While some small business owners are on board with the idea of search engine optimization many still aren’t. However, even with those who aren’t quite on board yet, there’s an increasing awareness of this thing called search marketing and small business represents a fertile market for SEOs. The difficulty is the increasing awareness still hasn’t reached the point of realistic expectations and costs for many small business owners. So how does an SEO sell services to a market who’s needs and wants are often out of alignment with realistic expectations and pricing?

So Microsoft adCenter is the only one of the 3 major paid search platforms that does NOT report on revenue.  Google AdWords will break it down nicely for you with conversion types, being leads, sales, sign-ups, and other, complete with revenue dollars generated from paid search ads in AdWords.  It’s quite a beautiful thing, but for the money it can now cost to run ads on AdWords with the competition these days, its good that there are such details to be accountable to.  It looks pretty much like this:

When you’re new to online marketing, where do you start when you want to build authority on a given subject?

In reality, Authority Building is a process … a linear process for the most part. This means that there are steps and stages, and perhaps even a natural evolution of actions. Within each stage, there are some tactics that will typically work much better than others.

The key here is to look for a process that can be replicated … and will consistently produce great results.

I was just reading comScore’s study into US national Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) search activity. Their findings revealed some major changes, and staggering numbers, among the top sites in 2007, mainly due to new, strategic partnerships. The IYP search market leader in Q4 2007 was Yellowpages.com Network, which forged multiple partnerships this year with sites including Areaguides.net and 411.com, helping them take the top position in total IYP searches.

What differentiates a tactic from a strategy?

A strategy is the plan for achieving a defined goal. A tactic is the “doing” part of the strategy. Tactics can be put together in a plan to form a strategy.

Time line is also an important differentiator between a tactic and a strategy. A blog can be up and running in a very short time frame (hours or days). A Strategy usually takes much longer to achieve (months or years depending on how lofty your goals are).

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Last week: The Compressed Index.

While human beings can scan a page and see if the whole phrase "a grandiloquent dictionary" appears on it, a search engine can’t.

A search engine needs to:

1. Lookup the occurrences for each word in the phrase
2. See if the positions of words in the document fit the phrase

As a search engine isn’t smart it needs to work smart.

Leverage Keyword Frequency

One of my New Year’s Wishes for 2008 was that Google would introduce a negative market option, much like negative keywords.

In short, I want all of Ontario, but not Ottawa.

Well, the new Google geo-targeting tool comes close, so I guess it’s only a matter of time.

I had the opportunity to use it to day, creating a North American campaign… Well, North America sans Mexico. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Mexico, just not part of my campaign needs.)

Click on North America bundle and viola! Canada, United States and Mexico. Click on Mexico and viola! There it is. Gone.

…and then progress dictated that all things need to be accessible online, so Microsoft (MSFT) created Office Live - a suite of services for small businesses.

Image courtesy www.di.net

Now unlike what the name suggests, this is NOT an online version of Microsoft’s suite of office software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc, but instead some various services being provided by Microsoft.  Services such as Contact Manager, Document Manager, Workspaces and Project Manager.

Contact Manager allows you to do such things as provide a single view of customers and prospective customers, track contact with customers, check account status and sales opportunities from any location with a Web browser, and send automated “triggered” emails specific to various events such as new sales leads, etc.

Tom normally selects a (very) funny cartoon for us. Unfortunately he’s struck by either some kind of ninja flu’ (Tom’s version) or a tiny cold (Tom’s wife’s version).

Either way, here’s me doing the honors for him!

These two Geek and Poke cartoons in the Simply Explained series remind me a lot of Common Craft’s Explanations in Plain English

In his January video marketing piece, Tom Tsinas reminded us of the importance of incorporating images, audio, and video into our content. He wrote: “As search engine marketers, we all know that content is king and that content is more than just text. Images, video and audio each represent a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to our client’s sites.” In this post, I’d like to share two examples that demonstrate how important that statement is.