Joe at PPC HERO Wrote this Excellent Article on Business.com

Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing comprise approximately 82% of search traffic. Therefore, we focus approximately 82% of our articles toward these two search engines, logically. Today, I am going to take a diversion and discuss optimizing your advertisements for Business.com.

Before you can enhance your listings, you have to know your core audience. As the name implies, Business.com is geared towards professionals looking for business solutions. It is a directory and pay-per-click network that serves approximately 40 million unique users every month. According to their company description, “Business.com helps business decision makers quickly find what they need to manage and grow their businesses, and enables advertisers to reach these users wherever they are across the business Internet through premier partners, including Forbes, BusinessWeek, Hoovers, Financial Times and Internet.com.” Basically, these individuals are looking for services and business solutions.

A Business.com search engine results page (SERP) is a mixed bag. The top of the page displays sponsored links for companies who are advertising directly with Business.com. The rest of the SERP is a blend of organic results, sponsored ads distributed by Google, and other Business.com sponsored links. If you are running a Business.com campaign; running ads within AdWords; and you rank organically, it is possible to have 3 more listings on a Business.com SERP. This means you can have a lot of realty on this site, but how do you make your Business.com sponsored ads work optimally? Here are some tips!

Have a well-thought-out campaign structure: As within any paid search campaign, you need to have a clean, logical account structure. Your campaigns should contain tightly themed keywords and highly targeted ad text.

Write relevant, compelling ad text: In order to craft relevant, compelling ad text you need to stick to the basics: make sure your keywords are highlighted within your ad (headline and body copy, if possible); include a clear call-to-action; and remember who your target audience is (individual looking for solutions). Remember, present your product & service as the solution the user is seeking.

Pay attention to your performance indicator: Performance Indicator reflects the performance of your listing relative to other advertisers bidding on the same keyword and your rank. If you have a low ranking then your ads may not be as compelling and relevant as possible. Revise your ads to increase your click-through rate (CTR) and your PI should increase.

Utilize your mulitlink option: The feature that makes Business.com paid listings unique is the fact that you can include up to 5 links within your ad. Your headline is a link, and you can include 4 additional links at the bottom of your ad. Be sure to utilize this mulilink option as it can draw more attention to your ad; build more trust with users; and increase your CTR by up to 20% (on average). Here is an example of an advertiser who using these options; the first ads are Business.com sponsored ads that are using the multilink option:

As I stated earlier, Google and Yahoo own the lion’s share of search traffic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t devote some of your time and efforts to alternative search venues. Sure, Business.com will generate far fewer clicks and conversions, but this could be business that you’re leaving on the table by ignoring it.

Link Building Best Practices wrote this great article

It’s a simple question, but plenty of people get confused by this one. There’s a huge difference between outsourcing your link building and buying links. One is a simple exchange of cash for particular links. It’s a straightforward transaction – you pay for a particular link; that’s it. I’m not saying that there aren’t many different types of links you can buy – there are. 

Link buying is generally a pretty standard transaction. In most cases, you are renting text links from websites, but you could also be buying reviews or sponsoring a website theme. The key is that you are making an out-and-out purchase. There’s a cash transaction specifically for the link itself.

Outsourcing Your Link Building

Outsourcing isn’t about buying links at all. When you outsource your link building campaign, you are hiring someone to do all of the dynamic link building work you would do if you had the time and resources to do it yourself. It doesn’t mean making credit card transactions to buy static links or put up banners.

Outsourcing means you trusting your campaign to a link building service who will take the time to learn about your business, your goals and your vision. They will do in-depth research about your industry, your competition and your company so that they can create dynamic links that aren’t purchased. They’ll be doing the kind of interactive link building that creates real buzz in your industry. 

If you find the right company to outsource to, they will invlove an industry researcher and a professional copywriter familiar with your industry who can develop articles, blog postings and press releases about what you do that will capture the attention of visitors to your own website and countless others.

They will be familiar with authority sites, industry sites, education pages and quality news feeds that you just wouldn’t have the time to research or the access to if you were trying to build links yourself. It’s this unique combination of skill and access that makes outsourcing your link building campaign a good idea for many businesses. 

What Sets Link Building Apart from Purchased Links

Link building is inherently content-rich. It isn’t about just the link – it’s about what surrounds the link. Because the link is imbedded in some kind of content that has to justify its existence, it naturally has to be something interesting enough to be of value. It may be an interesting how-to article, a thought-provoking response on a popular blog, a press release that’s been picked up on an industry news wire, a YouTube video…it really doesn’t matter where the link is. 

What matters is that the content is valuable to the reader, which makes the link more credible than a typical purchased link. It’s also why outsourcing your link building can be such a great investment – you aren’t buying links; you’re buying a team of researchers, bloggers, writers and industry experts who are doing what you would do if only you had the time and energy!

GrayWolf’s SEO Blog wrote this interesting article on links.  

I really find scandals interesting because people who are on the ball, plugged in, creative, not afraid to take chances and stir up a little controversy can do really well.

Case and Point Playgirl Magazine offered Ex-Governor Elliot Spitzer 1 Million Dollars to pose nude.

It’s a win-win scenario for Playgirl. Let’s go with the most likely outcome and assume client 9 says no, playgirl generated a decent amount of press, links, and attention, for the cost of a press release and some PR work.

Let’s enter dreamland and imagine he goes for the deal, I have no doubt that it would turn out to be the highest selling issue of Playgirl, attracting a huge amount of sales and advertising, more than enough to cover the $1 million dollar paycheck.

I recently asked Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz the following question and he was kind enough to reply, view his reply in bold below:

Hi Rand and Danny ,

Hope all is well. I have a question and I’m going to post your answers
on my blog if you don’t mind (if you answer at all, I know you guys
are busy

I have identified old domains with inbound links such as www.orlando-car.com
and www.albarentacar.com to purchase for my client site www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com

Their age and inbound links are attractive and the prices for the
domains are reasonable. Under $200 each.

Do I:
A. buy old domains and 301 to www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com
B. buy domains 301 non www to www then 301 to www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com
C. buy domain, build out sites and link to www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com

What do you think is best option? I think C is a waste of time,but I
wanted your opinion.

Jean-Pierre,

Best wishes,

Rand Fishkin 

BeefJerky.com Website Analysis

It’s pretty well known that orange and yellow hues make us think cheap when it comes to website design. When I landed on beefjerky.com (amazing domain, by the way) I was struck by the overall lack of quality design (orange colors) and I didn’t feel the good ol boy, pat you on the back, cozy feeling, that should be expected from a quality online retailer.

Why would you put so much time, energy and money into translating your site into over 14 languages and then hire someone with only novice web design skills to create your store? Would you hire someone who has never built a building to build your brick and mortar store? If the answer is no (and it unequivocally should be) then you’ll realize that’s exactly what you’ve done with beefjerky.com This is one reason you’re not selling as much jerky as you definitely should be! Here’s your schedule for tomorrow. Wake up, find the best designer you can, don’t sleep until the website is re-designed.

Now to increase traffic…ahh…this is my favorite part. Your title tag is currently “Beef Jerky,com. The Best Beef Jerky, Fresh from Beefjerky.com”
Sorry to break it to you, but not many people are typing in “Fresh from beefjerky.com” or “the best beefjerky” according to Google’s keyword tool. And this is prime keyword real-estate your giving up to non-performing keywords that are with out a doubt holding you back from receiving greater traffic.

Consider these keywords instead: Gourmet Beef Jerky, Beef Jerky Online, Buy Beef Jerky.

These keywords are searched by potential relevant customers that are more likely to make a purchase online. And there are tons of other keywords you should be using across your site to drive traffic.

For example: Start a page on how to make beef jerky and then sell your visitors a starter kit which comes with a sample of how the jerky should taste when done (they’ll like your sample better and return for more!) Obviously the keywords for that page should be “how to make beef jerky”. And don’t worry about teaching your consumer how to make your product, most people are way to busy with there every day chores and responsibilities, to become serious jerkers (is jerker the proper terminology?)

There’s a million other things I would fix on this site to probably quintuple sales in less than 60 days, but if you can’t see the mistakes your making, you should just sell beefjerky.com to one of your competitors for a couple million and retire.

Otherwise find a good website navigation design company, web designer and SEO company to arm you with the latest and greatest tools to launch your sales into the orbit and get ready to make more jerky than you ever have before.

I recently messed up bad by suggesting a friend should use Pay Per Post for some link building love. Well, what ended up happening is far from ever reaching a link building “How To” book.

I’ll make it short and sweet.

• Friend is on page six of Google for his desired key phrase.
• Friend buys $700 worth of PR 5 and up links on Pay Per Post.
• No real change happens.
• 30 days later friend buys another $700 worth of PR 5 and up links on Pay Per Post.

Poof, friend vanishes from page six and and top 100 search engine results pages too. They’re still in the index but no where near the top ten pages.

Here’s what I think happened. The same people who took the “post opportunity” the first time around, took it the second time around as well. Google noticed multiple links from not so relevant sites within 30 days apart from one another and punished my friend (thank the heavens it wasn’t a big client…lesson learned!)

So I write to Eric from StoneTemple.com the guy with all those Rambling’s About SEO and this is what he had to say…

“Hi Jean-Pierre,

Sorry for the slow response, but I am at SMX West in Santa Clara right now.
A couple of things to think about:

1. Is it possible that the pay per post links originally benefitted you, and
once they were detected and disabled, they simply stopped providing any
benefit? This is a scenario in which you would not recover, simply because
you were not actually penalized. Another words, in this scenario, all that
happened is that your paid links stopped adding value.

2. If you have in fact been penalized, and you have stopped buying links, I
would file a reconsideration request. Make sure you do this from within
Google Webmaster Tools. The standard advice for this is to keep it short
(no more than 3 paragraphs) and direct, admit your sins, point out that you
have cleaned it up, and ask for them to remove any penalty that may have
been applied.

Do NOT do this if you are concerned about what may happen to your site as a
result of a human review by a Googler. I.e. if they found some other
practice you have been using that they are not happy with, a reconsideration
request could make your situation worse. So make sure you are squeaky clean
before doing this.

3. With or without a reconsideration request, the process can take as little
as a few weeks, to several months. Unfortunately, there is no formula to
how quickly these types of things progress.

The other thing you need to think about, to drive your long term rankings
strategy, is what are you going to do to get natural links? These will be
the keys to long term success.

Hope that helps!

Eric”

Thanks for the great advice Eric, I appreciate it.
I think I will tough it out for a few more weeks though, considering we’re still in the Index and see what happens. If there isn’t an improvement soon, I’ll have to beg Google for forgiveness.

What do you think I should do? Apart from get my brain checked ofcourse…