One of the many ways to waste your organic SEO efforts is to fail to focus your keywords. For example, let’s say you’re targeting the keywords

• custom blog creation
• blog posting
• organic SEO
• website SEO
• article writing and distribution
• and small business SEO.

You’ve got your website with a bunch of different pages on it, and you have a page specifically about custom blog creation, another about a writing service that does blog posting, article writing, and distribution. On another page, you offer website SEO services, and you throw in the keyword for small business SEO on that page as well. Your homepage is targeted specifically for ‘organic SEO’.

But what happens if the SEO people screw it up, and start pointing links about blog posting to your page about small business SEO? What if you start getting your focus on organic SEO polluted by a bunch home-page links with the anchor text ‘custom blog creation’? Google’s going to get confused about what each of your pages is supposed to be about.

Enter your own blog. With a custom-made blog loaded with SEO plugins and carefully written, you can create focus out of the chaos. Google treats internal links (i.e. links from within your own site) as strong indicators of subject — so if your blog is hosted on the same URL as your main site, you can use the anchor text on your blog to tell Google exactly what each page on your site is actually about.

There are lots of other reasons that a custom blog is a tool that every small business can use. Using it to focus Google’s concentration to laserlike levels on the exact keywords you want to target with each page is just one — albiet a very strong one — of the reasons you should consider getting a blog for your business if you don’t already have one.

The backlinks created by directory submission are a great example. There are literally several hundred thousand website directories on the Internet, from the mighty open-source DMOZ to the hugely well-guarded and almost impossible to get listed by Yahoo! Directory to uncountable numbers of extraordinary niche directories that list things like African-American capoeria masters willing to take on handicapped students 12 and under for night classes in the San Fernando Valley area.

What does this have to do with you? Simple — these directories form a huge quantity of easy-to-obtain, permanent dofollow links. No one of them is terribly powerful, but no one of them is particularly hard to get as well. And if you have a thousand such backlinks and your competition doesn’t, well, guess who gets ranked?

The backlinks that you get by doing these kind of backlinks are very much like vertebrae — you don’t ever really think about them; they’re pretty low-maintenance all told. But without them, you’re relying on a framework of squishy muscle to hold up your ranking structures. On the other hand, if you invest just once in getting a good strong backbone built, you can continue to build on that framework to create a wonderful beast that will serve you for years.

Just one note — while it’s easy to get backlinks from directory submission, it’s also possible to get sandboxed for months if you get greedy. Don’t use software or other automated methods to submit to thousands of directories at once. Google knows that isn’t a ‘natural’ way for backlinks to flow. Hire an SEO company or a freelancer if you must, and build your backlinks naturally, or it’ll all be for naught in the end anyway.

Destination businesses can come from any industry and sell any product — it’s not what they sell, it’s how they sell it. A destination business seeks out a particular kind of clientele — the kind that are knowledgeable about what they want and where to get it. The alternative to being a destination business is to be a ‘pass-by’ business, one that essentially makes it’s money from people who pop in on their way to someone else and buy something.

Destination businesses tend to be niche businesses. For example, in my hometown, there are three competing Southeast Asian food stores. Two of them are pass-buy businesses; they carry fairly generic stock SE Asian food. One of them has a small pho shop attached. But the destination store doesn’t just carry SE Asian food — they carry halal SE Asian food. So anyone who wants to cook Asian and serve Muslim folks at the same time has to go to the halal market.

Mobile website design is the art of creating a website that is plainly readable on the typical 2-1/2″ screen on a smartphone. Mobile websites (supplemented with a bit of small business SEO) are wonderful for destination businesses, and here’s why: people look up destination businesses. If you need something specific like halal meat curry mix, you don’t just head out and hope you find it — or if you realize you need some on the road, you look it up on your mobile device.

Bam. Your mobile friendly website just drove foot traffic into your restaurant, and you made a sale.

If you’re a pass-by business, the same principle applies, but less people search for pass-by businesses deliberately — and pass-by businesses are generally more common. So while it’s still a good idea and will still drive traffic, it’s not the absolute must-have that it is for an established destination business. You should still get it done, though: it only takes a dozen or so customers through your door to pay for the operation (depending on the typical sale price at your store, of course), so it’s practically a no-brainer either way.

So what’s left to “take advantage of” in social bookmarking? How can it be social if no one is using it?

The answer is deceptively simple: social bookmarking might not fall into the realm of social marketing the way that Facebook and Pinterest do, but they’re still damn good for old fashioned organic SEO. Social bookmarks have lots of traits that make them good for search engine optimization.

Excellent ‘automated’ SEO
Social bookmarking sites stole a lot of tricks from the best blog software when they put themselves together. Every time to create a new social bookmark, you get the opportunity to add tags, and your link automatically falls into one or more categories. Every one of those tags and categories does an amazing job of telling Google what the subject of the page is (and thus increasing it’s relevancy to your subject, which in turn makes the backlink stronger).

Top Tier ‘Grey Hat’ Techniques
Grey hat SEO means you’re willing to do things a bit ‘dirty’ in order to reach the top. It’s kind of a strange area, because technically ALL SEO is grey hat according to Google; they’d like to see a world with no such thing as link exchanges, purchased backlinks, and so forth. But if you’re willing to get just slightly shadier in your ethics, social bookmarking allows you to do quite a bit of manipulation. From creating multiple accounts from multiple addresses and creating one bookmark from each account to then using each account to vote each other account’s story up several notches in the rankings, the abuse is right there waiting for the plucking.

Social bookmarking isn’t ever going to go away — not when it offers such wonderful tools to the SEO community. Probably there’s a few people out there who still use it to put up links for their friends and family, too.

The best you can get are those rare occasions when someone offers you a form of success in exchange for something simple and understandable. A chance to, for example, change money into more money. That’s the closest thing to success insurance. (Yeah, I just pulled the old bait-and-switch on you. I’m not apologizing.) One of the times in the world of internet commerce that you can pull this off is through the clever abuse of pay-per-click marketing.

The problem comes when you realize that pay-per-click marketing is a huge tangled mess and you’re more likely to get Congress to stop taking money from lobbyists than you are to just step blindly into the world of PPC and succeed. That’s why people who understand pay-per-click have started offering to be your medium — your PPC management psychic who can manipulate the ether of AdWords and assure your success at the small cost of some chunk of the money you’re making from their efforts.

These gifted men and women only ask two things of you: first, that you give them a decent budget (above and beyond the money they ask for their services), and second, that you build a website that converts visitors into money with decent efficiency. That second part is the only thing you can really screw up — and it’s one of the easiest parts of the online marketing game.

Turn visitors into money with even a moderate level of success, and the cycle goes like this. You spend money to get traffic, and the traffic turns into more money. The level of efficiency at which this operation happens is dependent half on the quality of the research your PPC manager does (the same keywords that work for organic SEO purposes almost always fail for PPC, so you can’t just use the same keywords you got from your SEO company), and your conversion rate. Get those two things right, and you can basically pay money to make money — and at that point, you don’t need success insurance.

When you’ve managed to get a top listing for all of the major keywords targeted by your website, SEO for those keywords can slow down a little bit. Not entirely, because your competition is going to try to unseat you, and if you stop getting better every day, they’ll overtake you. But a little bit, because you’re not running uphill anymore — you’re already the King of the Hill.

On the other hand, it seems like there’s nowhere to go but down if you’re already on the top. Fortunately, that’s not actually the case. You may have kicked butt on all of the keywords that are immediately relevant to the pages on your site, but that’s hardly all of the keywords relevant to your industry.

The obvious answer is to spread your sales funnel a bit. Create a new landing page or five focused on new keywords that you’re naturally doing well on (if you’ve topped a few keywords, it’s a sure thing there’s a few more that you’ve accidentally gotten to page 2 on.) Take those ’side’ keywords, focus on them, and get yourself more first page placements.

The less obvious answer is to move up in the world, rather than out. It’s a near-certainty that when you started in this game, you discarded several very high-value keywords because the competition was just too much for you. But now that you’ve been at it for a year or two and you’ve got your share of keywords that you’re top ranked for, it’s time to reevaluate the level that you’re capable of playing on.

There’s no shortage of directions you can go — just because you’re at the top of the hill for some keywords doesn’t mean you’re anywhere done with SEO. Game on!

But it’s also a great form of social marketing. Slapping those cute little social buttons next to every blog post allows you to get the message out to your followers (and your followers’ friends and associates) without even doing anything — just convince them to actually use those buttons, and your job is done.

So how do you actually come up with quality blog posts to pump out every week? It’s a tough discipline to master, but here’s a few great ways to get inspired to get your blog posting out of the way.

• Watch your industry’s news — this can be as easy as setting up a few Google Alerts with keywords directly relevant to your industry. If you come across something that sounds like it might affect your business, post about it. If there’s a really major event — like, say, the SOPA/PIPA ramage of a few months back — post your opinion on the matter.



• Talk about your plans or new developments — you don’t necessarily have to have news already; you can talk about what you’re planning to do a few months from now and start building anticipation. If you’re Gaslamp Games, for example, you post about porting your Roguelike over to the iPad even if it won’t hit the Apple Store until September.
• Watch your competitors — kind of a good idea regardless, but if you keep an eye on them, you can also blog about their activities as well.

Blogging is such a ridiculously useful activity for any business that has an online presence — the key is learning to do it regularly and usefully. Train yourself up and get it done!

The way to do that is to have a monetized website — either by selling a product or service from your site, or hosting advertisements on it, or starting a kickstarter project related to your site and directing visitors to it. There are lots of ways to monetize.

But of course there are complications. Monetizing requires that the people who make it to your website actually pay attention once they’re there. That, in turn, requires you to design a pretty killer website — or to design a more or less typical website and use a few ‘tricks’ — like targeted email marketing or a web presenter — to get them to stick around.

In the first case, a targeted email marketing campaign collects email addresses from visitors, and then automatically emails them every so often with some reminder that you exist and a link to your particular method of monetization. Every time you mail someone, there’s a small chance that they’ll follow the link back to your page, remember why they liked it, and maybe they’ll ping off of the monetization method and leave you with some money in your wallet. It’s basically like a standing invitation for everyone that’s ever been to your site to return and give you more money later.

Web presenters, on the other hand, are the ultimate in “spider’s parlor” tricks. They keep people from ever leaving your pages in the first place, by popping up and talking to them amiably about whatever your site happens to be about. They’re little animated people who chat with your visitors, gesturing at the various (static) parts of your webpage and telling them more about each. A web presenter, in short, gets people interested.

Load up your webpage with both — especially if the web presenter encourages visitors to sign up for the targeted email marketing list — and you’ll end up with a site that keeps visitors present, and then calls them back every so often to invite them to get snared all over again. That’s the smart way to turn SEO into blank ink in your checkbook.

Directory submission

There are directories all across the Internet. Some are general directories that will take listings from any type of site while others are more specialized and deal with one niche only. When you submit your website to one of these directories you are able to link back to your site from it. This is what Google wants to see when it is ranking sites. You’ll just have to make sure that you follow all of the rules for each directory in order to get your submission approved.

There is another thing to keep in mind when you are visiting directories. It is better to see dofollow links on their pages. There are lists provided of directories that have these types of links on the Internet. You’ll have to find these lists and then start making your submissions to as many as possible. One backlink from a directory is not going to do you much good. You’ll need a lot of them in order to see any kind of movement in the search engines.

Social bookmarking

This is using the same procedure as submissions to directories but your site is being added to sites like Stumble Upon, Reddit and Digg. You’ll need to first open an account at these bookmarking sites before you can submit yours to them.

As with directories, not every social site will use these do-follow links that you’re looking for. You’ll have to find a specific list of social sites that provide them. You’ll also have to make sure that there is no connection between your submission and your profile. This will devalue your links and make them pretty much useless.

Social bookmarking and submissions are a part of a wider SEO strategy. Any expert with SEO will make them part of the overall plan to get a site moving to the top in Google.

Blog commenting

When you comment on blogs that are owned by other people you’ll be dispersing the back links. If you only comment on your own blog and then backlink from it, all of these links will be coming from one blog only. Google loves variety and you need to provide it.

When you are commenting on posts you need to make sure that your words don’t appear as spam. You need to add something relevant about the post or about another person’s comment. If your blog comments appear as an advertisement, or don’t really have anything of value to add to the blog, it won’t get accepted by the webmaster.

The best thing about adding comments to other people’s blogs is you can provide your own anchor text in most cases. As long as you choose blogs that are similar to the type of site you are running, you’ll be able to add a variety of anchor texts that will please the search engines.

Your own blog

The purpose of having your own blog is not to create backlinks on it as much as it is to gather visitors to it based on its own merits. Google absolutely loves blogs and it is a very good idea to have someone do some custom blog creation for you, even on top of the site you are currently running. You’ll be able to capture more visitors as a result.

Both blog commenting and having your own blog are two very separate entities that are both valuable in their own rights. When you have both set up and running you will be able to add more visitors to your website and raise your website rankings as well.