Allow your readers to promote your website with the new Tell-a-Friend service. By adding a simple widget to your site, your visitors can share your pages with any of their friends, as well as with social media sites such as Digg.
For a premium, you can customize the widget to your own personal brand, and even add an incentive program for your readers. As it is, this is a simple to use and fun way to engage your readership and improve hits to your site.
Paul Gillen’s take (in The New Influencers, A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media) on why blogs are so advantageous for small businesses: “It’s all; about search–Google and its competitors are the best thing that ever happened to small business. Companies that can’t afford to advertise can achieve international visibility in vertical disciplines through search performance….Blogs do exceptionally well on Google because of the search engine’s fondness for frequent updates and relevant page titles. A focused blog, podcast or videocast that stakes out an unclaimed niche in the market can come to dominate search resulots in a short time.…
26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
JEFF COTRUPE
I just launched a new site for my business. Same domain, http://marketpowerLLC.com, but anyone who saw the old site may not even recognize us as the same company today. In planning the launch I realized one of the first things I look for as a site visitor is a search capability. Not of the whole web; I can get to Google or Yahoo! via my own bookmarks, thank you, and I never understand companies who provide web search but no search of their own site. Or, as is still the case at a surprising number of sites: No search at all.…
Jeff Cotrupe, Founder and CEO
One of my favorite comedy lines ever, which in this case emanated from the magically twisted mind of Steven Wright, goes like this: “I bought some batteries. But they weren’t included. So I bought ‘em again…I bought some powdered water. But I didn’t know what to add…”
Open letter to Steven and ROW (rest of world): When it comes to websites, I can tell you exactly what to add.
It’s always a good idea to keep your keywords and metatags complete and current on a website; many search engines still key on that when deciding whether to list you in search…
Good advice on how to tell ethical from unethical search marketing firms from Mike Moran and Bill Hunt in Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Second Edition. Rather than boost your site, a glib operator, or spammer, can actually get it banned from search engines. 
In search marketing, “spam,” explain Moran and Hunt, is “any technique that is designed mainly to fool the search engines to gain an untoward advantage:”
• Be wary of firms that guarantee high rankings. “No reputable firms will promise you top results–too many variables are out of their control.”
• Be wary of firms that promise that top rankings require only…
Here’s an internet marketing conference this week in Toronto, Canada. These kinds of gatherings for idea-sharing have increased relevance in this down economy. 
We’ve been talking about why it’s important to think of search engine optimization /search engine marketing (SEO/M) and Web 2.0 not as the be-all and end-all of your communications universe but as key ingredients in a complete, balanced diet. Of course what we mean when we say “Web 2.0″ breaks out into three areas:
- Rich Internet applications (RIA) including AJAX and Flash
- Broadcast media such as streaming, RSS and mobile SMS
- Consumer-generated media (CGM) like consumer reviews, wiikis, blogs and participation in forums
All of us who post here on SEO Shootout want to talk about best practices, but today is show-and-tell: I’m going to show…
