A lot of websites witnessed dramatic drops in rankings after Google’s Penguin 2.0 update. A smaller company or website with a limited budget needs to find new avenues to achieve higher rankings.
Small websites do not have a large budget for links or for top quality content such as those of large corporate houses and need innovative ways to compete with such giants in the rankings game. In addition, updates such as Penguin have changed the rules and SEOs need to accept that link building strategies need to be changed to restore lost rankings.
Marketers too need to change the way they market their products as well as their websites. Website owners and webmasters need to realize that they need to transform into highly specialized sites with a unique aspect that makes them stand out from the crowd in order to attract search engines and their intended audience.
Here are a few links that can help you move ahead based on your business model. For instance, if you are a business that deals with institutions then you need to turn into their approved vendor. This move will open the doors for linking opportunities. You should visit this link http://blandy.virginia.edu/facilities-use/approved-vendor-list to take advantage of these opportunities. This link leads to the site of the University of Virginia that features a list of approved vendors.
In case you are a female owner of a business and belong to the minority community then you have an added advantage of using links such as http://www.sba8a.com/ can provide a boost to your business. This site allows you to locate woman-owned and minority suppliers all over the country.
Similarly, in case your business operates from Virginia then this link http://www.dmbe.virginia.gov/ can be of great help. It leads to the Department of Minority Business Enterprise.
The above examples lead to trustworthy sites in the eyes of Google and hence you do not need to worry about how Google feels about them. However, you need to locate similar links based on your specific business and then transform it into a unique profile that is best for your own business. This is one sustainable way of pushing forward your small business online in competition with other small businesses as well as goliaths.