” attributes. Double check to be sure that your page is not using the “nofollow” attribute if you have outbound links on the page and you would like to maximize the benefit of the outbound links to the linked sites.

Clients frequently ask me whether or not they should engage in a sponsored search advertising campaign. My answer is generally a resounding “maybe”.

In the early days of sponsored search, also known as keyword bidding or pay-per-click advertising, the competition was sparse and the rewards were phenomenal. In the beginning, Overture was about the only game in town, and minimum bids were 1 cent. I can recall starting a new keyword bidding campaign on Overture and seeing online sales triple almost overnight. Well, those days are over. Overture was bought by Yahoo!, and is now known as Yahoo Sponsored Search, and many other players got into the act, most noticeably Google, with its AdWords program. Minimum bids increased from 1 cent to 2 cents to 5 cents to 10 cents faster than the Postal Service increases the price of postage stamps, and tons of businesses joined the programs. Thinking that this was some sort of marketing Holy Grail, competition caused prices to skyrocket for any sort of quality ad placement, and the impact of any individual advertising campaign became highly diluted. With all this in mind, should you or should you not get on board?

First of all, if you are considering a sponsored search program, I would suggest concentrating on the key players: Yahoo, Google, perhaps Ask.com, and, if you really insist, Microsoft Network. Keep in mind that sponsored search campaigns with either Yahoo! or Google will appear on a broad network of sites, not simply the two flagship sites. The partnering arrangements are continually evolving; however, your Google AdWords ads will also appear on sites such as AOL and About.com.

My next piece of advice is to try to first concentrate on improving your organic (conventional) search results through a search engine optimization campaign before spending your dollars on sponsored search. With all else being equal, most people when conducting a search will first click on organic search results which appear near the top of the first page before they will consider clicking on a sponsored search link. The perception is, quite accurately, that the results in the organic search listings are more likely to match their query, rather than representing the interests of companies which are trying to sell them something. On the same token, if you are already appearing at the top of the organic search results for any particular search term, do not bid against yourself through sponsored search. Remember, it costs you nothing for somebody to click on your organic search link, but it will cost you for that same person to click on your sponsored search link which might take them to the same page of content. Invest your advertising dollars more wisely than that.

If you cannot seem to gain a strong position in the organic search results for any particular search term (and you have already done your SEO homework and constructed your site properly), chances are that your business is in a field which is crowded with competitors. If that is the case, chances are also that the minimum bids for any kind of decent sponsored search positioning will have been driven up by competing bids. (I have seen bids in very competitive fields as high as $10.00 or more per click. Would I get involved in that playing field? No thank you!)

If the field is crowded, the trick is to concentrate on refining your bids by making your selected search terms much more specific in nature. For example, let’s say that you run a small business which makes handmade alpaca sweaters. You do not want to bid on the term “clothing”, you probably also do not want to bid on the term “sweaters”, but should more likely bid on the terms “alpaca sweaters”, “handmade sweaters”, or, if necessary, “handmade alpaca sweaters”. You see, by bidding on the terms “clothing”, you would be wasting money paying for clicks from people who may be interested in buying clothing online but who have no interest in buying sweaters. By making more specific keywords choices, you will get fewer clicks (which is good, when you are paying for each click), but your clicks will cost less (because of less competition for the more specific terms). Most importantly, because of the specificity, the traffic which you will gain is far more likely to be converted into sales. Always keep in mind that the quality of clicks is far more important than the quantity of clicks.

Are there times when you should engage in a pay-per-click program to promote a site even though you have not allowed sufficient time for SEO to gain the organic search positioning that it may ultimately deserve? Absolutely! Particularly if your product or service is time-critical, you may not be able to afford losing sales while your site is waiting to escape the so-called “Google sandbox” effect. If your product or service is highly seasonal, or if you have a new product which must capitalize on sales during an annual holiday such as Christmas, Valentines Day, or the Fourth of July, go for it!

For most businesses, simple website traffic is of little relevance. The important factor is sales, and sales are generated by traffic multiplied by your conversion ratio. Recent studies have shown the most productive visitors are the ones who reach your site directly, either through type-ins or bookmarks. This makes sense because it has always been a primary rule of marketing that it is easier to sell to an existing customer than anyone else. This rule carries through to people who have previously visited your website but not have necessarily made a purchase. Similar research has shown that, when simply comparing traffic which is generated from either organic search results or a pay-per-click ad, the ads outperform the organic search results by every measurement other than the number of page views. These factors include both the visitor:sales ratios and the average dollar amount per sale. This makes sense since most people clicking on ads either expect or are seeking some sort of commercial sales arrangement. The number of page views is reduced because pay-per-click ads usually bring visitors to a specific landing page for a featured item. This, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the rule that website traffic conversion is directly related to the number of clicks required for a prospective customer to find what he or she is looking for on your site. Most people know the rule that says, “If it takes more than three clicks, you’ve lost them.” Keeping that in mind, there is nothing more effective than a single click directly to the desired product.

There are many other factors which come into play when it comes to sponsored search advertising campaigns, including budgets, ad content, tracking, content matching, and far more. If there is adequate interest, I would be happy to expand upon any of those topics in future posts … or respond to particular comments to this post. In the meantime, I am hoping to have covered some of the basics for small business owners who are in the early stages of either considering or getting involved with their initial sponsored search advertising campaigns.

Every webmaster know that a properly entered keywords list in the META tags of a web page, particularly the Home page of a site, is a critical step in the SEO process. What not everybody knows is how to present the information within the tag, as well as how to insure that it is as complete as possible. The following are a few tips.

List your keywords in order of importance, all on a single line, separated by commas and including appropriate words and phrases from the following categories:

• Industry-specific: Your product or service and major terms which describe or relate to that product or service. For a family campground, examples might include campground, camping, RV park, RV resort, camping resort, family campground, family camping, tenting, travel trailer, motorhome, fifth wheel, pop-up camper.
• Geographical: Examples should include your city or town, nearby cities and towns, your county, your region, your state. For a campground, you might add topography to the list, with pertinent terms such as mountain, farm, lakefront, rural.
• Nearby Destinations: If you have a business which attracts a drive-up clientele and you are down the road from one or more major attractions, ride on their coattails. The list should include all major attractions within a reasonable driving distance of your business.
• Your Amenities: This should include all features and amenities which your business offers which may be decision-making factors. Examples for an online store or service business might include free installation, lifetime warranty, all natural, free shipping. Examples for a campground might include swimming pool, cabins, cabin rentals, pull-thru sites, 50-amp, miniature golf, mini golf, entertainment, horseshoes, bocce, bocci, bingo, etc.

In compiling your keywords listing, be sure to include alternate spellings (such as bocce and bocci) and common misspellings … even misspellings of your own business name. I often comment that consumers do not need to pass a spelling test in order to spend their money on your product or service. The bottom line is to make it easy for them to find you, whether or not they already know who you are, in an online search.

As I have already mentioned, it is important to list your keywords sequentially, with the most important terms coming first in the list. There is no limit to the total number of terms listed, but you should be careful to keep them pertinent to the content of your page, in order to avoid diluting the impact of your most important terms. It is also important that you do not engage in the practice (or even appear to be engaging in the practice) of keyword spamming. Use each word only once, do not use singular and plural variations of the same term (if the pluralization simply adds the letter “s”), and do not use the same word repeatedly as part of more than three keyword phrases (keywords made up of more than a single word).

Whatever terms are important enough to be included in your keywords list should also be incorporated, inasmuch as is practical, in your first paragraph of text on a page, any headline tags, ALT tags, the page description tag, and embedded links. I will write more on these subjects in upcoming posts.

One way of checking to be sure that you have not missed any important terms is to perform a quick search for the phrases that best describe your type of business to see which sites appear at the top of the organic search results on Google. You may also want to refer directly to the websites of your major competitors. Check the source code on each of those sites to see if there are any terms which are also appropriate to your website which you may have otherwise overlooked.

Finally, if your site is running Google Analytics, or any similar analytical software, keep a close monitor of the search terms that your current site visitors are using to find your site online. Be sure to include those same terms in your page’s keywords list. By doing so, you will help to maintain (or possibly improve) your site’s organic search engine ranking for those terms that are already proving effective at sending traffic to your site.