websense

Always on the lookout for my small business clients and friends, I have happened across and interesting offer from RatePoint, Inc. RatePoint provides copy in the form of testimonials, customer feedback, that sort of thing, for use on it’s clients’ web sites. This is a free offer for small business owners who are trying to maintain their online reputation. The services includes:

•Unlimited collection of reviews and testimonials from customers
•Unlimited automatic posting of content, such as newsletters, coupons and offers to Facebook and Twitter by simply checking a box
•Unlimited use of online surveys to collect customer insights
•Unlimited e-mail campaigns to a list of up to 125 contacts

This might work for some of you who need a hand in this department, but aren’t looking to spend money on it. I’ve mentioned here numerous times how important it is to build your brand and maintain your reputation online. This service may be helpful to you. It’ll probably be a bit cookie cutter, after all, it is a free service, but I’d wager that it has some very good points to it. There is a catch, each of the services offered have limitations. Such as only 125 email contacts for each email, you can’t post a review after 30 days, etc. These carry extra fees, thought they are minimal.
Overall, it is for sure better than nothing. If you have tried it or are using it, let me know what you think of it, I’d be interested to hear.

I’ve blogged quite a bit over the last couple of years, especially during the economic downturn, about making the most of your marketing budget. We’re seeing a turn around here in NE Ohio, but a lot of companies are being careful. They know they need to make the most out of their marketing budget.

If SEO isn’t part of your marketing strategy, I gotta ask why. Why, when it has been shown time and again to provide the best ROI? TKG’s SEO blog had a great post on this topic a few months back. The article outlined precisely why you should be using your marketing dollars for SEO. James Wells also has a great post about the Value of SEO in Your Marketing Budget. He makes the great point that “many companies are overlooking this extremely cost effective and valuable form of marketing”.

If you aren’t sure how much you should be spending on SEO, perhaps a better question would be to ask yourself how much money you would like to make. Marketing requires that you spend money to make money, as the old adage goes, but with SEO, sure, you’ll spend some money, but in truth, far less than with traditional marketing, with a much higher ROI. Once you develop a strategy, put it in place and tweak it as analytics dictate, you’ll start to see why I’ve been touting this stuff for so long.

If you don’t believe me, or these other guys, take a look at this fantastic Fox Small Business video. These guys are getting a taste of where their marketing budget should go to grow their small business printing personalized gifts for children. They are a perfect fit for SEO, and that’s the advice they are giving.

We’re more than half way through 2010. What kind of growth would you like to see this year? Do you want to spend a lot for a little, or a little to get a lot?

Those of us in the SEO world have been waiting around to see when and if Bing was going to really take off, be a major contender in the Search Engine game. Seems that time is upon us. Not only is Bing supposed to be merging with Yahoo! in the near future, powering results but Bing already provides the search results on Facebook. This combo, along with the fact that Bing -Yahoo! will provide about 35% of searches, means it needs to be considered when optimizing your site.

When it comes to Google Vs. Bing, it seems that on page efforts may be taking a back seat in both SEs to things like link building. Link building needs to consist of more than just a lot of links from one site, but need to concentrate to obtaining good links from lots of different sites. This will mean a small shift for some in strategy, but hopefully you are already diversifying your link building so as not to rely on one source.

We can all guess as to which elements of SEO will win out, or we can take a look at what the analytics tell us. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org has a great post up that walks you through the analytics of the whole thing. Pretty interesting – it’s gonna be interesting to see which elements are essentially the same, and who weighs which elements of SEO more heavily than the other.

Another question I put to you is what will this do in the wake of the MayDay update? What will happen to the long tail? Will the “exact match domain” matter as much as is being purported? “Exact match domain” refers to domains that are an exact match to your most relevant key phrases. We’ll have to see how analytics play out for a bit since the update. What this should mean is that your most relevant long tail phrase, if you used it in your url, should continue to matter, and in Bing – it will matter greatly.

While Google will still take over 65 percent of the market share, it is important to note that there is still a fairly large chunk (35%) to be claimed by the Yahoo!/Bing search engine. We will always optimize to make sure our clients are getting the most ROI, and I don’t see Bing changing that enough to warrant changing our best practices, however, I do think we need to pay attention to Bing and be prepared to make changes as needed.

Illegal data gathering by Google – really?! I’m shocked. Not. Google is being investigated, sued and reprimanded all over the world for illegal data gathering – gathering information from unsecured networks. A new case is being investigated now in Connecticut. The New Haven Register reports: “Google has acknowledged that the cars it uses to generate “Street Views” for its Google Maps have collected data in Connecticut over unsecured Wi-Fi networks, possibly including e-mails, Web browsing histories and passwords”.

Google maintains that this collection of data is a “mistake” and that it has taken steps to ensure that the data is “secured”. Not destroyed, secured.(Though they say they have begun destroying data in several countries where it was demanded that they do so.) Doesn’t this make ya think that just maybe they might be holding onto it for a while, just in case they need it for something, and hoping that you don’t remember they have it? Especially since this same thing has happened in several other states and 30 countries including Germany and Australia. I mean, what could they possibly want with all over 600 gigabytes of unsecured browser, password and email data? I can’t think of a single thing, but I bet they have a few new product ideas in the works after they review and secure that data!

According to the L.A. times: “Connecticut Atty. Gen. Richard Blumenthal said Monday that he was leading the multi-state probe, which will also look at how personal information, including e-mails and passwords, were collected and why the data were retained.

“Street View cannot mean Complete View — invading home and business computer networks and vacuuming up personal information and communications,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “Consumers have a right and a need to know what personal information — which could include e-mails, web browsing and passwords — Google may have collected, how and why.”

Let this be a lesson to those of you who have not yet secured your wireless network be it home or office – do it! Take the five minutes and just put a password on it so that your tax documents don’t end up in Google’s archives secured data center.

I find it interesting that as the eyes of the country turn to small businesses to see how they will react to and handle the (hopefully) rebounding economy, there is an increased focus on local search. This makes perfect sense, since small businesses are really starting to understand what the web can do for them, and web companies are eager to get a piece of that pie.

This can only mean good things for small businesses. Local search is a great tool to promote your business, and there are many, many ways to go about it. One of the first steps would be of course to make sure you have a great presence on the web. Even folks in your area will go to the web to grab a phone number, store hours, or perhaps your exact address. Making that first great impression can really help boost traffic to your brick and mortar, and therefore, sales.

The next thing I’d do is make sure your business is listed in any online listing services, such as:
GetListed.org
YellowPages.com
Google.com/places
Local.yahoo.com
Bing Local Listing
City search

There are many, many more, but you get the idea. Make sure you can be found online, even if you have not yet set up a site. A listing in most of these does not require that you have a site.

Many of these listing sites allow you to set up a profile to get reviews of your products or services. This can be really helpful to people who are new to an area especially if you are a medical professional, home service provider (such as housekeeping or carpet cleaning) or a mechanic – someone who people need a frame of reference in order to establish trust.

Make sure you have your physical address on your site. Our best practice recommendation would have you putting it at the footer of every page (most especially the home page). At a minimum have it on the contact or about page of your site.

When you are doing your on page optimization, be sure to include geographical phrases in both the copy, headers and tags. This will help your rankings when users search for business in your area.

Local Search seems to be taking on a life of it’s own. I’m excited to be a speaker at NE Ohio’s GetListed.org’s Local University on the 30th. Should be interesting to hear from others in field. I’m thrilled that some local business owners will have the opportunity to learn and implement strategies that will help boost our local economy. Hope to see you there!