small business

Trusting small business over big business shouldn’t be a stretch for anyone. There are a number of good reasons:

1. Resposibility - when you deal with a small business, there’s nowhere for them to hide. In most occasions, you either are dealing with the owner or are only one person away from the owner. The buck stops there.

With big business, you are often many layers of people and management away from the owner if there even is an owner. We’ve seen plenty of examples in the media of large corporations committing all kinds of unethical acts and the government has spent billions just trying to figure out who to blame.

The short answer? No. Google Page Rank gets bandied about quite a bit by people who really don’t know anything about SEO but want to pretend they do.

Google Page Rank is really all about trust. Google looks at a number of factors when anointing web sites with Page Rank but none of them have much to do with Search Engine Optimization.

Mostly, Google looks at how long your web site has been around. Their theory is that the longer your web site has been around, the more likely you are a going concern that isn’t going to shut down next week.

I was amazed by how many of the booths at the Business After Hours were really badly set up. The most basic tenets of trade show booth design were completely ignored by most of the small and mid-sized businesses there. The interesting thing is, most of them made the same mistakes that small businesses make on all their marketing materials, including websites.

One of the things that good marketing materials (including websites and show booths) should do is weed out the people you don’t want to talk to. How many times have you been at a show and watched people go by because you were talking to someone that turned out to be a waste of your time? Don’t put the name of your company at the top of your show panel.