Small businesses online has the same potential as their bigger competitors because they only have to have a good site and good products and services to entice customers to buy from them. When marketing offline, you have to have a good place for your business. If you are selling products, you need display cases for them and whatnot. On the other hand, if you are going to solely sell your products online, you would only need a place to store them saving you a lot of money.

If you have built your site to make it more appealing to search engines, you can even beat your competitors even if they paid more for the building of their site. You do not need a flashy website to have good Google rankings but you should also consider how your customers would like the layout of your site. It is best if you would work with a web developer and a programmer who knows how to make the site easy for search engine bots to read. The easier it is for the robots to read your site, the better chance you have of ranking well for the keyword you are targeting.

All in all, going online and expanding your network online is the best way for small business owners to level the playing field. With good search engine optimization techniques, they can easily attain good Google or Yahoo rankings which would result to more exposure for their brand and thus increasing sales. It can be done by working with a good SEO company which is not afraid to take on the challenge of taking an unknown brand and making it popular online.

Viral marketing is called that because if it is successful, it could easily spread like a virus. This is a good way to place your brand where you want your probable costumers to see them. Plus, you do not have to spend millions of dollars to have a successful viral marketing campaign as part of your social media marketing. With the widespread use of the Internet, more people can watch a good viral marketing campaign than an ad shown during the Super Bowl.

There is no quick recipe you can follow though to make your advertising campaign to go viral. Sometimes, even the most planned advertising stunts do pan out so well while some hastily made videos shared on YouTube could reach millions of views in a matter of days. Although there’s no recipe for success in viral marketing, you can follow some quick tips to make sure that your viral marketing campaign would not be a big flop.
First of all, be sure that what you are promoting is a good one. Your marketing campaign might get a lot of attention from people but it would be useless if the first hundred customers or so come out with negative reviews of your product or services.

Another thing that you have to look into is your site’s resources. If all goes according to plan and your marketing campaign becomes a viral hit, your site would receive thousands of visitors. If your hosting account only has limited bandwidth allocation, your site could go down which is never a good thing especially during that time span when your viral marketing campaign is at its peak or is about to peak. If that happens, you could end up losing a lot of potential customers.

Remember that the chance of making it big with just one shot at viral marketing might not be enough so try and try again if you fail. And don’t forget about search engine optimization since that is one long-term solution to ensuring your brand’s popularity on the Internet.

Key Features:

• Enable visitors to find the right products faster
• Filter results by category, price, brand or other attributes
• Provide user-friendly spelling options and synonyms
• Increase website conversions and sales
• Boost or promote chosen products within search results
• Deploy search solution in days, and scale effortlessly
• Customize, track, and optimize performance

“Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too,” Google says. “Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute.”

Watch this video to see how it works:

Advanced Link Manager – Analyze your website’s link popularity, find link partners and valuable information about them.
Product Page: http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com

Rank Tracker SEO Tool – Rank Tracker is an all-in-one rankings monitoring SEO tool for webmasters and professional SEOs who need to monitor their site’s positions in more than 250 search engines.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

SERank – RAGE SERank will monitor search engine rankings for any number of keywords and display changes in a web site’s search engine rankings over any point of time.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/search-engine-rank.html

Advanced Web Ranking – Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking software that emulates a manual search through each search engine. It works exactly like if you were manually checking your keywords ranking position via a browser.
Product Page: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Link Assistant – A search engine optimization software program designed to automate the many tedious link building tasks us SEOs need to do on a daily basis. A complete, feature-rich, easy-to-use environment.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/

iWeb SEO Tool – Quickly and easily optimize your iWeb based website for search engines then publish directly to your iDisk or FTP server without ever leaving the application.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/iweb-seo-tool.html

SEO Spyglass – SEO SpyGlass is an extremely powerful competition research tool that is amazingly easy to use. In three simple steps SEO SpyGlass will show you exactly how your competitors got top positions in search engines so you can learn how they do it, improve on it, and get your own site ahead of them, in 232 local and international search engines!
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

WordButler – A wordtracker competitor specifically designed for mac users.
Product Page: http://www.wordbutler.com/

For years now, the country has been competing with other countries like India in cornering outsourcing contracts. And the good news is that the country is competing well thanks to the many factors that help the Philippines maintain its comparative edge against other leading BPO providers like India. Here is a listing of the country’s strengths and in what sectors can the Philippines truly prove its mettle.

• · Low Infrastructure Costs. Here is one area where the country can show its edge. Office spaces and real estate properties in the country are minimal if you compare the prices to US real estate prices. Real estate prices in Metropolitan Manila are considered low if compared to other international markets. But if the prices in greater Manila still sting the budget, provincial locations are great choices as well. Real estate prices are significantly lower, like Subic, Cebu and Southern Luzon.
• · Government support is evident. One notable government move is to support 100,000 Filipinos thru scholarships. These scholarships will ensure that there will be a continuing pool for contact centers and BPO centers.
• · American-honed work culture. Since the country has been under American rule for many years, the workforce has assimilated some of the American culture, thus allowing the workforce to know and understand where their American customers are coming from.
• · The literate workforce. Companies that will look at the opportunities that can be provided by the Philippines will benefit from the Philippine’s high quality knowledge workers. The Philippines is the second largest English-speaking country and the country also boasts 94 percent literacy rate. Data suggests that more Philippine students are enrolled in the universities than in most European countries. This suggests the quality of education and the motivation of the students.

More importantly the, the Philippines and the country’s BPO providers is your ideal choice to handle your company’s outsourcing needs because of the ethics of the Filipino employees. Filipino employees can be the best workers as most of the Filipinos have Catholic upbringing. Their innate morals and ethics due to their beliefs manifests well in the workforces’ work functions. The Filipino workforce is known for being patient and accommodating thus making the Filipino workforce an excellent choice for your outsourcing needs.

In this newly rolled-out service by Yahoo!, users will get custom real time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

For further info, check out Yahoo! web analytics

I have checked a number blogs earlier and found out that most of them don’t care of the permalinks issue. If you’ll notice, wordpress permalink by default shows a question mark and numbers in it, obviously not search engine friendly. You can customize this by going to Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks section of your wordpress powered blog. You’ll see five options there for your permalink:

• Default – http://www.kontrapelo.com/?p=123
• Day and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/sample-post/
• Month and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/sample-post/
• Numeric – http://www.kontrapelo.com/archives/123
• Custom Structure – you can create your own here

Of all the choices, I usually prefer making it custom that don’t include the postdate. Why? Well, here’s the idea:

url #1: kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/wordpress-seo
url #2: kontrapelo.com/wordpress-seo

The first url above tells Google that “2008/09/12″ is more important than “wordpress-seo” as it is placed first. Placing the “date” first before your “name” structure pushes your keywords away. This is the best permalink structure for me but if you’re working a way to have your article featured in Google news which requires a 3-digit included in your url, it’s a no-no. If your wordpress blog already has 100 posts prior to targetting appearance in Google news, then something like “name/id” will do. If the blog is new, then work your way to have a 3-digit number in it. You can play around with the “year/month/date” placing it after the “name” structure.

In addition, I’ve read an article before (can’t remember where) saying Matt Cutts mentioned in WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco that the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens.

Well, to make it simple, the whole idea here is to take a domain like http://kontrapelo.com and redirect it to http://www.kontrapelo.com consolidating all incoming links to a single domain, wether they use “www” or not.

Here’s a simple mod_rewrite rule you can add to .htaccess to accomplish this, put it above any other rewrite rules that you are using, you may want the other rules to apply to the www. domain after the initial redirect.

note: replace the sample domain with your own domain.
RewriteEngine on

#Redirect http://kontrapelo.com to http://www.kontrapelo.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^kontrapelo.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.kontrapelo.com/$1 [r=301,L]

I wonder where Microsoft will be placed after this sale, if you don’t know yet, Digg has a 3-year ad arrangement
with them.

Digg has been popular for its voting concept that fascinated Google.

“The court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” Google senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said.

“We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”

Viacom recently issued a statement saying it is only out to bolster its case against Google and not to expose or pursue viewers of copyrighted videos.

“Any information that we or our outside advisors obtain will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google,” Viacom said.

“It will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner.”

WHAT IS THIS FOR US?
It’s simple. Viacom will have access to informations about every Youtube video that me and you have ever watched. They will know what username you are using. It’s a breach of privacy!!