Check out our new trade article: SEO, Spam and Your Small Business By Morgan Lakner I think we all can agree that life is better with that awesome spam filter on our e-mail. Were all a little more comfortable at arms length from ads for male enhancement or lower mortgage rates. But what about spam as a means of marketing your business? Theres lots of seemingly legitimate websites asking for practically nothing to distribute your business information to all the search engines. Heres what theyre not telling you: 1. The big search engines hate spam in all its forms. 2. Some of the sites your info gets spammed to are flagged sites. 3. Your search page ranking will suffer as a result of association with spam and/or flagged sites. 4. Your site may be flagged or removed as a result of spam techniques. 5. Some search engines will not accept your business listing when spammed. 6. Spam in all its forms is a thing of the past, many more sites will soon be removed from indexes as a result of deceptive practices. 7. The big search engines and the best websites only open certain features on your listing after multiple visits-spam cant do that! Todays businesses need websites and SEO done responsibly. The search engines are super-busy, spam is a harassment to them and it wont be long before they wont accept any business listings that arent done by hand. The damage done by these spam sites is difficult and very time consuming to undo. Listen to your Parents: If its worth doing, its worth doing right the first time. They were right. SEO done properly the first time costs money and takes time, but enjoying those sweet, first-page, long-lasting, organic search results is worth every penny. ROI is forever when the phone rings more every day. We have to think about the long haul when it comes to SEO for our businesses. Deceptive practices hurt your businesses internet visibility in the short and especially the long term. Dont end-up on the wrong side of the fence. Having your business website removed from search engine indexes will dramatically hurt your business today and into the future. Beware of the website that electronically distributes (spams) your business information to search engines. If you are still considering this because you need to get your name out there, consider these questions. 1. What information is being sent? 2. Will that information be displayed properly? 3. Will the search engines accept my information? 4. What if theres a mistake/error? 5. What if I want to change something? 6. What am I getting/paying for after the initial spam of information? 7. Do I want my business represented in this way? 8. Is this the way I would do business myself? Those last few are really important. Do you really want your business future to be represented by the easy way? There are so many risks in doing this, its scary! The thought of a site taking manual action to remove my business information from their index is a nightmare! You could lose all your business for months! Seriously, months! Thats just not part of my business model and it has no place in yours, either. When you let spam into your business model, you risk even more. Can spam make a listing on Google Places for Business? No way. What about Bing, Yahoo, etc? No way, no how. What about Webmaster Tools? All the search engines have these types of site helpers. Spam cannot enter here. And your business misses out on all those great features that were designed to help you stay within best practices and promote your website the proper way. Theres so much to lose and so little to gain. Even in the short term, if it hurts in the long run, isnt it better to leave it alone? Protect your business future and do it right the first time. The benefits far outweigh the short term visibility that is guaranteed to fade as Search Engines continue their war against spam in all its forms. Enough about spam, lets get a little more in-depth about SEO and what it means to your small business. When I first decided to open my small business, I shopped around for paid types of advertising my new business. I couldnt believe how much money folks wanted to just place an ad in the phone book. Let alone the fact that no one uses phone books anymore to find anything. My mom is 62 years old now and she uses her smart phone to find things on the go every day! We have to face the truth as business owners-phone books are a thing of the past! If we want business, we have to have a website and that site has to be optimized for search engines and marketed online. This is where SEO comes in, or as I like to call it, Internet Visibility. Your small business needs to be prominently displayed when and where your demographic looks for your service or product. SEO really begins with your website. Your website needs to have many things to be effective. • Real content written for people, not computers. • Keywords in the content, not content written around keywords. • Your site needs to mention your business name 3-5 times per page, no more. • Your site needs to state where your business is located and what areas are served. Theres a whole list of other things your site needs to be effective from an SEO standpoint. I strongly recommend you contact a local SEO provider and ask lots of questions. This is a big undertaking, one that can consume tons of your time that you may not have. Having someone Marketing your business frees you up to work on or in your business. Doing nothing really isnt an option. Get your business out there where people are looking for stuff.! ON The Internet! Read more about seo: visibilityrus/seo-no-no-s/
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 02:25:49 +0000
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