(Source) Consider setting up a second profile with an alias known only to your closest confidantes. Then dump all the good stuff there. (Sorry, “Philip McGroin” is already taken.)

This is probably the best advice I’ve ever heard regarding Facebook. Most people use Facebook to connect with their friends, but you can use it for business networking too. I would not do both through the same profile.

If you plan to use Facebook for business, don’t put those college photos of you drinking at that party up there. And don’t let your guard down. You could be putting more at risk than a simple dig on your reputation. Your entire reputation (and your business) could be at stake. If you really want to show your wild and crazy side, set up a profile for your personal shenanigans and let it all hang out there. Use your Facebook business profile only for networking with others who share similar interests within your niche. I promise, you’ll be glad you did it this way.

Kalena Jordan of Ask Kalena was recently asked this question:

Why do older unoptimized sites sometimes rank better than younger optimized ones?

It’s a good question and I like the way she answered it. I’m going to give my own answer now even though she and I are in agreement.

The search engines have well over 100 criteria that they judge when deciding which sites rank for specific keyword phrases. The algorithms are such that no criteria is weighted so heavily that it dominates all other criteria. On-page optimization is just one ranking factor. Other ranking factors that influence where websites fall in the line up include:

• Age of the domain
• Relevance of inbound links to the domain
• Quality of inbound links to the domain
• Server neighborhood of the domain
• Registration history and future of the domain
• Web page load time
• Code to text ratio
• Link attributes and graphic alt tags
• Many, many more

There is more to website optimization than merely choosing the right keywords and placing them a number of times within your content. Internal links are important, site navigation is important, and there are a ton of off site optimization techniques that are looked at. If an older non-optimized site in your niche is outranking you, it is likely because it is doing enough things right that the one ranking factor (on-page optimization) simply isn’t enough to push it down and push you up.

The good news: Over time, if you keep doing enough of the right things, you should be able to bridge the gap.

Find out the 3 essential elements to ranking a web site well in any search engine.

One restaurant owner in Arizona drove to pick up a customer who had been involved in an automobile accident and was in danger of missing his reservation. Now that’s customer service! And it got such word of mouth buzz that the restaurant attracted press stories - and not just in its home town.

The story is the perfect illustration of how exceptional service can lead to word of mouth buzz. It’s uncommon and this type of service doesn’t happen every day, which is what makes it worth talking about. And if you perform that kind of service for your customers then you’ll be talked about too.

Never deny the power of word of mouth advertising. It’s cheap advertising, but by cheap I don’t mean non-valuable. The value is immeasurable. It’s inexpensive because you don’t have to shell out dollars and hope it works. It is costly, however, because exceptional service requires some level of risk that must be managed. Still, it’s worth every ounce of it. There is no substitute for word of mouth buzz, even for a small business.

In the last couple of years that has been a growing trend called microblogging. Essentially, microblogging is throwing up a sentence or two in short bursts and many microbloggers do this several times a day. A lot of them claim it is good for business and have hundreds or thousands of people following them on the popular microblogging sites. Is it worth it?

Well, let me just list the top microblogging sites:

• Twitter (the most popular of all)
• FriendFeed
• Plurk
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Identi.ca
• Kwippy

The last two on this list - Identi.ca and Kwippy - are the two newest microblogging sites to the list. The point behind these sites is to allow social media marketers and others who own websites the opportunity to market themselves in short bursts throughout the day.

While I don’t do any microblogging myself, I do see where it can be helpful. But microblogging is best done as an adjunct to regular blogging, not as a replacement. Most of these sites have word limits (Twitter’s like 140 words, or something) and you can’t write messages longer than those. That isn’t much space to include a blog post like this one that is full of information. Instead, what it does is allow you to shoot out quick promotions and if you have a lot of products and services to promote, or a lot of clients to promote then microblogging can be a great way to get your quick messages out there for the world to see.

If you like to fish then you understand the importance of bait. You take something that fish like, put it on the end of a hook, and throw your line in the water. When they bite, you snag them and reel them in. Link bait works much the same way.

What you do is create some kind of content that others will find attractive to link to. You are “baiting” their links. But not just any link bait will do. The No. 1 rule for link bait is to make it relevant.

You want the people who link to your site to be people within your niche. They will be people who own websites or blogs about your topic. Your link bait will attract their links and that translates into a higher PageRank and eventually higher rankings for you. Sounds simple, right?

Well, it is simple enough to understand. The hard part is creating the content. You have to predict what people will like, which requires having some understanding of human nature and what people within your industry want. If you can nail that down, you can create some awesome link bait.

Erica DeWolf conducted an informal survey about e-mail marketing preferences among companies to see if they preferred to hire someone to do their e-mail marketing in-house or hire an outside agency to handle their e-mail marketing. With only 18 responses, it’s difficult to get an accurate reading of the results, but there may be enough information here to get a good look at what other businesses want to do with their e-mail marketing.

Erica’s survey doesn’t say what size companies responded to the survey. I suspect that larger businesses would have responded differently to the survey than smaller businesses, but the results are interesting:

60% of the respondents said they currently outsource their e-mail marketing but 50% of the respondents said they’d prefer to keep it in-house. Erica’s survey results don’t say what the crossover is among that 60% and 50% of survey participants (Are they the same people? Is there only a 10% overlap? A 25% overlap? That would be interesting to know).

I would have to slightly disagree with some of Erica’s conclusions, specifically about saving money and branding. It might seem like it will be less expensive to hire someone to manage your e-mail marketing, but that really depends on how much e-mail marketing you do. If you don’t do a lot then it might actually be less expensive to outsource it depending on your agency’s fees. If you hire a full-time campaign manager then you’ll have to pay salary and possibly benefits. You do need to factor perks and benefits into the cost equation of your marketing expense (Do you provide vacation and sick days? Insurance and medical benefits? Other perks? All of those are a part of your expenses so include them in your figuring). You won’t have to pay outside agencies any benefits or provide insurance, which could reduce your expenses.

On branding, an outside agency that specializes in e-mail marketing can be just as adept at taking your branding and including it in your e-mail marketing efforts. A marketing agency that does this full time knows how to work with companies in that manner and can be just as effective as an in-house marketing manager.

When it comes to e-mail marketing, an in-house manager might work for you, but outsourcing can be the best option for some as well. You have to do the research and make that determination for your business.

Talking to some friends the other day I had someone say to me, “Don’t you have to pay to be on page 1 of Google?” My chin dropped.

It dawned on me that the typical user of the Internet who has no interest in running a business online and who may never run a business online has no idea how to get their website ranked in the search engines. They, first off, probably have no interest since they aren’t running a business. I guess that’s just the way it is.

But if you do run a business and you do want to establish a Web presence, the first myth you need to get out of your mind is that you have to pay to be listed in the search engines. You don’t.

We live a pay your way world. You have to pay for all your basic needs - food, shelter, clothing - well, I guess you don’t have to pay for self actualization. But some people do. They have therapists to help them get there. Others just take up yoga.

Online, however, the economy is different. You don’t have to pay to be No. 1. You just have to learn how search engines work and build a website that does all the right things. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. It does take work. Like mowing the lawn. It’s virtually free. You pay for the gas in your mower, but if you do it yourself your only expense is your time. Or you can pay the kid down the block $25 to do it for you.

When it comes to making sure that you achieve respectable rankings for your website, you can do it yourself - if you have the time. Or you can pay someone to guide you. But Google doesn’t need your money.

I must confess: I’ve never given this much thought since I don’t run a lot of contests, but Small Fish Big Money makes a convincing case that e-mail newsletters are better for promoting contests than blog posts are. Is he right?

I know he is right about one thing - newsletters are more personal than blogs. With blogs, you are talking to an entire market, essentially an anonymous mass of individuals. With newsletters you are talking directly to opt-in subscribers, a more captive audience and people who have volunteered to receive your communications. While blogs also have subscribers, they are anonymous subscribers and your blog readers don’t necessarily have to subscribe to be regular readers. It’s just that subscribing makes it easier and more convenient for them to read when they want to read.

But what about contests? Should you promote them through your blog?

Personally, I’d say if you are running a contest you should use every means of communication at your disposal to promote it. That does include your blog, but I think SMBMs point in discussing the topic is to say that on-blog contests, where you run a contest solely through your blog, are risky. I’d have to agree with that.

That said, I have seen some successful on-blog contests, but those contests are generally geared toward a particular marketplace where the goal is to increase a blog’s readership. Give away a gift for the best comment on a blog post, offer a coupon or free service in exchange for the best trackback, or something of that nature. Those are good contests, but they are better contests if you have a meager readership and you are trying to increase it. If you have a large readership then you might turn off the people who are your regular readers.

Another thing to keep in mind with blog contests is that you might get people entering your contest who would never read your blog were it not for the contest. These are people who are not really a part of your target audience. They are there only for the freebie and once the contest is over, they’ll be gone. Do you really want to encourage that behavior?

Before you run a contest through your blog, think about what your goal is first. It is highly likely that your contest might best be announced through your e-mail newsletter then promoted lightly through your blog and social networks. That’s my Small Business Maverick suggestion for the day.

I stumbled across this website called www.dontclick.it. Of course, the concept is intriguing, but the thought crossed my mind, How would this concept affect SEO if it were to roll out across the entire Web?

First, the site is designed entirely in Flash. In order for it to do very well in the search engines at all, Flash would have to move beyond its current state of interest and the search engines would need to capability of crawling them. That’s already happening to some degree. But Google would have to to do better than that in order for Flash sites to be indexed the same way that HTML sites are now. That’s for starters.

Another thing that I think would happen if the entire Web looked this way is meta tags would go out of fashion completely. There’d be no need for them. If the search engines could crawl the Flash files and read the text and images for indexing purposes then there’d be no need for meta tags whatsoever. They’d completely disappear.

The most obvious issues related to search engine spiders would be the links. Since we’re talking about mouseover effects inside of Flash, there might be an issue with the search engines being able to crawl those links - at least at their present stage of development. Google has been known, however, to find solutions for its algorithms based on new developments in design so it is not entirely impossible that Google couldn’t figure that out. And what Google does the other search engines are sure to follow.

Still, the biggest downfall of a Flash-dominated Web would be the interlinking. Would webmasters still want to link out using mouseover links? Today, if you want to leave a website to get to another, you have to click a link and that takes a conscious effort. What about if you simply had to mouseover it?

You could make the mouseover require an action like swiveling the mouse in order to activate the link, or add a timer, but each method has some drawbacks. No matter, there would still be some SEO ramifications to any of these solutions. Would link building still have the same effect that it has today?

I realize some of this may be over the heads of readers who are new to the Web development and are still trying to figure out why linking matters at all. But eventually these questions will have to be answered. I see Flash becoming a more important part of the Web, but just how important remains to be seen. And, of course, like any new development, there will be adjustments. But the SEO part of the equation is one that I find intriguing and am somewhat concerned. Does anyone else share that concern?

Your bounce rate is the number of people who land on your website and don’t click through to another page. Your analytics package should tell you which pages have a high bounce rate. Pay attention to this number because it is a negative and you need to do what you can to reduce the bounce rate.

Instead of looking at your average bounce rate across the entire website, which isn’t very useful, look at the bounce rates for your individual pages. Most websites have high bounce rates (somewhere around 70%-80%), but you don’t have to. You want to get that bounce rate below 50% if possible. Find out what your site visitors are looking for and provide them with information that will help them achieve it.

Bounce rates differ from industry to industry too. Are your site visitors just looking for information or are they looking to buy a product or service. If they are looking to buy something and all you have is information then you’ll get high bounce rates. If they are looking for information and you have products or services to sell then you will have high bounce rates. If either of these is the case then you are likely targeting the wrong keywords and phrases or you are not making the right offerings. It could be a combination of the two. To fix it, do a little deeper analysis of your site visitors’ needs and tweak your web pages to provide that or create new web pages and drive your visitors there.

Your bounce rate is a very important statistic and says a lot about what your visitors really need. It all starts with web development and builds from there.