if you hop right off the porch to play with those big dogs.

“But I hired a ‘big dog’ SEO firm to make my stand out and compete with the geeks in my market niche.”

More power to you. In actuality, unfortunately, you probably just hired a teenager from India with an internet connection in his parents’ house. Most small start ups cannot come close to affording a major SEO firm. They charge corporate-level premiums to be able to access their services.

Everyone else in the SEO world is practically working out of their garage in comparison.

Scared yet? You don’t have to be as long as you are spreading your marketing around to the non-search engine traffic you should be getting.

Writing articles and syndicating them in your market is a direct traffic strategy that has nothing to do with search engines. Except that search engines find your site through those links as well. But you should be doing it solely for DIRECT TRAFFIC from readers on other sites and taking the search engine traffic boost as mere icing on the cake.

You see, as people spam the search engines, they must adjust how they rank sites in order to compensate. This means a lot of good sites take a hit when Google changes the way it ranks sites.

You could have done everything completely on the up and up and gotten dropped in the engines because they made a new rule that everyone who registers their domains only for one year is a possible spammer. There goes your legit site. Hope you weren’t planning on search engine traffic for your SOLE source of traffic.

Can you see how dangerous it is to get bitten by the search engine bug? YES you can propel your overnight from a profitless dead zone to a glamorous profit machine with one top ranking.

Of course that is possible. It is not likely.

People who are turning their small online businesses into success stories are doing one thing across the board: Conducting a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes search engines along with a good mix of other non-search engine marketing such as reciprocal and non-reciprocal linking tactics too numerous to mention here.

If you want long-term success online, you must be willing to look past all the sleeze merchants selling you dreams of riches through search engine marketing.

Search engines care about one thing: Their own hides. You should care more about your hide than anything else and use a well-planned, disciplined marketing strategy that puts search engines in their place. Not in the epicenter of your marketing campaign, but just another tool in your toolbox for bringing in targeted traffic.

Do this, and you will escape the fate of thousands of startups this year who will realize too late that they hung their hopes on the wrong marketing strategy as their engine for profits.
Jack Humphrey explains his proven marketing strategies in the all new Power Linking 2005 at power-linking-profits.com Jack is proudly NOT a “search engine expert.”