Here’s Google’s official answer to PageRank related problems: 

"Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked.

PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner."

If you worry too much about PageRank, please don’t. Even Google admits it’s a non factor.

Simple Tags
Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc! No nonsense and get’s the job done.
http://redmine.beapi.fr/projects/show/simple-tags

Why PPC Can Work For You

Here’s some very fundamental things that you should know about PPC first…

• PPC pays for itself when it’s done right–and it can be done right.
• The goal of nearly all PPC campaigns is to produce a profit, not a loss.
• The amount you spend on PPC can be capped at any amount you want on a day by day basis–so it’s TOTALLY under you’re control.
• You can get a sense of how well it will a campaign will work in your niche before even trying to advertise, and if for some reason it’s not working you can stop it instantly.
• A good PPC campaign becomes more profitable over time as it’s optimized and improved.

My hope is that the points above should help set at least some part of you at ease.

What About the Warnings?

You’ll hear a lot of people warn you about PPC. I found that generally speaking these warning from people seems to fit into about 2 categories:

1. They tried it themselves and didn’t have an expert setup their campaign—so they set themselves up for failure—that’s because there are a lot of people out there that buy into the line that they can do PPC themselves, and I’m not going to tell you that. These people now warn everyone about PPC!
    
2. Or, a marketing company will tell you PPC doesn’t work and is risky because they want to sell you something else. Purely a sales tactic that plays on your fear.

Meanwhile there are millions of companies making a killing using AdWords because they are running their campaign correctly. Google made it’s fortune on AdWords, and it’s because marketers online are a savvy bunch, if some form of advertising isn’t working, they stop using it–they continue to use AdWords because it works!

AdWords is simply one of the most effective advertising mediums on line. Of course PPC may not be right for you’re business, but it’s fairly easy to discern this. See my blog post "4 Questions to Ask When Getting Started with PPC Advertising" for more details.

If you have any other concerns shoot me a quick comment below or email me and let me know what they are. Maybe we can chat about it.

Your products or services may be excellent candidates for pay-per-click. It depends however on your profit margin. If it’s large enough then PPC will work nicely, if it tends to be small and you tend to make money on volume instead then probably not. So, you’d have to decide how much you’re comfortable with each order placed through PPC costing you. For example, if you paid on average $70.00 in advertising for every one order you got through PPC would that still allow you a very reasonable profit. You’d then target your PPC campaign to spend $70 or less per order.The basic idea is that you need to make more than you spend.

How Do I Measure PPC Success?

The way you measure what people are buying is by putting some tracking code on the thank you page of your site’s order form or lead generation form. Google then tracks the conversions. So for example you may get 100 clicks to your site from your PPC ads, and each click costs you .70 cents. So, say that for every 100 clicks you get about 1 sale (which is tracked when someone orders). So 100 clicks cost you about $70.00. And so for that $70 you have net 1 sale in our example.

$70 dollars is just an example though. One of the company’s I manage a PPC campaign for has a $50 dollar limit, so we shoot to make it below that. That is the CPC or average "cost per conversion". And that’s a pretty realistic one.

What Should I Expect in the First Month of Doing PPC?

The first month of PPC advertising is usually a trial period to see how well things work. If it’s working it can work great. For example if your company services a major metro area and gets 50  to 100 leads a month, and then you may be perfectly happy spending $50 per lead. If you’re a national or international company then you could stand to get much more traffic because you have a much larger geographic area you can target.

For your PPC campaign you don’t have to target just one metro area but as many as you want. Then you can set whatever budget limit you want. For example you can limit to your budget to spending only $50 a day on ads, and you’d never go over that. However if those clicks are profitable and you’re recouping the money, then we can raise that limit and get more clicks. As long as you’re always recouping the money. If your business is seasonal that will be reflected in the amount of traffic from PPC too.

What’s a Good Starting Budget for PPC?

I don’t recommend you start with anything less than a $1,000.00 ad budget for a month because you need enough clicks to optimize the campaign and get it rolling. If you’re using a PPC management service like I provide then in the first month there is usually a setup fee which includes setting up the campaign with 100s of target keyword phrases, and creating ads to test. Each month there is also a management fee for the ad budget which includes the ongoing optimization of the campaign, testing, working at lowering your cost per click, and reporting.

So here’s a realistic example break down of minimum costs you might have with a $1000 a month budget:
Month 1: $1000 ad budget + $300 campaign setup + $300 campaign management (30%).
Month 2: $1000 ad budget + $300 campaign management (30%).
Month 3: $1000 ad budget + $300 campaign management (30%).
Month 4: $1000 ad budget + $300 campaign management (30%).
Etc…

When your PPC campaign is profitable you’ll probably raise your budget to meet demand and make more money.

If you’re new to PPC I hope this information helps you make a smarter decision about using PPC. Feel free to leave your comments below or contact me with questions.

Here’s how I like to answer it:

Yes, SEO does work. Here’s why.

Google and any search engine is looking for the best site to rank for your particular target keyword phrase. When you understand how Google chooses the best site you can then manipulate your site to take advantage of that. You accomplish this by doing two things:

1. You make changes to your site to help clarify what your site and pages are about, and
2. you make changes to other sites. With other sites, you’re creating links that link to your site—because every link to your site is a vote for your site.

When you’ve got both clarity and votes, and do so without trying to trick or cheat the search engines, then you’ve got effective SEO.

In order of value:

Social Media Channels

1. Forums
2. Blogs
3. Social Networks
4. Social Bookmarking
5. Social News Sites

Non-Social (Direct) Media Channels

1. Your Dedicated Mailing List
2. Joint Ventures
3. Squeeze Pages
4. Banner Marketing
5. Polls
6. Pay Per Click Advertising
7. Co-Registration

At MaryEllen’s company they may not do much or any search engine optimization (SEO), however mentally add SEO to the list above because for many businesses it’s a huge profit generator and a relatively small expense.

Here’s another perspective offered up by eMarketer.com recently:

Original article: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007131

Also, in a recent seminar on Twitter by the highly respected MarketingExperiments.com (one of my favorite haunts) a researcher in the company reported that Dell was one of the few and only companies actually making profit from Twitter. Dell sells refurbished computer equipment through their Twitter channel.

Keep that in mind when considering doing social media–just because there’s a buzz about it and it seems like everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean it will be profitable. If you have a small business budget and limited time I recommend you consider hitting Mary Ellen’s list of non-social media channels first. Making social networks profitable can not only be difficult and time consuming but expensive. 

I’ll give you one social media channel exception to consider though. That is having a blog to assist with list building, and even sales. Here’s why.

If you can create a great blog and keep it updated weekly you will be

1. regularly generating and growing new content which gives you better chances of ranking in search engines,
2. by social bookmarking and spreading your blog posts around the Internet you can pull in traffic, this traffic doesn’t typically sell immediately, however you can use it to build an email list of subscribers and these subscribers can become loyal followers and customers.

While there are other great reasons to maintain a blog which I’ll talk about on this blog, these reasons above will generate traffic and can lead to sales.

I’m always curious to know what works for you, so I invite you to share you’re own biggest online marketing channel successes below…

"Say you have a site and it ranks very high in natural search. If you revise the site creatively, but keep the content, but it’s reorganized, will you maintain your ranking? In other words, what does changing your site creatively do to your ranking?"

The bottom line is once you’re doing SEO and you’ve earned some search engine rankings then any further changes to the site must be considered from the SEO standpoint. However, some things are pretty safe and continuing to develop and grow the site is never a bad thing–you must continue to develop your site.

What is generally pretty safe to do without causing SEO problems is:

• adding or modifying images/graphics,
• adding new copy,
• adding new pages

Don’t sweat this stuff above.

What can cause SEO problems is:

• removing copy,
• revising copy completely,
• removing pages,
• changing page file names,
• changing the site architecture (if your site has a single tier directory architecture then no big deal here)
• duplicating existing content

Anything that could cause a search engine to either lose track of an existing page, or assess a page as being less strongly centered around a keyword phrase is potentially bad for seo. Removing and changing content can certainly cause this problem and should be done carefully.

The Simple SEO Road Map

1. Always start with keyword phrase research and on-page optimization of your home page. What this means is find the one to 3 keyword phrases which are most searched for in your niche and that incorporate the name of the nearest largest city or metro area. Then optimize your site with this keyword putting special emphasis on your homepage.
    
2. Next carry out a thorough link building campaign generating links to your site from blogs, articles, online social bookmarking sites, website directories, and even other local business websites. This will generate hundreds and sometimes thousands of links into your site. Make sure the links to your site contain your target keyword phrase. Remember, every link to your home page  is considered by search engines a vote for your site.
    
3. Get your site listed in the major online local directories, and yellow pages, such as Google Local, and Yelp.com. This will help your site appear in geographical search results, generate quality links to your site, and traffic.
    
4. If your product or service has a medium to large profit margin or a long and profitable lifetime value then consider pay-per-click advertising, particularly Google Adwords. You’ll want to setup a campaign and have a minimum budget of $1000 a month. The goal with PPC should be to spend some and make much more. If you’re spending and not recouping the costs then your PPC campaign needs optimization, your profit margins are too small, or it may simply be that PPC isn’t right for you. When it works however, boy does it work well!
    
5. After PPC consider a professional social media marketing campaign. This can be as simple as blogging and social bookmarking, to community building and viral video product. Some of this you can do yourself, but if you want a full blown campaign be ready to get some help. You can easily spend 10 hours a week just working your social media campaign. Once it’s rolling though it can bring new and residual business for years to come.
    
6. Eh? Let me know below if you have an idea of where you’d take it from here, or if you feel there’s a strategy that fits into this list that has worked great for your business.

It’s important to note that throughout all these campaigns you should be measuring and monitoring your results. Be sure to track your search engine optimization effort by reviewing your target keyword rankings monthly, and reviewing the amount and source of incoming traffic to your site from search engines and social media outlets, this will tell you how well your efforts are working and what if any adjustments may need to be made. 

SEO isn’t a one shot deal, and there are many different approaches, though good solid rankings can last a long time. Ongoing maintenance and strategy is strongly recommended so that you preserve the rankings you earn and strengthen them over time.

The tagline, for example Nike’s famous "Just do it…", has been in use for decades. There’s a draw to having a snappy phrase to set beneath your company logo, and let’s face it, tag lines sound and seem cool. The truth however is that the great majority of businesses don’t need taglines and should not be using them, especially online. Let me give you a quick example why.

Yes, this is precisely what many companies are communicating to their potential customers with their own company tag line or slogan… are you one of them?

Here’s an example why…

Imagine that your company is called "Carlile Industries" (just a random example), and someone who has never heard of your company arrives at your site. They see your logo at the top of your site that says "Carlile Industries” and they see to the right a nice photo of your office building surrounded by trees and a beautiful blue sky, and just beneath your logo they see your tagline. It reads: "Helping Companies Find Solutions".

Research by the Web heuristics group UIE found that on the Web you can give someone 5 seconds to understand what your company uniquely does and and what services your company provides. If it takes longer than 5 seconds for a visitor to "get it" then you can assume they will loses interest.

Now imagine you’ve come to this Carlile Industries Web site above and you’ve had 5 seconds to read the header at the top of the site; do you know what this company does?

Of course not! You have no idea. Something about solutions… and you know they have a nice office building. The unfortunate reality is that too many Web sites do just this–or worse even less. They don’t communicate clearly and thoroughly what they uniquely do and what benefits they provide to the customer. So, the visitor is left guessing, and more often than not will find another site to visit—maybe your competitor’s instead.

One way to measure how many people may be running from your home page screaming is to look at a Web site log reporting metric called a "bounce rate". In my experience if your home page has a bounce rate of over 50% then your benefits copy on your home page either isn’t resonating with your visitors, or worse it doesn’t exist!

If taglines suck why do companies like Nike use them?

This is a good question which should be asked more often. Taglines are used with already known brand names to help renew and reinforce the brand’s style and message. Usually they are used in quick visual 30 second TV media spots—and they are designed to be short and memorable. Some companies do manage to squeeze what makes them standout in a few words—but these are the minority, and chances are your company is more complex than “Pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free”.

Give up the tagline!

Instead of a tagline what you need to communicate is something that may take one or two, and sometimes 3 sentences, but that clearly states what your company does that is different than your competitor’s company, and what benefits your customers get by working with your company. (In Web marketing parlance we often call this a UVP or Unique Value Proposition.) Often those benefits are derived from your unique differences. Be as specific as possible and avoid abstract words and concepts. Backup claims with real data.

One final tip: it’s sometime helpful to discover your company’s most compelling benefits by answering this question: what is that my customers say they love about my company?

Discovering what is truly unique about your company can take some thought, some time and some hard work, but once you can communicate this, you are communicating what your Web site visitors really need and WANT to know. That is why they should choose your company over company "X" down the street! If you don’t tell them nobody will.