This just in from BusinessWeek:

Nouriel Roubini, the NYU economist who accurately predicted the financial meltdown, writes an important commentary in The Globe and Mail about two disparate American economies: “There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn,” he says.

Roubini goes on to outline two separate Economies emerging within the United States — a smaller economy driven by large corporations that has slowly begun to emerge from recession, and the larger economy that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Echoing what I have been discussing in recent months with small business owners and in my Twitter postings, small business owners are reacting with extreme skepticism (even pejorative sarcasm) at the White House notion that the economy is improving.  It turns out, the “recovery” is only a half-truth and addresses the corporate sector which, as Professor Roubini points out, has been able to re-negotiate its debt burdens (or receive government bailout money to ease the pain).

Ironically, the largest economy is the small business sector.  It should be clear by now that the small business sector is not going to get any help from this Administration.  Yet waiting for a recovery is not plausible while one’s business is suffering repeated setbacks and declining revenues.

One of my suggestions would be to start thinking like a larger corporation.  Big business does not think in terms of its individual storefronts; even the storefronts themselves are 100,000 sq. ft. mega-boxes versus the mom & pop sized retail establishments we see in strip centers.  Wal-Mart is not thinking about its current inventory that’s on the shelf; they don’t even pay for current inventory until after it has sold…

My point is that small business owners need to get wise to the way the Government plays business.  The rewards are there for the biggest players, even though they make the least difference in the total economic scheme.  They are the BRANDS  in the marketplace that make the headlines.  Even the media (another mega-corporate empire) responds to this because it is a story that can be packaged easily.

The real story is you and I.  Small business.  We are the driving force of any economic recovery because we are the largest player.

The big players have websites and they transact far outside their neighborhood boundaries.  At the same time, they intend to OWN whatever market they are in.  They don’t play for second or third place; they realize that a loss these days equals death to their business.

How do you play outside your boundaries?  With an effective website.  Not just a “pretty” site that isn’t relevant to your market, but an SEO-enabled website that benefits your bottom line.

“Aren’t websites like that usually $1,500 or more?”  Yes, usually.  But right now, your friends in business at Kinetics Web Pro are offering exactly the right website for your bottom line growth — priced at $499.  Things are already looking up for your business.

Be your own bailout.

Technorati Tags: Bailout, Business Sector, Businessweek, Corporate Sector, Debt Burdens, Downturn, Extreme Skepticism, Financial Meltdown, Globe And Mail, Large Corporations, Nouriel Roubini, Professor Roubini, Recession, Retail Establishments, Sarcasm, Setbacks, Small Business Owners, Storefronts, Strip Centers, Wal Mart

As small business owners, we need to find traffic for our websites from wherever we can get it — assuming, of course, that the source is relevant traffic.  Irrelevant traffic actually HURTS your website’s ranking in the Search Engine’s eyes, so we don’t want that.  For that reason, we are not fans of reciprocal linking schemes, link farms, etc.

Case in point.  I recently met with a new client who had previously enjoyed a Page Rank of 5 for their website.  Over the past two years, it has dropped to a Page Rank of 3.  This was due to a number of factors, but chief among those was the fact that they had been forced into a reciprocal linking arrangement with an unscrupulous vendor.  It benefitted the vendor tremendously, as they were able to show the search engines that their site was being ranked to from a PR5 website; it made the vendor’s site more “buoyant” (it made it rank higher) in the search engines.  The moral of the story is, be very careful if someone offers to do you the “favor” of creating a link to your site, in exchange to linking from yours.  It could be detrimental to your website’s Search Engine health.

Nevertheless, you should look for opportunities to receive links from relevant websites whenever possible.  It might not seem fair to “take” a link without giving one back, but there are other ways you can help the linking website.  If they have a satellite website, you could consider linking to that in the body of one of your posts — relevant topic / contextual link / deep link to the satellite site.  Just be careful that the link partner understands that directly linking from the satellite site to their main site will not be nearly as good as if they link in a broad circle of 10 sites before returning to the main site.  This is somewhat sophisticated SEO / linking strategy that we’re sharing, so it’s not for everyone to implement on their own.  It also implies that you have up to 10 web properties that are all somewhat related that can be daisy chained together… Again, not for everyone.  But definitely for businesses that want to insure being on Page 1 on Google.

It requires a lot of time, attention and planning to implement a 10-site daisy chain strategy, and we encourage you to go into that with plenty of forethought.  Take the time to not only analyze and eliminate any chance of reciprocal linking or neighbor linking possibilities in the chain, and also insure that whomever in your organization will be managing your website network understands this strategy.  A company SEO Policy is a very smart investment in resources. It takes relatively little time for a website to fall in page rank, and a significantly greater amount of time to gain rank — especially after it is lost.  

The underlying issue of Page Rank has been said to be overrated, and it’s largely a symbol of the site’s overall bouyancy in the search engines… it’s not necessarily a goal for a web owner to achieve a particular page rank; it’s more of a barometer or guideline than a definitive benchmark or landing point.  The website owner with a page rank of 0 would certainly agree that a page rank of 5 would represent that his/her traffic has achieved more traffic (visitors), more conversions and more leads & sales.  That’s really the benchmark we’re aiming for.

Technorati Tags: Back Linking, Case In Point, Circle Of 10, Deep Linking, Directory Listings, Engine Health, Fans, Feeder Sites, Link Exchange, Link Farms, Link Partner, Moral Of The Story, Page Rank, Pr5, Reciprocal Link, Reciprocal Linking, Relevant Topic, Relevant Traffic, Relevant Websites, Satellite, Satellite Sites, Search Engine, Search Engines, SEO, Small Business Owners, Traffic Website, Web Properties, Website Search

You own a small business, just like me. You own a brick & mortar business. I have over a decade of personal, hands-on experience with that; I have paid rent, payroll, payroll taxes, sales tax, worried about inventory and sell-through… I get it. Your margins are getting thinner and sales are getting smaller. You have been looking at every expense item in your business and you have probably run out of things to cut. The next thing to cut will be you, or the business itself. What you need are more customers. More customers will solve your problem, won’t it?

I’d like to ask you to think about advertising your business in the Yellow Pages. I’m not suggesting you think about it as a viable means of advertising — I’m asking you, consider the advertising that you’re doing, whether it be the Yellow Pages or any of the other “old school” methods for advertising your business. Consider how that ad works for you. Consider how that ad MUST work for you in order for it to do its job of bringing more customers into your store or restaurant, or getting more prospects to call you. Someone needs to get the idea to open the phone book, page to your category, peruse the ads, find YOU, see something in your display ad to make them take action and call. NO ONE works that hard anymore to seek you out. That advertising costs thousands of dollars a year. How many of your new customers came from the Yellow Pages last year? Do you even have any metrics (data) to know where your new business came from? Humbly, I suggest the best thing you can do is eliminate that display ad; create a regular, simple listing and pay for an extra line for your website address.

Now please consider your website. I’m going to be very direct and honest with you — if you are running your website like most small business owners, it’s failing to add anything to your business. Many small business owners operate their website as though it were a Yellow Pages ad; it’s there. Your customers won’t randomly find you on the Internet. They won’t just happen to think about your business and type it in. Even if your potential customers go to a search engine and type in your TYPE of business, they probably won’t find you unless you have 1) optimized your pages properly and 2) created specific methods to increase the presence and visibility of your website to the search engines. You see, not only your customers need to know who you are, but Google, Yahoo and MSN does as well. If they don’t know you exist, they can’t deliver your site to people who need your product or service.

Done properly, a website can be a VERY effective method of adding customers to your business. It can be modified very quickly to adapt to trends. Through your website, you can feature sales, talk to your customers and find new clients. A website can be any size you want it to be. You can even sell some of your products on your website and reach beyond your local market.

Consider your website name. If your business is about plumbing, and you don’t have “plumbing” in your .com name, does Google know what your site is about? Do the pages of your site talk about the various aspects of your business? Oftentimes, you’ll see a local business have a three-page site — a Contact page, About Us, and then a HUGE page about everything it is they do. Why? Because they “got a deal” from a web designer for a three-page site that was cheap and easy to implement. This is a terrible strategy in terms of search engines. Segment your pages into one topic per page. Make sure the metatags on each page match the topic. You can Google a discussion about metatags, but essentially, metatags are the code Google looks at for clues on what the page is about. YOU determine what the metatags are. Oftentimes, web designers don’t put anything in the metatags because you have paid for “web design” not “SEO.” That’s one reason why you got such a “deal” on the price. (Kinetics Web Pro only creates SEO-friendly sites, so every page has metatags.)

Metatags are easy to find. Just go to your website, and then in your browser, go to “View Source.” Search for the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags. If you don’t have anything there, or you can’t even find those words in your code, then your page is not optimized for search engines in the most basic way.

Metatags are the simplest way to optimize a website for search engines, but really, it goes to the very structure of the site. Think in terms of an outline with 1) 2) 3) and sub-sections of a) b) and c) — search engines think the same way. They like to see orderly, planned websites that function logically. Your site should be the same way.

We hope this has been helpful to your business.

If you don’t have time to do this work yourself, we can help. Contact us today.

Technorati Tags: Advertising Costs, Amp, Brick, Decade, domain name marketing, Hands On Experience, Local Business Marketing, Margins, Means Of Advertising, Metrics, Mortar Business, New Business, Old School, Payroll Taxes, Personal Hands, Phone Book, Prospects, Sales Tax, Small Business Owners, Thousands Of Dollars, Website Address, Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages advertising