My Two Cents Canadian
Long-time reader, first-time contributor.
First of all, whoever "Guest" is has a partial point. It does "cost" to get into search engines. However, the cost doesn't always have to be financial. The cost can be "paid" with time, effort, and goodwill (I'll come back to this a bit later).
There is no "quick fix" for getting a high rank in all search engines, nor should there be. If a company is really serious about its search engine positioning, it should start small and grow outward and upward, just as it would grow offline.
Consider this offline fictitious example:
John owns a consumer electronics store in Anytown, Ontario. John's largest competitor is Best Buy Electronics. Is John going to go after Best Buy Electronics and try to beat Best Buy at its own game by running national ad campaigns, buying hundreds of millions of dollars in products, and hiring thousands of employees? This scenario seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it?
John, like most small business owners, would likely focus on targetting his advertising to his community, perhaps also offering products of a nature that could only be found at his store and not at Best Buy, perhaps offering a unique customer reward program.
As the citizens of Anytown become aware of John's products and his customer service over the next 12-18 months, they in turn tell their friends and neighbours. Some of these friends happen to live in Anytown's neighbouring town, Nextdoorville.
Soon, John has a second store in Nextdoorville, and the citizens of Anytown and Nextdoorville begin seeking out (or searching) John's store for his products and services. Word of mouth continues to spread as time goes on.
In 5 years, John has a chains of stores throughout Ontario.
In 10 years, John has expanded to the Eastern Canadian provinces and Northeastern US states.
In 20 years, John has stores all across North America with plans to enter Europe. And so the story goes, all because John chose not to compete directly with Best Buy but to start small and grow.
Search engines are a form of advertising, whether people accept it as such or not. And like all other types advertising, most companies need to start small and then grow. People need to establish niches, which are ever-decreasing but still available, market to those niches, satisfy those clientele, and then grow from there as those clientele refer you (via hyperlink, which will increase your PageRank, or otherwise) from there.
As far as the argument goes about PageRank negatively affecting a smaller business, to a certain extent it does. However, in most cases a business can and should be able to overcome it by limiting the initial scope of its site to that which it can effectively service. Ma and Pa's Country E-Commerce Business (as someone referred to it) will not likely have taken care of the issues of international shipping, taxation, duties, tariffs, etc. and thus would likely only focus on a relatively small radius from its location of operation. The reason it can't rank up with the Amazons and the Buy.coms of the world initially is simply because it shouldn't.
So how can PageRank be increased without spending money? By spending time on it. Post on message boards such as this one as much as you can, making sure that your site is hyperlinked from the board in a sig. Help out other people. Get local business directory sites to list you. Write some articles on your industry (you're the expert, right?) It'll take time, but if you're serious about your business and not looking for a get-rich-quick answer that you think the search engines can and should provide you by default, then this shouldn't be that difficult a thing to accomplish.
As your reputation grows, so too will your site. Small sites can, and often do, crack into the search engines with relative ease and continue to get stronger as time goes on.
As far as Google's algorithm goes, they never once have made a statement that their algorithm is perfect, and it's going to be erratic from time to time. Personally, I'm willing to live with the mistakes that the Florida changes have brought about for a little while because they will get fixed, and these errors were brought about trying to improve the engine and make it more relevant. Sooner or later (and likely sooner), Google will get their act straightened out and it will be back to business as usual.
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