Small Business Ideas from the Exhibition Hall at SES San Jose

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday, August 8-9, 2006 poking around the Exhibition Hall at Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose looking for Internet marketing services that might be of special interest to small to medium businesses. As I look back, nothing I saw really blew me away, except perhaps Trellian Competitive Intelligence. But I did see a number of ideas that were new or new to me. One of these might be just what you need.

Trusted Feed to Yahoo

PositionTech (www.positiontech.com) offers trusted feed services to a Yahoo! paid inclusion system (Yahoo! Search Submit Pro). You send PositionTech your basic webpage data (presumably from a content management system). They analyze the pages, prepare or amend meta tags and title tags, and submit your page information directly to Yahoo!, which then doesn't need to spider your pages. PositionTech claims that their submissions nearly always rank above the pages that Yahoo! itself spiders. The catch is that Yahoo! charges a pay per click fee for every click-through generated from this trusted feed (from which PositionTech gets a revenue share -- that's how they're paid).

This is especially useful for larger sites that may have trouble getting all their webpages indexed in a timely fashion -- dynamic sites, stores with hundreds or thousands of product pages, or banks and mortgage companies. There is no entry fee, so you can try for a month or two and see if it helps your rankings. This kind of service helps "level the playing field," according to the PositionTech representative.

Publications

• BtoB Magazine (www.btobonline.com) from Crain Communications is available in print for $59, but you can get an online digest via e-mail and read the articles online at no charge.
• WebSite Services (www.websiteservices.com) -- the Magazine for Website Success. The online version seems to be blog-based. A print version is free in the US and Canada.

Linking Ideas

If you're seeking a higher page rank, consider paying for a link in the following business directories. They have the potential to bump your rankings because of their generally high PageRank:

• Business.com (www.business.com) is $299/year. Your listing would be grouped with others from your industry. This one is recommended.
• Best of the Web (www.botw.org) is $49.95 annually, plus a $149.95 one-time review fee. BOTW claims to be "the Internet's oldest directory," but you have to pay to be listed as "best."
• Text Link Ads (www.text-link-ads.com) is a clearing house for buying and selling text links that help promote a high PageRank. Some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies will purchase text links for their clients to bring a quicker PageRank boost, while diligently working at a linking campaign for a longer term solution. Publishers with a high PageRank can sell text links for $20 to $80 per month through Text Link Ads, for a 50/50 revenue share with Text Link Ads. Of course, selling text links is frowned upon by purists who were upset that the Stanford Daily (the university home of Google's founders) was selling text links. They stopped for a while and then resumed.

Local Internet Marketing

Where can you advertise a purely local business. There are many companies vying for your dollar. These were represented at SES:

• Local.com (www.local.com) is a local search engine specializing in local results. They take PPC text and banner advertising and are now #79 in order of high traffic US sites according to comScore.
• TrueLocal.com (www.truelocal.com) is developing review sites for local businesses. In cities where they have many reviews they are also publishing a print guide to local businesses containing the review information. They also create simple sites for businesses that don't have a web presence. If this catches on in a community as a place to read local reviews, it could become a good spot to advertise. It is presently only available in select metropolitan areas.
• YellowPages.com (www.yellowpages.com), now owned by AT&T, puts local merchant's ads in a searchable online Yellow Pages directory with a relatively high PageRank.

A/B and Taguchi Testing Companies

Four companies that specialize in A/B split-testing and Taguchi testing were prominent this year.

• Offermatica (www.offermatica.com) provides solutions for larger companies, using an impressive toolset.
• Memetrics (www.memetrics.com) offers rather sophisticated testing tools for both enterprise-level applications and small-to-medium business. Their xOs Express tool, designed for smaller companies, costs about $40,000 annually.
• Optimost (www.optimost.com) was also represented. Their focus is on larger companies.
• Vertster (www.vertster.com) didn't have a booth, but CEO Scott Miller spoke at the testing session. Vertster provides testing software that small businesses can actually afford.

HackerSafe

At the session on testing, James Roach, CEO of Offermatia, reported that across testing for many firms they found that a HackerSafe (www.scanalert.com) or TRUSTe (www.truste.org) symbol and a prominent returns policy significantly affect the conversion rate. ScanAlert claims a 14% higher average conversion rate obtained from A/B split-tests. I'm going to look at securing a HackerSafe recognition, if it makes that much difference!

Competitive Intelligence

If you need to do in-depth intelligence on your competition, here's a low-priced option. Compiled from various tool-bar data, Trellian Competitive Intelligence (ci.trellian.com) identifies:

• Websites that drive the most traffic to your competitors
• Which search terms generate traffic and from which search engines
• What search terms are paid for through search marketing campaigns
• A competitor's top affiliate partners, etc.

The system takes a couple of weeks to be set up. Set up fees are $150, then $99.95 per month.

Content Management Systems

Two content management systems were showing at the Expo. Medium sized businesses might be interested.

• HotBanana (www.hotbanana.com) provides their Active Marketing Web Content Management Suite.
• Marqui (www.marqui.com) offers platforms for articles, ads, blogs/feeds, database, etc.

Content Generation

If you're lacking SEO food in terms of content, LifeTips.com (www.lifetips.com) has an interesting approach. They work with only one company in a niche. They research the company's business, keywords for which they want to score high, and then team writers with SEO experts to create content designed to attract traffic, followed by press releases. Authority links from the LifeTips.com site increases keyword ranking. $5,000 to $9,000.

Podcasting

OneUpWeb announced that it is offering services to get companies set up for podcasting, that is, broadcasting audio messages which are downloaded by subscribers onto iPod-type players for later listening. OneUpWeb's free, 16-page PDF whitepaper, Corporate Podcasting 101 is well worth getting. It isn't just a lightly disguised sales pitch; the paper actually gives you a lot of general information about the subject (www.oneupweb.com/landing/oneupweb/podcasting101/).

PPC Advertising

There was strong representation from the Paid Search industry, with showings from Kanoodle, Mamma, LookSmart, and many others second-tier search engine and ad networks.

Microsoft adCenter (adcenter.microsoft.com) claims a better conversion rate than from Google or Yahoo. The reason is that your ad can be targeted to be shown only to the demographics you select -- not only keywords, but also age, geographic location, gender. This is possibly due to MSN's ability to connect searchers to demographic information contained in tens of millions of user profiles of MSN applications, such as HotMail, and MSN Messenger. I found it either arrogant or stupid (or both) that none of their slick collateral I picked up at SES contained a URL for adCenter. :-)

Google AdSense Section Targeting

I learned at the Google Dance Tuesday evening that it is possible to target the Google AdSense ads on your site, to make sure they are focused on the important keywords of your webpage. This is done by placing tags such as:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

around particular paragraphs of your webpage content that Google ought to be looking at for a keyword focus. Of course, it's more complex than that. But if you have pages where Google AdSense just isn't serving relevant ads, here's a way to fix it. www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23168