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.

When it is time to register a domain name these days, there are understandably times when some of us almost yearn for the “Good Old Days” when Network Solutions held a monopoly on registrations. Prices have certainly come down, but it has become more important than ever for the buyer to beware and to remember the old adage that you get what you pay for.

For starters, we all know that the “standard” price for domain name registrations back in the days of the NetSol monopoly was $35.00 per year. I just performed a search on Google for the term “cheap domain name registry”, and the first page of results included listings which allegedly offer domain name registrations, some including free website hosting and others claiming to include free website design, for $6.95, $5.95, $2.85, $1.99 and $1.00. What … no registrar is willing to pay me $100.00 for the privilege of registering a domain name? Remember TINSTAAFL: There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

For any company to provide registrar services, they must pay the necessary fees to ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). These fees begin with a non-refundable $2,500 application fee (scheduled to increase) and end with added per-transaction fees. So how can any registrar stay in business offering $6.95 (or less) registration packages? How can they do this and still buy expensive ads on the Super Bowl or 10-12 page spreads in IT magazines? Quite simply, add-ons and fine print.

If you should ever fail to renew your domain name registration, does your registrar offer a renewal grace period? In many instances, the “bargain” registrars will put your domain name on the auction block the second that it expires, where it will be bought up two seconds later, and where you will have lost it forever. This practice is known as “drop catching”. Quite a price to pay for an oversight, isn’t it?

Of even greater concern are the registrars who routinely engage in deceptive marketing practices, using any combination e-mail scams, junk faxes or direct mail. You may have seen these solicitations. They usually look like invoices, until you read the fine print at the bottom, and they generally arrive months before a domain name registration’s renewal date, sometimes listing inaccurate renewal dates in an attempt to trick the recipient into making an urgent decision. In most instances, these shady registrars are trying to get you to transfer your domain name registration(s) from your existing registrar into their portfolio. In other instances, they are trying to get you to register variations of your domain name under a variety of worthless country codes (such as .cc and .cn). These solicitations are a spin on the old “slamming” techniques that had been used by long-distance telephone companies back in the 1980’s. One of the most notorious companies is Domain Registry of America. Do a Google search for their company name, and (after the link to their own website) you will see an entire page of websites warning about these scam operators. Another similar outfit is called Liberty Names of America. Same scam. Check out a Google search for their company name. My recommendation to my clients is to save any solicitations from these companies. Eventually, there are likely to be some sort of class action legal actions in response to their deceptive marketing practices, and your letter, fax or e-mail could allow you to be included in any settlement.

As if these were not bad enough, a new registrar scam just came to my attention last week, when one of my clients received an e-mail solicitation. This one, from a company in Hong Kong called Asia Network Online, claimed that it was sending a “courtesy” notification that a (fictitious) person was attempting to register versions of the client’s domain name under a variety of TLD’s (top level domains), including .hk, .cn., and .info. First of all, there is no registrar who would offer any such “courtesy”. Secondly, if somebody did, in fact, want to register the .hk version of a domain name, they would take the money and run. If it smells like a scam, it is because it IS a scam.

Do I have a suggestion for a registrar whom I have learned to trust? Yes. I hesitate to make recommendations because there are so many good registrars out there. My best advice is to avoid any company which has an offer which appears to be too good to be true. Over the years, I have been very happy with a company called directNIC, located in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their basic registration fee is $15.00 per year, and they offer a variety of added services, many at no additional charge. And, yes, they do have a grace period.

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.

Are you using Google Alerts? If not, read on, then get started! Those of us who have been around long enough remember the days of newspaper “clipping services”, programs where readers actually pored through newspapers and periodicals looking for references to any particular business or subject, clipping out the articles (yes, with scissors) and forwarding them to subscribers. As you might imagine, this process was as far from instantaneous as it was from inexpensive.

Well, along comes the 21st century and Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, you can monitor the Web, news, blogs, groups – essentially a comprehensive range of online media – for references to your business or industry. Just as importantly, you can also monitor references to any of your competitors. Simply sign up for a free account with this Beta program, enter a search term (within quotes seems to be the most effective), and indicate how frequently (weekly, daily or immediately) you would like to receive lists of any new references to that search term (or phrase) which are found by Google’s spiders. You can setup an unlimited number of alerts.

The advantages to keeping informed in this manner are enormous. Particularly with the growth of social networking websites, you might discover new linking opportunities … or less than flattering reviews of your company, product or service that you might want to counter with alternate opinions. Quite honestly, until you subscribe to this service, you cannot really know what kind of buzz might be circulating, right behind your company’s back.

Most website owners these days are obsessed, for good reason with Google and Yahoo!, the two behemoths of Internet search. Those of us who remember the early days of the World Wide Web, back in the last century, know that before there was search there were directories. When Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web evolved into Yahoo!, it was a directory, not a search engine, and getting your site listed in the directory was neither particularly easy nor inexpensive. In response to this “Yahoo! Challenge”, the Open Directory Project evolved out of Netscape and the Mozilla Project, hence the dmoz.org address (which evolved from the directory.mozilla.org address). The Open Directory, as always, remains to be maintained by a community of volunteer editors, and you cannot pay to be listed, although a shortage of volunteers (compounded by a degree of infighting and power struggles within the editorial ranks) can often lead to lengthy waits before a submission is approved and added to the directory.

Although it is true that Internet users today turn to search (usually on Google) to find what they want online, rarely opting to wade through the hierarchical structure of a directory to find Web content, the Open Directory Project remains as important as ever. Here’s why:

• Inclusion of a website in the Open Directory has a positive impact upon a site’s Google PageRank.
• The Open Directory Project licenses its content distribution through hundreds of small search engines.
• The Open Directory Project data is included in the directory services of many of the major search engines, including Google and AOL Search. That’s right: Your search on Google will often reference site listings from the Open Directory.

Now you know why your site needs to be listed.

The submission process is simple. First, check to see if your site is already listed. Go to www.dmoz.org and enter your business name into the search box at the head of the page. A business can only be listed in one category. If you are listed, fine (unless you strongly believe that your listing should be moved to another category). If you are not listed, you can drill down through the hierarchy of categories to find the right place to list your site. If you would like to simplify this task, enter your type of business or the name of a similar business (perhaps one of your competitors) into the search box to see what listing categories might appear. Click on one of those categories to confirm that it represents the most appropriate place for your site to be listed. From that page, click on the “suggest URL” link to go to the site submission page for that category.

Enter the following information on the submission page:

• Your site URL. (Check the Regular option.)
• Your site Title (taken from the Title tag of your site’s Home page).
• A description of your site in 25-30 words. Try to write this as objectively as possible. The more that you embellish, the more likely it is that your description will be edited.
• Your e-mail address.
• Enter the captcha script at the bottom of the page, and hit Submit! You are on your way.

Since its inception in 1980, Pelland Advertising has specialized in serving the needs of small businesses with growing pains and limited budgets. One of our key niches has been the family camping industry, for which we have designed and produced literally hundreds of brochures and related four-color process collateral advertising projects, with clients which include many of the leading family campgrounds from throughout the Northeastern and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. Since the mid-1990’s, Pelland Advertising has provided website development services for many of those same clients, while concurrently producing several of the Internet’s leading online commerce websites for clients from within a much broader range of industries. The company also provides a wide range of instructional, consultational, and search engine optimization services for a full range of home-based small businesses, primarily concentrated within the Hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. Our campground industry clients include the Northeast Campground Association, the Pennsylvania Campground Owners Association, the Maryland Association of Campgrounds, and National ARVC’s National School of RV Park & Campground Management. Some of our other highly recognizable clients include the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company, the Mayhew Tool Company, Smith’s Country Cheese, and Storybook Land.

Our purpose in creating this blog site is to share our expertise in an open forum, providing an exchange of the latest in useful information covering topics including:

• Search engine optimization
• Web design tips
• Site submission resources
• Consumer-generated web content
• Web analytics

I encourage your feedback and contributions and hope that this is the first step in what will become a rapidly growing and valuable small business resource.