(Never mind the likelihood that most of your business listing pages have no PageRank to speak of. Heck, not even the top business promoted on your Member Showcase page has any PR on its business listing page.)

On the other hand, if you’re a company that’s been in trouble because Google considers you a middleman that offers links for SEO credit, you’ll wisely change your tune and promote the idea of links-for-traffic instead of links-for-SEO-credit.

Strange times we’re marketing in, aren’t they?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

What Does Your PPC Ad Say About You?

On the PPC side, you don’t need such an early start. A great PPC campaign can bring immediate results. So, with that in mind, small businesses who are looking for some holiday PPC hints may want to check out this webinar Yahoo is hosting on Wednesday:

Holiday Trends and Best Practices for Sponsored Search

Yahoo tells me the webinar is “specifically for small businesses, to share shopping trend information and search marketing best practices based on data from Yahoo!’s extensive user and advertiser base.”

It starts at 10:00 am Pacific on Wednesday. It’s free.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Yahoo Hosts Holiday Sponsored Search Webinar

I’m gonna start with a short list of good articles that have nothing to do with search. Because it’s my blog, and I can.

• The 7 Habits of High Successful Small Business Owners
• SMB’s Should Consider Surveys — Amen, Pamela Hazelton. Couldn’t agree more.
• Photography: More Than a Decent Camera — If I had a dollar for every small biz client that had crap product photos….

Christine Churchill wrote a great article for the “Small is Beautiful” column this week on SEL: When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: What You Don’t Know About Your Web Site Can Hurt You.

I’ve seen a fair amount of posts on this theme in recent months, but Andy Beal uncovers a good example of small businesses dealing with the new realities online: Local Businesses Need Online Reputation Management Too!.

If you’re deciding between an agency or a consultant for your search marketing needs, Lee Odden shares 5 Pros and Cons of SEO Consultant vs Agency.

In the news this week: Google Introduces Hosted Site Search for Small Businesses, and there’s also Chris Sherman’s take on it at SEL.

Here’s a great post from Avinash Kaushik for those of you not selling products: I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success?

If you’re diving into PPC on Yahoo soon, check out Top 5 Settings to Check When Starting a Yahoo! Search Marketing Account from PPC Hero.

And last but not least…, Mario Sundar shares some advice for businesses still not blogging: Corporate Blogging 101: 10 Easy Steps to Get a Corporate Blog Up & Running.

That’s all. Have a great weekend!

Now playing: “Warning Sign,” Coldplay

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

Anything that helps me think more creatively about something that can be incredibly monotonous is a Good Thing. That’s probably why I liked Tom Clitchlow’s guest post on the Link Building Blog: 5 crafty outside the box link-building tricks & tips.

Here are a couple good business blogging posts from the past week:

• Using Blogs to Market Your Business by Chris Brown, and
• How are Blogs and Brands Related from Drew McLellan

I often write about the first four items in this article, but I think #5 is one that gets overlooked a lot — not just by me, but also by small business owners. You’ll have to read The Top 5 Small Business Marketing Tips for Budget-Minded Business Owners to know what on earth I’m talking about.

Even if you don’t get the Fox Sports Net reference, you’ll like Stoney D. giving away one of his SEO playbooks in The Best Damn On-Page Optimization Process Checklist, Period.

Lee Odden offers a good thought piece on why SEO is not a short-term, “one and done” effort: Advantages of Ongoing SEO Consulting.

This was a good week for social media/marketing discussion and articles. Here are the ones I bookmarked:

• But What If They Say Something Bad? - Jennifer Laycock
• Why Social Media Belongs In Your Internet Marketing Campaign - Lisa Barone
• Why Facebook is Not a Viable Marketing Platform - Muhammad Saleem
• List of Video Sharing Sites and Impact of Video Marketing - Joe Whyte

Not done yet … stay with me here. Chris Silver Smith talks about using Google’s Webmaster Central to find Quality Scores for Natural Search Optimization.

And though I don’t cover PPC much here, the Google AdWords blog answers a common question: Not seeing your ad on Google.com?

That’s all for this week - have a good weekend!

Now playing: “Rain King”, Counting Crows

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

Harnessing Social Media - Web 2.0 Grows Up - Free Internet Traffic

They created four new sites and used both PPC and SMO to acquire traffic. This chart summarizes the results:

As you’d expect, PPC was a faster solution. You can start acquiring traffic within minutes of setting up a good PPC campaign.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is a long-term proposition. It also brings with it the risk of being accused of spam, which is never good.

But the numbers above are pretty clear who the winner is in this battle royale: SMO by a knockout.

Read the full report and case study at MarketingExperiments.com.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Battle Royale: SMO vs. PPC

All three — seowoman, Patrick Schaber, and Richard Ball said NO! And a fourth, Todd Mintz, said the same thing via e-mail.

Okay, so, that was an easy decision, wasn’t it?

SEO Woman, AKA Adrienne Doss, shared a link to her very good 3-part series, Pay-per-click Tips for Small Businesses, which is well worthy of a shout out here.

Thank you all for the quick help.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Three AdWords Experts: Don’t Let Google Optimize Your Campaign

I got an email from AdWords a few weeks back offering to help optimize the “national” campaign (we have one for national traffic and one for local traffic). The email said, in part:

We noticed that at least one of your campaigns has the potential to receive even more targeted traffic, so we’ve looked at your keywords and designed a proposal to bring you an increase in clicks — without an increase in your budget.

When I logged in to see the changes, they’re recommending a list of what looks like a couple hundred new keywords, 95% set to broad match, that they think should be added to the campaign. (Interestingly, they’re suggesting bidding on the names of a couple other real estate agencies, too.)

Anyone ever get an email like this from AdWords, and are their recommendations generally helpful? My gut instinct is to NOT do this because they’re suggesting keywords like “buy tri-cities homes”, which — when set to broad match — I think would mean her ads might appear in any one of the other 5-6 areas in the country called “tri-cities.” Am I right in that?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Calling An AdWords Expert….

This’ll certainly help me win favor with Mrs. McGee: David Wallace notes that I left myself out of the “SEO Lookalike” post, and decided to put me and my lookalike on his blog, with surprising results!

On a related note, David is one of about 5-6 “missing” SEOs from my lookalike post, but not for lack of effort. I must’ve tried about 4-5 different pictures each of David, Lee Odden, Neil Patel, Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz, Michael Gray, and Andy Hagans … and never came up with an acceptable lookalike. Sorry, guys!

One of the best SEO posts you’ll read in 2007 came from Todd Malicoat this week: The SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice. Bookmark it, print it out, put it under your pillow before bed. It’s that good.

It’s kinda sad that we even need lists like this in this day and age, but judging from the e-mail spam I still get, day after day, I guess we do: Top 10 Internet Marketing Scams, from Justin Smith at the Christian Real Estate Network Blog.

Along the same lines as that link, there’s 10 rules for your small business home page from a site called Download Squad. It’s a pretty good list, but I take exception to the “Add site search” listed in #3. Let’s face it: Most site search stinks, and most small business sites don’t have enough content to justify a site search.

And while we’re on the “tips for small biz” subject, I enjoyed Stoney deGeyter’s “Small is Beautiful” column on Search Engine Land this week: Fifty Questions You Need Answered Before Starting Your SEO Campaign.

Let’s talk about writing/blogging a bit, shall we? Here are two good ones worth your reading time: Business Blogging: Important First Steps to Consider from Patrick Schaber, and Brian Clark’s Five Common Headline Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.

Looks like Yahoo Answers keeps adding new fans. You know I’ve written before about why I love the service, and now here’s a blog called LyteByte sharing 10 Steps to get Traffic from Yahoo! Answers..

If you’re doing the AdWords thing, you’ll probably appreciate Brad Geddes’ How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid.

I found this one to be somewhat timely for a few reasons: Jessica Bowman writes about hiring in-house SEO staff: You Can’t Afford Michael Jordan, But You Can Get a Strong SEO Leader.

And, last but not least, some more SEO humor: Rebecca Kelley has filed SES New York: The Comic Strip. Some hysterical pix and captions in there. Have to say I can do without the awful photo of me and the obligatory “small” reference, but since Rebecca didn’t care much for my Lisa Ling reference, I’d say we’re even.

That’s all for this time — have a great weekend!

Now playing: “Fix You,” Coldplay

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

Faster, Simplified Online Customer Checkout

From a small business perspective, this makes Yahoo Search Marketing a much more attractive option, especially when you add in the new, improved Panama system functionality. PayPal is far and away the No. 1 checkout service for small business (42% Paypal to 6% Google Checkout, according to JP Morgan stats in January, 2007) and no doubt businesses that accept PayPal now have another reason to give Yahoo Search Marketing more consideration when spending PPC dollars.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, paypal, google checkout

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Yahoo/eBay Take on Google Checkout

What’s the hottest trend in the SEO industry right now? Nope, not linkbait. Not Digg-bashing. Try mini-seminars. Seriously. In about two weeks, I’ll probably be the only search marketer not involved in a small group training seminar on SEO/SEM. The latest one is SEO Class, announced today, which features Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Greg Niland. Another new one is Seodays, which features Jennifer Slegg, Greg Boser, and Dave Naylor. And stay tuned, because by this time tomorrow, there’ll probably 3-4 more announcements of new seminars.

Gord Hotchkiss has done it again. Last week it was an informative interview with Google’s Marissa Meyer. This week it’s an informative interview with Google’s Matt Cutts, who says:

“…the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less.”

You can read the full interview on Gord’s blog, or catch the highlights with commentary on Search Engine Land.

Over on the PPC side of life, the big news this week was Google’s transparency on click fraud. They say less than 10% of clicks are invalid, and all but 0.2% are identified proactively.

This really needs to be mentioned, at least for the archives. Over at ZDNet, Donna Bogatin recapped Intuit’s recent earnings statements, which included the news that the Google - Intuit partnership isn’t going very well so far:

“…we haven’t seen a huge lift on that yet.”

Don’t miss this great post from Peter Krasilovsky about video & local search: TurnHere: Local Video Network For Hire.

Tamar is on a roll lately, this week putting together an excellent overview of Six Free Stats Packages for the Startup or Small-Business Owner. That one already has a spot in the “March Best Posts” list.

More social media goodness from Garrett French, who put together The Why, How and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon.

And for a different look at social media, don’t miss Social Bookmarking through the eyes of a novice from SEO Igloo. This one is what it’s like out in the trenches with small businesses, gang….

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Now playing: “Everybody Hurts,” R.E.M.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama