According to new data released by the e-tailing group and PowerReviews, nearly two-thirds of online shoppers now spend a significant amount of time reading consumer reviews before making a purchase. Dubbed "social researchers," these shoppers rely on advice and feedback from others to help them decide which products or services to buy. 86% claim these reviews are "extremely important" to their buying decisions.

That should be a powerful message to retailers. While we've always known consumers look at marketing messages with skepticism, the growth of consumer generated content online has now given shoppers a nearly endless supply of unbiased information about every product under the sun. Spend all the time and money you want on your marketing message...but know that it might be completely ignored.

So what's a small business marketer to do? Well, you can start by giving the people want they want. Access to customer reviews. Adding consumer review capabilities to an e-commerce site isn't generally a difficult task. In fact, even if it will cost you some time and money in development, the pay-off in terms of increased time on site and conversions can be well worth the investment.

As a shopper who falls into the "social researchers" category myself, I can't even tell you how much time I spend reading product reviews. It's one thing to get the specs on how large or small something is, or to read about what material was used to make it. It's an entirely different thing to hear someone else tell you how horrible it was to put together, or how well it stood up to hard-core usage.

In the world of online retail, the only way to "handle" the merchandise is through the words of total strangers. Give those strangers a voice and your customers will walk away from their shopping experience feeling like you have nothing to hide. Even better, give those strangers a voice and they may make the sale for you.

Of course don't discount the other benefits of adding consumer reviews to your web site. Apart from working as a sales and information tool, customer reviews can also do a great job of helping you target the keyword long tail.

After all, one of the most common frustrations I hear from small businesses who run e-tail sites is how difficult it is to generate keyword rich content for their product pages. Sites that integrate customer reviews can find themselves swimming in keyword rich reviews. An added bonus is those reviews tend to focus on the words customers use to describe your products rather than the words your marketing team may have pushed. Keyword rich content that's highly targeted to the words and phrases your customers use and that didn't cost you a thing?

How could you go wrong?

This is the point at which at least a dozen readers are shaking their heads and thinking "but what if they write bad things about us?"

That means this is the point where I respond to say "who cares?"

No company has ever sold a product that made every last customer completely and unequivocally happy. It simply hasn't happened. Chances are good your company won't be the first.

People realize there's always at least one person who will find fault with a product, no matter how wonderful that product is. In fact, the occasional negative review can actually lend credibility to your products. It's a lot easier to believe reviews are un tampered with if the occasional criticism shows up. You also shouldn't overlook the benefit of negative reviews when it comes to improving your products. After all, if you don't know what people dislike about them, how can you make them better?

The new data from the PowerReviews report simply adds to what many businesses already know. Consumer reviews are a powerful tool, both for bringing traffic in and for converting them once they're there. What are you doing to leverage this technology?

"Chinese Wall - The ethical (not physical) barrier between different divisions of a financial (or other) institution to avoid conflict of interest..."

- Investopedia.com

"While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results."

- Google's Webmaster Help Center FAQ

"NO pay for inclusion, and a complete separation of the search index part from the money part."

- Google Chief Engineer Craig Neville-Manning, Search Engine Strategies 2004

The good people at Google have long maintained that there is a Chinese Wall between paid search results and organic results ? that is, the department responsible for advertising is completely separate from the department responsible for organic search engine placement. The company insists that Google Adwords is a completely separate entity than the Google search engine, and never the twain shall meet. This all sounds very good, in theory. But do they live up to this ideal in practice?

You don't hear Google talking much about Chinese Walls these days. This is certainly in part because they have had great difficulty gaining traction in the literal and very competitive Chinese market (headlines such as "Google Hits Chinese Wall" or even "Google Advance Halted at Great Wall of China" were commonplace). But might there be other, more nefarious reasons? Is there a reason why we hear less and less from Google about the virtual wall that separates paid search results from organic search engine placement?

What Is Google Really Doing for Its Big Spenders?

It has long been rumored that Google will offer technical assistance in achieving better organic search engine placement to those who spend more for paid search results. I know for certain that these rumors are true in at least two instances. In fact, I actually have the minutes from one of these technical assistance meetings after the company met with Google engineers. While the identity of these two companies is irrelevant, suffice to say that they are companies that you have almost certainly heard of and that they spend millions of dollars on paid search words each year.

To be fair, based on the meeting minutes I have, the advice that the engineers gave to the company does not include anything groundbreaking. It is mostly common sense advice that a good search engine optimization firm already knows about organic search engine placement and other issues, and much of it is already covered in the publicly-available Google Webmaster Guidelines. This, however, is beside the point. Google has obviously decided that it must offer perks to its big paid search spenders to keep them happy (or rather, happy enough to not pull their advertising). Clearly, one of these perks is access to Google engineers and the ability to glean information about organic search engine placement, a luxury that smaller advertisers do not enjoy.

Organic Search Engine Placement for Sale ? The New Google Reality?

From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense, of course. Big-dollar advertisers make up the bulk of Google's revenue for paid search, and any intelligent business will take whatever steps they deem necessary to hold on to their most valuable customers. This is why larger advertisers already have a designated account representative from Google. I am willing to bet that this perk was not Google's idea. Rather, it almost certainly stemmed from the sense of entitlement that those spending large sums on paid search felt and the fact that technical help with their organic search engine placement is what they demanded.

Unfortunately, this reality leaves an advertiser with a small budget for paid search at a disadvantage. If Google is willing to offer this secret perk to larger advertisers now, what might they do in the future? Offer price breaks to larger paid search spenders? Increase the minimum monthly spend to squeeze out smaller companies and please the larger ones? It certainly has the potential to become a slippery slope, and I am interested to see where it goes next.

One final point ? since Google is willing to give advice about organic search engine placement to companies that spend a great deal of money on Google advertising, is the phrase "While Google never sells better ranking in our search results..." truly accurate? I suppose this is open for interpretation. It may be technically true, but offering advice regarding organic search engine placement straight from the horse's mouth in exchange for millions of dollars in money for paid search results isn't far from selling rankings, in my opinion.

Conclusion

Please don't get me wrong ? I still believe that Google is the best search engine out there, I greatly admire the way that they are continually reinventing themselves, and I think they are still the target for those seeking the most benefit from organic search engine placement. They have the folks in Redmond constantly guessing and always three steps behind, and I love how they have started from humble beginnings to take on one of the biggest corporations in the world (and consistently win). I simply believe that they have played the underdog, anti-corporate card for too long, and that even if it has not outlived its usefulness, it has outlived its truthfulness. Google is now a huge multinational corporation that answers to its shareholders. To pretend anything otherwise is silly, but it seems that, for now at least, the charade will continue.

Google's overriding principle, one that they have been happy to espouse to the media, has long been "Don't Be Evil." Whether they still adhere to this principle since they have become a public company is another question that is open for interpretation. If you are a smaller advertiser and feel that Google's favoritism toward larger paid search customers regarding organic search engine placement is evil, it probably seems as though the "Don't Be Evil" principle no longer applies. You may conclude that the principles of "Don't Be Evil" and "Keep Shareholders Happy" are mutually incompatible, and that the latter has gained the upper hand.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.

Feed subscribers are quite possibly your most loyal readers therefore it's important to grow your subscriber community as much as possible. With Google's purchase of FeedBurner as well as their own proprietary subscriber calculating technology don't be surprised to see feed subscribers becoming a variable in Google's ranking algorithm. In today's post we'll talk about how to increase your feed subscribers with some very simple tips.

1. Prominent, Accessible and Ease of Use: Make your subscription buttons available on all pages and place them above the fold. Using technology like FeedBurner you can get a sense of your subscribers' favorite feed services and begin making subscribing to those services even easier.
   
2. Repeat in Footer: Something that has worked well for me is adding the subscription option to the footer of each individual post. What this does is remind visitors to subscribe after reading one of my posts.
   
3. Subscribe by Email: Depending on what industry you're in adding an option to subscribe by email can dramatically increase your subscribers. Many authors of travel sites have noticed that email is even more popular than feed readers.
   
4. Add Option in Emails: In FeedBurner you can also publicize your feed's content by placing a widget in outgoing emails. Through this widget people can also subscribe to your feed.
   
   
    

Increasing Feed Subscribers: Additional Resources

• The Blog Studio: How to Increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 Days
• Pro Blogger: 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
• Daily SEO Blog: Increase the number of subscribers to your blog overnight
• Copy Blogger: 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Rob Malon: Decrease Bounce Rate - Increase Subscribers and Visit Time
• Internet Marketing Students: How To Increase Blog Subscribers
• Jimmy Thakkar: Techniques to increase subscribers for BLOG
• Ades Blog: Increase your RSS subscriber count with FeedSmith
• Garry Conn: How To Increase RSS Feedburner Subscribers
• Jonh TP: Tips To Increase Your Blog Subscribers

As businesses get more and more obsessed with building community and leveraging Web 2.0 techniques, a lot of small businesses are finding themselves wondering if they can afford to get into the game. What these small businesses often miss is the fact that they don't need to invest a ton of time and money into fancy new technologies. Sometimes, it's about finding what already exists and leveraging it for your brand. That's something I've noticed more and more companies doing with Flickr, my favorite social media site.

Mack Collier's post over at The Viral Garden today reminded me of a great example of a company using Flickr to build community and to promote a "soft-sell."

I'd seen mention of the Georgia Aquarium using Flickr before, but hadn't had a chance to do much digging into how they setup their group. Mack explains:

The Georgia Aquarium noticed that visitors had taken a ton of stunning photos of the displays at the aquarium and had posted them on Flickr. So the Georgia Aquarium created a Flickr group, and invited members to join the group and post their pictures of the aquarium's exhibits!

It's a great idea, one I've been playing around with myself in a few different ways.

Mack points to Josh Hallett's post about receiving an invite to join the Georgia Aquarium Flickr group. Josh joined the group and then wrote a great post using the campaign as an example of starting small with social media. John points out that small businesses (and even large ones) often avoid getting involved with social media because they're just not sure how to leverage tools like blogs and widgets. He explains that for these businesses, the best way to test the water can be to simply take advantage of the social media tools and networks that already exist.

In his post, Josh shares the Flickr mail he received from the Georgia Aquarium team asking him to join their Flickr group. (They ran a search for photos tagged with Georgia Aquarium and then sent messages inviting those users to join the newly created Georgia Aquarium group on Flickr.) He writes:

Back in October I received the following e-mail invite via Flickr. Of course I joined the group, and as of today there are 89 members with close to 400 photos. Why only 400? The aquarium has asked members to submit their best five photos. I don' agree with that entirely, but I can see their point.

The Flickr group does include messages from moderators asking users to limit their uploads to their five favorite pictures. I would imagine the limit was put in place to help keep any one member from dominating the feed. Josh explains that the Georgia Aquarium is using the photo feed on their newly redesigned web site.

The new site includes a feature called "International Adventures" that pulls from the Flickr feed and uses a Google Maps mashup to map visitors to the aquarium from around the world. Site visitors can zoom in and click on a visitor based on where they live to view the pictures they've submitted of the aquarium. So far, the group has nearly 90 members from the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Central America and South America.

It's a great example of a company working to build community around their product. After all, it doesn't take long to setup a Flickr group and with so many mashups now available, it also wouldn't have been too difficult to integrate those photos into the site.

Georgia Aquarium's use of Flickr is a great reminder of how simple it can be for a small business with a limited budget to launch a social media campaign. The key in this case is simply to make it more about empowering your visitors to share their experiences than about making a hard sale. (In fact, selling or marketing your products is against the Flickr TOS, so it's essential you read the Flickr community guidelines and use common sense to keep from crossing the line.)

Josh clearly had his common sense social media marketing hat on as he wrote his post though, because he's got some great suggestions for the Georgia Aquarium team on continuing to leverage the group. He offers up ideas as simple as creating a calendar using the 12 most popular photos to hosting a special after hours event for Flickr group members to come in and take new shots for the site group. After all, it's about adding value to the community to encourage them to add value for you, right?

I've always been a baby steps kind of guy when it comes to SEO. According to Google, they, and probably other engines too, look at over 200 different signals when it comes to analyzing pages for rankings. To attempt to optimize each of these signals perfectly would require a significant amount of work and continuous tweaking in order to find the "perfect" combination. Or let me put it another way, the task of creating the perfectly optimized page is darn near impossible.

Some of these "signals" that the search engines analyze are on the page, some are site-wide, and others are entirely off the page where the SEO has no absolute control, if any at all. The goal of the SEO however, is to try to make all of these things work together. They must leverage those things they do have control over, to complement and/or influence those things they have no control over. The idea then, is to create a synergy with the whole that truly is more than the sum of its parts.

I once heard it said about public speaking that if you have to write out your speech word for word then you don't know your material well enough. But if you can't write out your speech word for word then you still probably don't know your material well enough. The meaning here, in case you missed it, is that you shouldn't need to write out what you'll say but you need to be able to.

While looking at every last minute detail of SEO is advantageous, it is effective only to a point. One can't get mired into trying to get every last little detail right all of the time. To do so often comes at the expense other important things. Instead of focusing on the big picture, you're mired in the little things that don't provide the return you may have imagined.

Time vs. benefit

One of the big issues of obsessing over every last detail is the time / benefit ratio. Such minute obsessions rarely pay themselves back with appropriate dividends. Why? Because while search engines look at over 200 signals, I'd say that if you get any 50 of them right or close to right, you're going to be doing significantly well. Don't quote me on that, I don't know my material well enough, so I 'm just making an educated guess.

The key is to learn which signals provide the greatest benefit for the least amount of time involved. For the first five or so, this is fairly easy.

Title Tags probably provide the biggest time to benefit ratio. While you should consider your title tags carefully, it still doesn't require a whole lot of time to craft a 65 character title. If you know what the focus of any given page is then you make sure your title contains those "key words" along with other enticing information for the visitor.

Headings are another easy thing to utilize that can provide the search engines some strong signals as to the overall content of your page. While it isn't always necessary, I strongly recommend using proper heading tags and be sure to keep all your headings organized as you would an outline for a term paper. In other words there should only be one H1 tag and your H3 should not supersede your first H2. Keep things in proper hierarchal context and you'll do fine.

Content takes time, but like the title tag, it is hugely important. Without content, the search engines don't know what your page is really about, only what others say (see the Links below) about it. There is no magic number of words or keyword usage ratio that you should have to focus on, but you do need to write using your keywords and make sure the content is valuable for your site visitors.

Links allow the search engines to know not just what you say your pages are about but what others say about them. In very crude terms, more links mean your page is more valuable and links that reinforce your page topic tells the engines that your page is a valuable resource for that topic. In many cases the search engines place more weight on what other sites are saying via their links to your page, than what you are saying on your page, but both links and on-page content should reinforce each other.

Website architecture also speaks volumes about what pages of your site you feel are more important, or have the best content. A poorly implemented website structure can be one of the fastest ways to inadvertently tell the search engine spiders that they are unwanted. There is no easier way to lose all your site rankings than to screw up your robots.txt file.

This list could go on an on, but the law of diminishing returns starts applying pretty significantly. Is that to say that these are the only things you should focus on with your SEO? Not at all. These are just the first five things that I thought of as important off the top of my head. I'm certain some will disagree with this list or would have put swapped one of my items for something different. My point here wasn't to create an all-important list but to provide some insight as to a few things that should be considered as more valuable in terms of time and benefit.

I also don't mean to suggest that some of the other "signals" much further down the priority list should be ignored. But it is a matter of prioritizing. Get to the important things first, those things which provide the greatest immediate benefit, and then begin focusing on some of the smaller things which do make an impact, just not as great or immediate of one.

Rankings vs. usability

Some consider the rankings vs. usability argument to be akin to the old chicken or the egg debate. Without rankings then you won't get visitors anyway so who cares about usability? But if you focus solely on rankings then you'll get traffic that doesn't convert.

Let me put this into a slightly different perspective. Without good usability you won't be able to convert near the number of visitors that you should be able to. But without search engine rankings you can still get a whole mess of traffic, just from alternate sources. So which is better? Usability hands down.

Yeah, everybody wants to rank well, but we also have to realize there is life outside of the search engines. In fact, sometimes you have to wonder how companies ever got customers before the search engines existed. They did, of course. Just like businesses got customers before radio, TV, magazine and billboard advertising. Search rankings are just one more way to get exposure, not the only way.

But yeah, I get it. Search engine rankings are extremely powerful and I don't mean to suggest that we neglect that whatsoever. Just don't put all your eggs (or chickens) in one basket! Rankings are fluid and search engines make changes. If you rely solely on rankings then you're essentially at the mercy of the search engines. I don't know about you, but I don't want my livelihood to be at the mercy of any one thing that I largely cannot control.

But let's go back to usability. If you have multiple streams of traffic, you need to be sure that you are maximizing that potential. Finding even more streams of traffic is all well and good, but why not focus on getting more out of the traffic you already have. Converting traffic to paying customers is often times far easier than going out and finding another traffic stream. Both will increase your sales, but focusing on usability is far less expensive. Not to mention longer lasting. Traffic streams dry up, but good usability is simply good for business.

Baby steps vs. the big picture

As I said earlier, SEO is largely about baby steps. It's nearly impossible to create a perfect SEOed page all at once. But, over time, you can create a very near perfectly performing web page. Notice here I said "performing". Not all the 200 signals need to be perfect for a page to perform strongly. But how do you get a strong performing web page? By taking just one step at a time, analyzing what's been done, the effect of those changes and then determining what should be done next.

But never neglect the big picture. I'm almost certain that the perfectly SEOed page is one that is far from perfect from the usability side of things. And that's a bad thing. Every baby step you take toward creating a better optimized page should not be a step away from better usability. This means that many of the 200 signals being analyzed should never be optimized for at all. If a change toward SEO harms usability, then you may want to rethink it. On the other hand, if a step toward usability harms SEO, well, that's not always so bad.

There are a lot of factors that are in play in how a website performs at achieving its goals. Knowing and understanding those factors is important, but not everything is worth equal time and consideration. Like giving a speech, you don't need to obsess over every little SEO detail. It's the big picture that is far more important. But you do need to be able to. If you can't, you probably just don't know your material well enough yet.