The bottom line is - it doesn’t matter if a small business has been established for decades. If they have a new website on a new domain, then they are dead in Google for competitive keyword rankings, unless they do something extraordinary. Why can’t you escape? Your fighting for googles trust and they have heard websites cry wolf before.

Is it googles fault? Should we have them flogged? No, they are just a company and ‘we’ the surfing geeky net addicted let the Googleness Monster take over our searching world. We created this creature. Now it controls our interweb (or hypernet) Skynet?

So now we have the yette in charge of our google rankings how on earth do you shake the sandbox effect in the quickest possible way?

Building links and anchor text on your own site is fine but what you do need is links from trusted third party providers. You need links from a site you can produce user generated content. The age of Web 2.0 is FOOOOOL of them.

The cheap as chips, easy winners are:

1. Link on your ebay about me page.

2. Link on your myspace account.

3. Links on your live journal account

Sounding familiar? WhAAAT? You already have these all set up and you never just slipped in your website link? Well do so.

If you are a small business, you can look into business directories (which can be pricey) and also respond to blog posts that are topical to your website and you are usually asked to provide an email addy and website address.

Adverts may be boring and invasive at times but Blogs are not, take ‘Innocent smoothies‘ they have a web log that provides an interesting insight to their origins, ethics and the people in the company. A blog like this takes of the lid off a large company letting the consumer take a look inside. This is what corporate blogging is all about.

For instance Bluefly.com a fashion designer and retailer launched their blog http://flypaper.bluefly.com to raise awareness and keep customer informed of new styles and movements in the fashion industry.

Top free blog providers out there include Blogger.com, Typepad and Wordpress. Wordpress is also one of the most popular open source blogging software, with a new release at the end of January and a unique ‘Multi-Blogger’ system dubbed ‘Wordpress Mu’ so you can provide your employees with a blog of their own linked to your main domain.

As a new ‘blogger’ I would suggest a free hosted blog before you integrate a blog into your main domain. A ‘news’ blog needs to be updated with new content everyday, but a corporate blog only needs feeding 3-4 times a week. If you don’t update your blog your customers interest will wane and the point of the blog will eventually be lost.

We hope to see you in the blogging revolution!

Ecommerce allows people to carry out business without the restraint of time or location. A traditional website can serve anywhere in the world that can log on! The cost per sale is reduced when you’re talking about e-commerce. No human interaction is needed, and errors are reduced as the customer provides all the information.

Customers can search for niche products in an instant, and if you are a seller of niche product, reaching out to the world can increase your sales volumes thus decreasing the cost of the item for you, the business.

The customers experience can be streamlined, they will spend less time over order discrepancies and there is an increased chance of cross selling as the products are just another click away.

So when as a business would you choose a marketplace such as eBay?

Marketplaces are great for customer acquisition; a marketplace such as eBay will spread your branding across the web quicker than any pay per click scheme. Marketplaces have high velocities, great for brand new stock and finishing lines. Marketplaces can also be places to test ideas or new products, you will soon know on whether a product is not going to do well or fly off the shelves.

Protecting your bricks and mortar:

Many traditional companies are afraid of marketplaces and the fierce price wars between competitors. They are afraid of a detrimental effect to the brand, their brick and mortar shops not being able to match the prices and keeping up with the demand of a high volume marketplace. Fear is a great controller, and you must know your enemy. Many high street businesses trade under a pseudonym, access to the product, but it causes no cross over in their high street stores.

As for prices, well the competition for the product types are already there. Many will browse shops muttering that they can get it cheaper on eBay. I know I do. You have to join the race, not shy away from it to stop your competitors getting ahead. Brands are more dilute when it comes to e-commerce; smaller brands come into their own. This trend could start creeping into the high street as broadband gets faster and cheaper and the payment gateways more secure.

Protecting your brand!

As with any new route to channel, you have charlatans to go with it! Is someone trading as you? Using your brand awareness to gain sales? Even if you are not e-commerce active you need to make sure you regularly check your brand on the internet. Reputation is everything to a business and with the anonymity of the internet is easy to impersonate a leading brand.

Advertising on the Internet

Back in the days of the dot com boom all you needed was a website and the traffic was yours. But the giants like Google and Yahoo forced us to search their ay and the fight for natural search was on! To fund their world domination these two titans have their own search marketing schemes or pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic using keywords. Large advertisers can spend thousands on pay per click advertising (probably wasting a lot of it due to bad management) Marketplaces are an active way to do this. For instance on eBay you are advertising as well as physically selling an item. The marketplace has done the hard work for you

Adverts may be boring and invasive at times but Blogs are not, take ‘Innocent smoothies‘ they have a web log that provides an interesting insight to their origins, ethics and the people in the company. A blog like this takes of the lid off a large company letting the consumer take a look inside. This is what corporate blogging is all about.

For instance Bluefly.com a fashion designer and retailer launched their blog http://flypaper.bluefly.com to raise awareness and keep customer informed of new styles and movements in the fashion industry.

Top free blog providers out there include Blogger.com, Typepad and Wordpress. Wordpress is also one of the most popular open source blogging software, with a new release at the end of January and a unique ‘Multi-Blogger’ system dubbed ‘Wordpress Mu’ so you can provide your employees with a blog of their own linked to your main domain.

As a new ‘blogger’ I would suggest a free hosted blog before you integrate a blog into your main domain. A ‘news’ blog needs to be updated with new content everyday, but a corporate blog only needs feeding 3-4 times a week. If you don’t update your blog your customers interest will wane and the point of the blog will eventually be lost.

We hope to see you in the blogging revolution!

‘For many business owners, marketing to fellow entrepreneurs is job one. The challenge is, entrepreneurs are time-strapped multitaskers who are also relatively risk-averse–making them a difficult audience to reach and persuade. Sound familiar?’

This article explores a ‘common sense’ approach to marketing and designing a business to business product or solution.

What do businesses want? According to this article:

• Increased sales - does your solution provide that?
• Safe Choice - do you have a content rich campaign with customer feedback and cases?
• Maximum Convenience - is there a huge amount of work the buyer has to do? Is this included in the solution? If it needs 20 hours work on the clients side is their an alternative?
• Ways to save money - Can you add features? Bundle products together for a ’special price’?
• Do it yourself solutions - businesses love low cost self service solutions but if again time is an issue. Free customer support in the bundle is a great seller!
• Reliability and Performance - What guarantees or warranties does your company offer? If something goes wrong are you their to help?
• Vendors they trust - Special events and networking are great to build trust with a customer.

The finishing line of this article is ‘What matters most is that you create an opportunity to build positive relationships’ Probably the most important statement for businesses I have heard in a long time.

Google created the world of links SEO, forcing companies to use spam like techniques to get anywhere with google. So how does a company improve its position on the interweb?

We have gone back in time and now it is all about ‘Natural Linking’ - no automation, no spam and definatly not reciprocal!

Taking this from an enclick article byPaul Elosegui

1. Natural links are deeplinks. Links that point to specific material deep within the body of knowledge.

Deep linking is linking that points to a specific page or image within another website, as opposed to linking to a website’s main or home page. Deeplinking goes hand in hand with the long tail.

2. Natural linking is not reciprocal. Scientific papers are published sequentially in time. More recent papers reference older papers as they try and build the body of knowledge. Link exchanging, where websites exchange links, is not natural.

3. Natural links are built slowly over time. A seminal academic paper accumulates references, links, slowly over time. It is only well established highly regarded academic papers, like the discovery of DNA, that accumulate large number of references quickly.

4. Natural links make a point. Academics construct an argument around their references. So natural references are surrounded by relevant text and have specific anchor text, as each scientists tries to make his own point. The ratio of number of links to text has an upper limit, the density of links is relatively low, and the context surrounding the reference is relevant material.

5. Natural links come from everywhere. Scientists publish their research in many places. From important journals, like “Nature”, to less important conference proceedings. So, natural links come from varied sources of relevant material.

So unless you have a team of employee’s seaking out relevent links and communicating with webmasters peronally whats the fastest way to improve your page rank?

Spend alot of money….websites that have been arround a while will have the best page ranks in the end. I find this a good thing for the old school webby, but for new companies trying to get a grasp of the interwebby and improve sales, this is gonna hurt.

I am going to be watching this space, and I am going to work on my deep linking for my little business I wish to start up next year. I have 12 months, wonder if that will be enough time to get a decent page rank. I will probably make lots of web friends in the process!

I might even start a natural/deep linking experiment - leave a comment if you want to join or a link!