In our book, we call Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords the “wonder twins” of pay-per-click. Read reviews and comparisons of the two major U.S. PPC services, and their newer competitor, Microsoft adCenter, here.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) [Yahoo! Link] is actually a suite of several online marketing tools, including sponsored search, local advertising, and the Yahoo! Directory submittal. However, when people talk about YSM they’re generally referring to the sponsored search – that is, the pay-per-click service. Currently the #2 service in the U.S. (second to Google AdWords, discussed below). The service has a respectably large reach, including all the Yahoo! properties as well as many meta search engines, smaller search sites, and content sites such as ESPN (see partial partners list [Yahoo! link]). Advertisers can choose to be displayed on additional sites through the “Content Match” option.

YSM ad campaigns are generally considered easier to set up than Google AdWords campaigns, but lack some of the geekier (and fun!) features, like comparing performance for multiple ads and dynamic keyword insertion. There is also an editorial review period for new listings that can take a couple of business days. Conversion tracking is included.

Rumor has it that YSM will slowly but surely become more like Google AdWords in the year 2006. Changes may include: speeding up their campaign setup, implementing geotargeting and possibly other Google-like features, and changing the PPC ranking algorithm so that it takes more factors into account, rather than just the dollar amount of the advertiser bid. [Editors' note: The late 2006/early 2007 upgrade, called Panama, reflects these changes]

• YSM’s Sponsored Search
• YSM’s Keyword Selector Tool
• YSM’s Listing Guidelines
• YSM’s Advertiser Workbook (PDF)
• All about the 2007 Panama upgrade from Yahoo!

Google AdWords

Google AdWords [Google Link] is a PPC service with a fabulous, ready-made venue for advertisement display: Google’s own wildly popular search engine. In addition, Google offers advertisers the option of displaying ads on thousands of affiliate sites linked through the AdSense program and matched algorithmically with the ad content.

AdWords offers many helpful features for advertisers, including: quick campaign setup, the ability to rotate multiple ads for the same group of keywords, advanced keyword matching options and geotargeting. One disadvantage of AdWords is that advertisers can’t just pay their way to the top of the heap – rankings are based on a number of factors, including bid price and predicted clickthrough rate. Conversion tracking is included.

Future AdWords features may include behavioral targeting, in which searchers can be targeted based on past searches or other web activities.

• Google AdWords
• AdWords Learning Center
• AdWords Program Comparison
• The Maximum Effect, a 2003 Google AdWords guide to improving ad performance (PDF) (also mentioned in our article about dynamic keyword insertion)
• View Google AdWords’ most expensive listings as of March 2006, as researched by blogger Cyberwyre.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Aaron Wall’s free downloadable PPC report
• YSM vs. Adwords on seomoz.org
• Read Overture vs. Adwords originally published on Jill Whalen’s newsletter
• Yahoo!’s John Battelle on Google Adwords
• Bruce Clay gives further descriptions and comparisons of Google and YSM.

Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft launched its pay-per-click service, Microsoft adCenter [MSN Link], in May of 2006 to compete with Yahoo and Google for a chunk of the growing SEM/PPC advertising market. The Microsoft offering follows the same basic model of the other two: advertisers pay a per-click fee to display their listings above or near “organic” search results for chosen search queries. MSN differentiated its offering with more advanced demographic targeting options than Yahoo and Google, including the capability of adjusting keyword bid costs for differing demographics (for example, paying full price for female searchers and bidding at the 50% level for male searchers). The accuracy of these demographics has been debated. The adCenter control interface, while rather difficult to use, does offer a dynamic keyword insertion feature in the ad displays that vastly improves upon Google’s dynamic keyword insertion functionality.

In our experience of early 2007, traffic levels at MSN were still too low for it to be a primary source of PPC site traffic; however, per-click costs are also significantly lower than Google and Yahoo. We were also surprised at the very strict editorial reviews that our ads received.

• Microsoft adCenter
• A Sept, 2006 article states: “adCenter Advertisers Like Returns, Want More“
• Read the adCenter blog
• Read the adCenter FAQ
• Read a 2008 detailed user review of adCenter

Q: I would like to create an area for our customers to read articles or news about our industry and our company. Should I institute some kind of blog format so that customers can comment on stories or articles? Will this be complicated to set up? Is there any advantage over standard web pages for posting articles?

A: Many people wonder whether to use a blog format for posting articles online, or whether a classic, tree-structured website navigation is better. We’d look at this situation from a few angles: where it fits into your conversion goals, your available labor, inbound link potential, and target audience preferences. Here’s a bit more on each of these:

Conversion Goals
If you are developing content that is clearly helpful in driving conversions, such as “Perfect sizing tips for your baseball cleats” or “Which is the right softball for you?” then we’d argue that it belongs on your site as an article. This is our gut feeling, because we think this type of content is generated less frequently and tends to appeal to a newbie audience, so it’s just better suited for a static page within your global navigation.

On the other hand, if you have “newsy” content – promotions, events, etc., that is meant to engage interested visitors and spark return visits, then it would be perfectly reasonable to post the content in a blog format. Similarly, if you often post brief commentary and observations, industry notes and links, rather than longer, essay-like research and articles, a blog would provide a better venue.

Do you have both conversion-minded articles and news items? You can always create a hybrid situation in which you use the blog primarily for news, but create a post on the blog containing a “promo” for, and a link to, every new article you create.

Your Available Labor
You sound concerned about technical work involved, but what about writing work? Do you have the writing staff to keep a blog current and populated with compelling content? Is blog-style content generation realistic for your particular industry and company? A lot of companies use blog authoring software to post their press releases, which is perfectly kosher, but that kind of arrangement rarely comes close to using the blogosphere to its full potential.

Inbound Link Potential
We think it’s reasonable to assume that a well-written, interesting blog will generate more links than articles, because you can generate more discussion on a compelling and dynamic blog than in a static article.

Notice how we went overboard with the adjectives there? “Well-written, interesting, compelling, dynamic?” Just a friendly reminder that content is king no matter how you add it to your website.

In order to gain the full benefits of integrating a blog into your existing site, you should make sure it is part of your domain, i.e. yoursite.com/blog. Then, start linking out to other relevant blogs. The blogosphere is a two-way street: you should link out if you want to get links in.

Target Audience
Think about your target audience and how comfortable they would be with your choice. Would your internet-savvy audience find a classic navigation boring and old-fashioned? Or would your more traditional or newbie audience get lost trying to use page tags as navigation? Keep a clear eye on your target audience and your long-term business goals, and make your choice accordingly.

Search engine marketers love Digg. But Digg hasn’t been giving them a whole lot of love back. Here is some insider advice for dipping your toe into the Digg pool.

Website marketers far and near are striving for hits on Digg.  Why is Digg so alluring? For one thing, it gets huge numbers of visitors: over 15 million unique visitors a month. A well-dugg article could bring a pointy spike in visits to your site.  For another, it’s free! There’s no fee to get the over-the-top traffic you crave. Instead, you earn the best positions with a more elusive form of currency: compelling content.

We sat down with Scott Baker, Digg.com’s Director of Operations, with a few simple questions on every website marketer’s mind: how can we use Digg to help our clients?  What does Digg really want to see? And what is the formula for success on Digg?

“Don’t Try to Game the System”

Brace yourself for disappointment: Baker says he can’t share any insider secrets that will get you more diggs, because, as he says, “It’s all in the hands of the users.”   Yup, just like so many other marketing endeavors, there are no formulas or magic bullets.

Baker was, however, happy to share some basic Do and Don’t advice for Digg newcomers:

• Categorize correctly. For example, if you are posting a blatant opinion piece, make sure to post it in the “political opinion” category instead of “political news.”
• Be unique! Don’t post a story that already exists on the site – search for duplicates before you submit. And, if your story is not covering a unique subject, you’d better have a unique angle.
• Don’t post a link to your own blog and make it look like a news story. For example, posting a story with the newsy title “Rumsfeld Resigns” should point to an actual news story, not a second-hand retelling on your own blog.
• Don’t try to game the system. Digg has multiple safeguards against spam and bombastic marketing content, including algorithms that influence and moderate the rise and fall of stories. But probably the most important safeguards are the diggers themselves. For example, according to Baker, there’s a simple reason that attempts to buy diggs didn’t work: “When unscrupulous content owners tried to pay top diggers for diggs, it didn’t work because the stories themselves were not of high quality.  That’s the built-in B.S. detector of Digg.com.”

Learn From a Master

Hungry for more strategic advice?  You might look to Neal Patel, co-founder and CTO of ACS, and well-known veteran of the Digg homepage. Patel is a great source of Do’s and Don’ts for Digg newbies (our favorite: add humor to your title and description, even when posting a serious story).  He also details a strategy of participating in the community, making friends, and giving more than you expect to receive, in this podcast.

As Digg has risen in popularity, it serves as an excellent example of common challenges in SEO in general. Appealing to a particular user base, providing unique and interesting content, writing well, keeping abreast of changing algorithms and standards of acceptability. These are not new concepts – they’re very, very old school SEO.

Controversy Built In

One thing we learned from Neal Patel’s advice is not to be taken in by the “post it and they will come” mystique. It’s not that simple. Digg’s audience is a community of primarily young male techies. You need to appeal to this audience, but just as important, you need to not offend them. Hell hath no fury like a PO’d digger with a bury button and a commenting feature at his disposal. If you don’t believe us, you can read Danny Sullivan’s account of his own Digg misadventures.

No doubt about it, things get exciting when a website is composed entirely of user-generated content, and directly influenced by its users’ preferences. Sure, there are individual users voting on stories “in a vacuum.”  But primarily, Digg is a community, and it behaves like a community – with affinities, grudges, schisms, and moderators trying to keep things from getting out of control. Networks of friends can coordinate to give each other boosts by digging each other, or to bury common enemies. And then there’s just plain anarchy for the fun of it. Have you heard about the time that hundreds of Digg users mutinied and posted forbidden code?  Or have you seen the popular article “exposing” a group of sites that violate Digg’s user guidelines? Or the world’s most hated comment? This is just the tip of the iceberg on the daily feuds, accusations, and drama that is interweaved with the website’s main menu of seriously entertaining content.

The takeaway? Learn the ropes and avoid breaking etiquette by becoming a user first; spend a good month as a regular user before you even try to post an article.

So, Why Try?

We won’t lie – we haven’t had big success with Digg, but we then again, we never expected any. After our conversation with Scott Baker, we’ve come to a not-so-startling conclusion: The majority of the Digg user base does not like SEOs. We’re not taking it personally, but we are taking it with a practical attitude: we won’t place a lot of our social media marketing efforts into Digg.

You, on the other hand, may have lots of good reasons to try for your 15 minutes of fame on the Digg home page. Here are some indicators that Digg might be the right venue for you:

• You have unique content that has a serious chance of appealing to an audience of young opinionated techies.
• You are an excellent writer who is especially talented at crafting wry headlines.
• You already have a loyal following that is likely to Digg your content.
• You have spent a good amount of time actually using Digg.

If you have Digg-specific appeal and a very strong understanding of Digg etiquette, then get to work on your Digg strategy – you just might make it to the home page!

Q: In order to serve more customers, my web development firm will be offering SEO, based upon the methods in your book. My question is, will passing my recommendations to other webmasters give away all of my SEO techniques? Wouldn’t this be “shooting myself in the foot” so to speak and give a rival webmaster the means to quickly offer their own SEO program using what I’ve handed over? How can I perform SEO and still protect my methods?

A: We don’t think you’re in danger of “shooting yourself in the foot,” for a number of reasons.

First, every website is different, and therefore your advice for every website will be different. Your value as an SEO depends on you giving out specific, well-researched advice based on target audience, conversion goals, and so on – not just a list of best practices. If you are delivering solid SEO recommendations for one website, most of these recommendations will not be transferable to another website.

Second, as we like to say, SEO is not brain surgery. It’s more a mixture of common sense, great writing skills, and boring little details. So, whether you hand them your recommendations or not, your rival webmasters can figure out how to implement basic SEO best practices by surfing the web, reviewing other sites, and reading our SEO book. The question is — will they bother?

And third, good SEO takes a lot of work! There’s much more to being a successful SEO than just reading your recommendations, or our book, or even memorizing basic best practices. For example, good keyword research takes hours. To be good at SEO, you also need to spend time keeping up with search news and developments to make sure you’re giving current recommendations. And it takes work and skill to communicate with your customers so that they understand and trust you.

So, as long as you’re doing good work and building up your experience, knowledge, and range of customers, you probably won’t be giving away anything by handing over good SEO recommendations – it’s more likely that you’ll just be building your reputation and creating another satisfied client.

Q: I have a business selling big and tall men’s coats online. I was going to start attempting to build some links as suggested in your book but it was suggested to me that if I managed to get too many links, that my site may get Google sandboxed as it is only 1 year old and may look suspect.

Could you tell me if this is maybe correct, and if so what speed should I try to get links added. My friend suggested 1 a week.

A: It’s true that there are penalties for websites building a lot of links in an “unnatural” way in a short time, but we don’t think this would be an issue for someone in your situation. We think this problem most often applies to spammers, scrapers, or people who own hundreds or thousands of domains and work to build status by interlinking between them. Your site contains real, unique content and a legitimate product, and should be able to build links naturally without any problems on the search engines.

If you are concerned that you’re building links too fast (that’s a pretty nice problem to have!), just be sure that they’re coming from a wide variety of types of sites (that is, they are not all from within comment postings, or bulletin boards, instead, they are a mix of blogs, social bookmarking sites, static sites, etc.), and most importantly, that as many links as possible are from sites that focus on similar content to your website. Keep your focus on the overall site quality and the relevance to your target audience and it’s very unlikely there will be any penalty.

Q: When generating your top 10 keyword list you say that one step is to combine your keywords. This confused me and I was hoping you could provide additional perspective.

On my top 10 list I have 3 phrases:

hamburger stands
great hamburger stands
best hamburger stands

Do you mean I should shrink this to 2 phrases (“great hamburger stands ” and “best hamburger stands”). If that’s the case, wouldn’t I be dropping out anyone who searches for “hamburger stands” which is a much broader (and very relevant) term for me? Won’t I miss a lot of people by doing this?

A: We do recommend combining keyword phrases when they contain the same keyword(s) in them. Let’s say your visible text contains 7 instances of the phrase “great hamburger stands.”  The search engines will know that your page is relevant to both “hamburger stands” and “great hamburger stands”, and you won’t “miss” your target audience. Technically, the keyword density (number of instances of the keyword phrase compared to the total number of words on the page) will be better for “great hamburger stands” vs. “hamburger stands,” but unless you’re in an extremely competitive situation, it’s still fine to combine the two on a given page.

Another very good reason to combine keywords is that it usually makes for much better writing. It’s important to avoid keyword-stuffed, repetitive sentences like this: “If you’re looking for hamburger stands, we’ll show you the best hamburger stands because we’re all about hamburger stands, especially the BEST hamburger stands.” And you want to avoid HTML title tags like: “ZappyCo: Hamburger Stands and Best Hamburger Stands,” because it’s not compelling to write that way!

And, most importantly, just because you’re combining the phrases doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use just “hamburger stands” on your site – you should feel free to use it as needed! And you can also track your site’s performance for both variations of the terms.

We’re talking about organic (non-paid) optimization here. If you’re opening a pay-per-click account, as a rule it’s actually better to list all variations of your keyword phrases if you have the budget to do so.

Q: I am stuck on a problem that I hope you can help me overcome. I understand that almost everything hangs on the choice of keywords. I have subscribed to Wordtracker but can’t find a useful keyword that isn’t WAY OVERUSED already. See example below.

We are a non-profit organization that helps teachers and students learn more about business and entrepreneurship. We try to help teenagers start their own business and become successful entrepreneur. Each year we conduct a Business Plan Competition and a Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. We also provide curriculum and teaching aids for educators.

Unfortunately, each of the words underlined above scores a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) of .0004. How can I build a successful SEO strategy if I can’t find appropriate keywords that aren’t incredibly overhyped?

A: We just love your methodology for telling us your keyword choices. It really helps to put things in context.

It looks like you’re using Wordtracker’s KEI as a primary indicator of your keywords’ possible success. KEI is only one measurement. It’s at best controversial, and at worst, unloved by lots of SEOs. (For fun, you can Google “KEI is worthless” to get various opinions.) Our advice is to ignore KEI as it’s not really a prime indicator of the actual competitive climate of a given keyword, and it certainly doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability of a keyword for your website. In our SEO book we recommend assessing keywords differently, by doing things such as reviewing allintitle data (See our search engine shortcuts page for a how-to) and snooping on websites that are similar to yours in focus, among other tasks.

You note a bad KEI score for “each of the words” you underlined in your paragraph. Taken individually, of course, your keywords are awfully generic. Trying to rank for single words like “teacher” or “business” would be an exercise in futility, so if that was your line of thinking, it’s no wonder that you’re finding your keyword choices problematic.

Even if you find a few gems by combining the keywords in your paragraph, we wonder if you might be barking up the wrong tree. We say this, of course, with zero knowledge of your campaign, but we’ll go by our hunch here. Since your business offers an unusual service, you are probably in a situation where most people aren’t actively searching for exactly what you provide. If nobody’s looking for your service, then you need to think about what they are looking for, and how your business fulfills this need.

One way to do this is to rewrite your paragraph from a user’s perspective and see what keywords emerge when you think this way. Off the top of our heads there might be some tie-in to summer jobs (i.e. you provide and alternative solution to them) or college preparedness (surely what you do helps beef up a college application), and it looks like you might offer specific tools for teachers – not just “curriculum” – like, say lesson plans. And, by all means, don’t forget to consider adding location-specific keywords to the mix. If you’re having trouble finding these kinds of keywords, it’s time to call up some of your teachers, students, and volunteers, and ask how they would describe your business to others. You might be surprised – and enlightened – by what they tell you.

Q: I’m a professional SEO. I have a potential B2B client who keeps saying: “Sure, online marketing works for B2C or just selling stuff on the Internet, but it doesn’t work well with B2B.” Is that true? And do you know of any studies that I can quote to show whether SEO works for B2Bs or not?

A: There are some very good reasons that SEO works for B2B (business-to-business) websites. The main reason is that targeting is the key to B2B website success. The total traffic for a B2B can be very small, as long as it’s well targeted. You don’t have to bring in thousands of users per day;  you just need to bring in the right people. By contrast, with their bigger audiences, large B2C (business-to-consumer) sites often find pay-per-click advertising prohibitively expensive. Websites with a very focused niche are actually perfect candidates for SEO. As a bonus, SEO will help your B2B clients think about their users – what categories do they fall into and what are they looking for – so it can be a great part of a holistic web usability effort.

Of course, if you’re promoting a B2B site, your SEO strategy should be tailored for a B2B site. You won’t want to focus on general keywords; instead you may want to focus on more specific keywords like product names and descriptions.

In some cases, it will be harder to track SEO success for a B2B than for a B2C.  This is because your conversions are not likely to be straight sales or any other quantitative value, but rather leads off the website, phone calls, or something even less tangible like branding. Further, the total number of people visiting your site is smaller than a typical consumer site, so you’ll have fewer opportunities to experiment with your SEO strategy through variations on landing pages or navigation.

We do know of one B2B study, which we quoted in our book, which states that “A 2004 survey found that in business-to-business (B2B) purchasing decisions, 63.9% of respondents stated that a search engine would be the first place they would go to research a product or service.(Source: Enquiro/MarketingSherpa).” Of course this is a couple of years out of date, but our strong suspicion is that these numbers are only going to go up, not down. One important takeaway is this: Visitors to B2B sites are using the Web for background research, not necessarily direct goal seeking as you’d see in B2C. Since this is the case, you as the SEO provider need to work hard up front to figure out how you are going to measure and track gains, and tie them to your SEO efforts.

One last thought: have you looked up any of this client’s competitors? In some cases, if your competition is using SEO in their marketing efforts, that’s reason enough for you to do it, too. You would hate for a competitor’s name to come up in a search for your product. (Ask your client whether they’d like to come up in a search for the term “myProduct vs theirProduct” and we have a feeling they are going to say yes!)

And lastly, think about how SEO can play into a company’s branding efforts and overall reputation.  All companies, but probably B2Bs especially, should pay some attention to their online reputation and make sure that searches aren’t bringing up anything embarrassing or discrediting.

Matt McGee is an expert in SEO for small businesses, and runs a blog at SmallBusinessSEM.com. Here, we connect with Matt and find out more about the vibrant world of SEO for “mom-and-pops.”

Q: What advantages do small businesses have over big ones in the world of search marketing?

I think small businesses have a couple very real and very distinct advantages. The first is speed. Small businesses are able to move so much more quickly than bigger companies. A small business can analyze and act on data or new developments almost immediately, and I’d say the smaller the company is, the faster it can move like this. On the other hand, big business is a lot slower and quite often bound to internal procedures and protocols. Analysis and action is much slower because ideas and decisions may have to advance through two or three, or more, layers of committees and management. So when a new opportunity arises, I think small business is at an advantage to be an early adopter. And that’s something small businesses really need to focus on – being quick and using their small size to their benefit.

And the second advantage is somewhat similar: Small businesses can be more creative with their search and online marketing. They can try new things and take more chances without fear of negative public scrutiny, negative press, negative shareholder reaction, etc. There’s more freedom in being small, and more room for creativity.

Q: What are the greatest disadvantages you see for a small business marketing itself online?

Well, budget is an obvious one. A small bookseller just isn’t going to outspend Amazon or Barnes & Noble on broad book-related PPC keywords, and most probably don’t have the budget to put together a big organic SEO effort that would come close to what those kind of companies spend on SEO. Small businesses can’t just write a big check to solve a marketing problem.

Now, small businesses that don’t have money to spend can get around that by spending time – time learning SEO and SEM themselves, time on the web interacting with customers and prospects, and things like that. But that’s often Problem No. 2. Small businesses, generally speaking, have employees who wear many hats and work a full 40 hours per week at minimum – and usually a lot more! A big business might have the luxury of hiring 2-3 people whose sole job is to manage and promote the corporate blog, for example. I’d guess that most small businesses couldn’t do something like that.

Ultimately, there are more disadvantages we could talk about here, but I really think it all boils down eventually to a time vs. money problem.

Q: Can you give us an example of a small business that “got it right” in SEM and one that got it wrong?

In the interest of fairness, I’ll pass on mentioning any companies I’ve worked with over the years.  So, I suppose one obvious success story would be MyWeddingFavors.com. The site itself is really a great lesson in SEO-friendly design – great choice and use of keywords, correct use of page titles and meta description tags, solid content, and a ton of inbound links. If any readers are not familiar with the story, just do a search for the full domain and after the site itself, you should find several articles and stories that talk about how the site grew into the success story it is today.

As far as getting it wrong, rather than call companies out by name, let me say this: It’s been my experience that the companies whose online marketing efforts fail are often the ones who don’t try. And the reasons they don’t try usually boil down to one of these two things: either they assume they’ll never be able to compete, or they don’t understand that search marketing, and online marketing in general, is hard work. For a lot of small businesses, just getting a web site launched is hard enough. But that’s when the hard work really begins. “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work with web sites and search marketing! So the challenge for SEO or SEM consultants is to first convince small business owners of the need to market what the business owner thinks is a marketing tool, and then to convince the small business owner that being small is not a guarantee of marketing failure.

Q: What is the biggest misconception you’ve seen regarding SEO and SEM for the small business?

I’m not sure it’s a misconception, but I think there’s a general lack of understanding about how search engines work. If I had a dime for every time a small business owner has asked me, “How do I get my web site to be number one for such-and-such,” I’d be retired on a beach somewhere right now.

To the average user, Google is so good at what it does, that it looks easy – and I suppose that’s how it should look, right? But what happens is that Joe Business Owner gets this idea that, as soon as he puts up a web page about green widgets, Google (or Yahoo or MSN) will automatically pick it up and it’ll magically appear in the top 10 – because it all looks so easy.

I’ve actually had conversations with clients about some of the science behind search engine algorithms in an attempt to explain why it doesn’t work that way. In one case, I went as far as sending a client links to read the Hilltop and PageRank documents! I’m sure the client’s eyes glazed over in the first five minutes, but it definitely helped erase that misconception about how search engines work and how easy it should be to get to the first page of results.

Q: What, if anything, do you think that a typical independent, mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar (say, a neighborhood manicurist) needs to understand about search marketing?

First and foremost, that SEO is not rocket science. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. There’s a difference! There’s a small set of basic rules that apply to any web page or web site, whether you’re a small business or not. Your site has to be crawlable, your content has to be good – and I’d include things like page titles, keyword use, etc., under the umbrella of “content” – and you need quality, relevant inbound links. That applies to everyone. Come to think of it, I think the phrase I heard the most from other speakers at SES Chicago went something like this: “This is really basic, but no one seems to get it right” or “This is a simple rule, but so few web sites follow it” – stuff like that. So, if you just focus, at minimum, on doing the basics better than your competition, I think you’re off to a great start.

And then, using your example, the neighborhood manicurist probably also needs to understand what local search is, what the popular local search properties are, and how to market on those. And that, again, is not rocket science. It’s more about hard work and persistence.[editor's note: see links to major local search engines]

Q: Many small businesses can’t afford the fees for quality search marketing.  What options would you recommend to them?

You either have to spend money or you have to spend time. Your web site isn’t going to succeed on its own; you have to invest something in it after launch. So if you can’t afford to hire an SEO company, you have to spend time learning to do it yourself. And luckily for the small business owner in this situation, SEO/SEM is probably number one on the list of industries where experts are willing to give away their knowledge for little or no cost!

When I speak at SES on the “Big Ideas for Small Businesses” panel, I mention that there are a lot of SEO blogs, forums, and mailing lists where the small business owner can learn how it works and get great tips and advice. I mention that attending conferences is another good place to learn – and network – inexpensively. A third thing I discuss is SEO training classes; there are some great options that range from a couple hundred dollars to less than $1,500. And last, but not least, I mention three great books: SEO Book by Aaron Wall, Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing by Jennifer Laycock, and … drum-roll, please … Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day. I think you’re familiar with that one! 

I’ve read all three of those books within the last year, and learned something from each one. I really don’t think there’s a better value in terms of cost vs. benefit than these books, and any small business on a tight budget should probably begin by buying one or all three and going from there.

Q: How does the rise of social media optimization affect small businesses online?

It opens up some new opportunities and avenues for marketing, and this is one of those areas where the smart and quick small business can try out some of these new opportunities before big business muscles its way in.

But I have mixed feelings overall about social marketing. I don’t think MySpace, for example, is a legitimate opportunity at this point for the typical small business, and that includes small businesses whose target audience is the MySpace demographic. Yes, there are small business success stories on MySpace, but I think they’re the ones who started a year ago, trying it out to see what works and what doesn’t. Everyone’s trying to market on MySpace now, and I just think small businesses are smarter to try something else at this point.

I’m a big fan of Flickr, for example. Flickr is more than just a photo storage site; it’s a huge community of users built around the concept of “photo groups.” And there are groups for everything on Flickr – pet lovers, surfing enthusiasts, musicians, home aficionados, and so much more. So, let’s say I’m a small general contractor in Reno. I’d be taking photos of all the beautiful homes I build and sharing them in some of the photo groups devoted to houses and homes. More importantly, since I probably only do business in the Reno area, I’d also share those photos in a group(s) specifically for the Reno area. And then I’d be sure to join in any discussions in those groups and just make myself a visible, vocal, and active member of the community.

Some social marketing efforts require a bigger time investment than others, so I think the small business owner needs to try a few of them, and then analyze if there’s a benefit, and if the benefit is worth the time it required.

Q: Is there anything you would like to add?

I’d just encourage small business owners to make the most of their size. Nobody likes to deal with huge, faceless corporations. We all like the human touch, and that’s what small businesses do best.

Thank you very, very much for your participation!!

Thank you for the terrific questions!

Q: I once had a program that would submit my website to all search engines. A person warned me about using that kind of program because the search engines will cut you off if you submit too often. Is that true?

A: We don’t have a definite answer about whether autosubmit programs will get you penalized or banned, but we can tell you that we don’t recommend doing it, and we don’t think it’s necessary.

There are only a few unique search engines with a big audience reach, and as you know from our book, those engines are Google (and AOL, which uses Google’s results), Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.  After submitting to the biggies that allow submittals, probably the best thing for you to do is look for niche directories and sites that speak to the same audience as your site, and approach these very targeted websites for a link or listing. This method of link building helps you focus on getting the specific audience you want to your site, and doesn’t waste your time or money on audiences that are too general or too tiny. You can look on our website for a sample link letter. And of course link building is covered in the hour-a-day plan in our book.

Back to your original question, there are differences of opinion about whether oversubmitting can get you penalized by the search engines. But we would guess it can’t, because it would be very easy for someone to attempt to knock their competitors down by oversubmitting competing sites.  And we don’t think the search engines would want that to happen.