by Christi on July 21, 2010
Whenever you are looking for content for your website, your business Facebook page, Twitter account or any online presence for your business, keep one thing in mind . . . IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU! And, by the way, it is not about your web designer either. It is about your CUSTOMERS!
What can you give of value to your customers? You may think the video with music or the flashing images are cool, but will your customers? Or, will they just find them irritating and distracting.
When your customers find you, can they find useful information? Can they navigate easily? Can they easily contact you. What is your customer’s experience with your online presence?
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by Christi on July 20, 2010
In case you were thinking that, since you now have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Foursquare account, etc., SEO (search engine optimization) is just taking care of itself, you could be wrong.
SEO is still something that businesses need to give some serious attention.
As an effective online marketing tactic, SEO ranked #1 in this survey from Forbes.
Of course, you do need to include social media in your SEO plan. Using your keywords to get found on Facebook is a great tactic considering that Facebook has overtaken Google search as the most visited site. However, keep in mind that you do not own Facebook or Twitter or any other social media platform. Sometimes, they make decisions that can impact your business that you cannot control. For example, Facebook recently removed the ability for business pages that had less than 10,000 fans to set an FBML page as a landing page for new visitors. Of course, after the screams and outrage of many small businesses on Facebook, they reversed that decision very quickly.
The point is, you should definitely include social media in your SEO plan, but don’t forget about your own website. The one that you own and control. So what are some of the things you can do to enhance the SEO on your website?
- Research your keywords. See what people are searching for that relates to your business. There are lots of free tools available. Just search for “free keyword tools” to see what is available and do the research.
- Remember to go back and do that research on a regular basis as your keywords could change over time as people are using different words to search.
- Select one or two keywords or key phrases for each page on your website.
Now that you have your keywords selected, let’s look at some “on page” SEO tactics:
- Use your keywords in your root domain name if possible. If you already have a domain name that you have been using that does not include your keywords, don’t change your domain just to include them. However, if you are just starting out, go ahead and get a domain that includes your main keyword or keyword phrase.
- Use your keywords in your page title. Each page should have a unique title and that title should contain the keywords or keyword phrase pertinent to that page.
- Use your keywords in your content. Make sure that they occur naturally. Stuffing keywords in will not make sense to your visitors, and it will make you look amateurish.
- Make targeted landing pages with unique keywords/key phrases for each page.
- Create fresh, unique, relevant content on a regular basis.
- Use your keywords in your alt tags.
Now, let’s look at some “off page” SEO tactics:
- Get other relevant sites to link to you. How do you do that? Create great content. This is sometimes called, “link bait” and is a great SEO tactic.
- Use social media to spread the word about your great content. Add useful information to social communities to build a reputation as an expert.
Enhancing your SEO will help your target customers find you. Once they find you, treat them well. Give them the information they are looking for and provide them with easy ways to contact you or to take the next step to becoming your customer. SEO is an important part of your overall business strategy puzzle. Make sure you give it some attention.
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by Christi on July 16, 2010
You may remember reading some great articles on this blog written by Herb Lawrence, director, at the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center at Arkansas State University – Jonesboro. Well, great news – Herb has just started his own blog offering some very valuable information for small businesses. You can find the blog at:
http://www.asbtdc-asu.com
Already, Herb has written some great articles about finance, financial analysis, and market research for small businesses and will be adding some more articles a few times a week that can really help your small business.
Hope you’ll go on over and visit the ASBTDC-ASU blog today!
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by Christi on June 29, 2010
Remember back in the old days when almost all websites were static and you paid a developer not only to create the site but for all changes made to the site as well? Businesses were tied to their web designer/developer at the hip and often were at the designer’s mercy. Well those days are gone. At least, in most cases. Sure there are times when a static website is all that is needed, but not very often.
Enter, the Content Management System (CMS). CMS is designed to allow website owners to easily change and maintain their site without knowledge of any programming language. Changes can be made from any computer with an internet connection and a web browser. Making changes in most cases is as easy as making changes to a Word document. There is no need to call or pay a web developer to make changes or maintain your site.
However, setting up a CMS can be a bit complicated up front so you will probably want to hire someone to do the initial setup and this is where things could get tricky. Some developers create proprietary CMS so you can still make changes easily, but you are also still tied to the developer for any updates to the CMS or any additional functionality such as shopping carts, forms or social media integration.
Don’t worry though, there is another option. Open source CMS is available and there are some really great open source options. The top three open source options are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. What are some advantages to using an open source CMS?
- No licensing fee – open source options are available to download for free.
- You can contract with any open source CMS developer to create your site and if, for some reason, something happens to them someone else can easily take over without having to learn a proprietary system.
- Open source CMS makes it easy to implement social media and other web 2.0 integration.
- SEO is enhanced because the coding is clean and adding content is easy.
The wider the distribution of an open source CMS means a larger user base and user community. The community of people work on the software, patch bugs, create add-ons for greater functionality, create new and better versions and more. And, the best part is you get all that benefit for free!
So what are some of the disadvantages of open source CMS?
- Open source CMS requires more specific hosting. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal work best in an Apache environment and require PHP and MySQL.
- Initial implementation costs may be higher. While open source CMS is free to download, the initial setup and configuration is more complicated that static HTML. However, in most cases, the savings of being able to update and maintain your site will more than make up for the initial setup cost.
While there are a lot of great open CMS options available, for now, you might want to stick to those top three – Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. They all have strong communities built around them. They all make regular updates to add greater functionality and all have extensive plugin/extension/add-on libraries.
Those old days are long gone and the future looks more exciting than ever for business using the powerful reach of the internet to attract new customers and grow their business!
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by Christi on June 23, 2010
Is that your web strategy? All your customers are on the web so you should be too, right?
Well, there may be a little more to it than that. A website should be a complementary component in your overall business strategy. Before you even think about color or design you should ask yourself a few questions:
- What product or service are you selling?
- Who are your customers?
- Who are your competitors?
- What is your competitive advantage?
- Where would you like to be in 5 years?
How can a website help you with your overall business strategy? If you don’t really have a plan going in, a website may not really help you that much! A website should help you showcase your strengths and should support your business strategy. A website should be designed to help you reach your target audience and turn them into customers.
Building your web strategy as a part of your overall business strategy is the first step to building any kind of website. We’ll be looking at some of the other steps involved in the next few days. Stay tuned!
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by Christi on June 21, 2010
The saying in real estate is “location, location, location!” Where you locate your business matters. You want to be in a good neighborhood. If you are selling clothing for children, you obviously do not want to be located next to an adult novelty store!
The same goes in the internet world. Where is your site located? Do you have good neighbors? I was researching a site this morning that was on a server with over 5,000 other sites. Of those sites, 5 were tagged as being potentially “adult oriented” and that could hurt the innocent site I was researching. If search engine filters decide that you are in a bad neighborhood it will impact every site on that server. They could potentially put a block on that IP!
What if you are in a neighborhood with spammers? Or even a neighborhood with sites that use the host mail server to send out a lot of emails or load lots of un-optimized pictures? These servers could be affected not only by being flagged, but also by being really slowed down while the server is processing the sending of all those emails or downloading all of those photos.
How do you know who’s in your neighborhood? Go to You Get Signal and check out the reverse IP domain check. If you see any problems, contact your hosting company and let them know your concerns. Don’t let bad neighbors hurt your business!
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by Christi on June 4, 2010
It seems that this situation is happening more and more. A business wants to update and make a few changes to their website. They call their web designer and on of the following happens:
- Their web designer doesn’t answer and doesn’t return their phone calls.
- The web designer agrees to do the work but months later the changes still are not made.
- The web designer makes the changes and charges an exorbitant fee.
The business owner is left wishing he could just make the changes himself and call it a day. However, when he tries to get access to the site to make the changes, he finds out he doesn’t have access and in many cases, can’t get it!
Wow, don’t let this happen to you! There are a few things you should know BEFORE you start. First of all
OWN YOUR WEBSITE!
That means that you have access to everything and that you can kick your web designer to the curb if you aren’t happy.
Own your domain name and make sure it is registered in your name and that you have the administrative username and password. Any reputable web designer will be happy for you to do this.
Own your hosting. Make sure you have a user name and password that enables you access to all of the files and programming that make up your site.
Own your content and programming. I saw an excerpt from a contract at Entrepreneur.com that a poor lady signed and then, of course was left without ownership of her site:
Unless other contractual arrangements are made beforehand, you will not be receiving any source code or files containing code of any kind from us other than what is stipulated here: You can request a CD or ZIP file containing and limited to: “.swf”, “html”, files for purposes of backing up your site. Unless specific arrangements are made these files cannot be altered, adjusted, decompiled or changed in any way. If you remove and edit or otherwise obtain files not given to you by us you are in direct copyright and contractual violation.
I understand that the source code for all projects belong to and are copyright of (Name of Design Firm). Source code is defined as all project files, executable code, source files and materials used to create the framework of the project. [In the event that (Name of Design Firm) is not able to provide service or future updates, we will negotiate a flat fee for any source files. This fee will be 50% of the total hours spent on the creation of source files. Source files will include fla, swf and a copy of the store.]
Why would anyone agree to such terms? They probably didn’t understand that by agreeing to such crazy terms, they were completely handing over control of their website to someone else.
Also, insist that your designer use industry standard programming. Proprietary programming is going to be difficult for another designer or you, as the business owner, to take over and, quite frankly, sometimes it is designed that way for just that purpose.
Don’t “ask” for access to your site – demand it. READ your contract before you sign. Pay your hosting, domain and design fees on time so none of them lapse. If you are not comfortable making changes to your site, make sure you understand what the charges will be for your designer to make changes for you.
Keep in mind that if you use a “do-it-yourself” template design, you will most likely NOT have access to the code of your website, so if you wish to change to another system or host, etc. you will have to start from scratch. Often these types of systems only allow limited access to meta tags such as title tags and descriptions as well.
Your business website can be one of your most valuable assets. Don’t give someone else complete control over that much of your business!
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by Christi on May 29, 2010
We discussed internet safety on The Margaret Banks Show on Saturday. Take some time and stay safe on the web! Some of the highlights:
- Protect your password – make sure your password is not something someone can guess and don’t tell anyone what it is.
- Avoid clicking on links in emails.
- Check out what is posted about you. Go to Google search and type in your name and see what comes up.
- Use virus checkers. There are lots of free ones like AVG and Spybot and Spyware Doctor. You can search for any of them on Google or Yahoo or Bing and download them.
- Check out how you are listed on spokeo.com. You can remove yourself from the listings by clicking on “privacy” at the bottom of the screen and following the directions.
- Be careful about who you hand your credit card to. There are now card swiping devices that can connect to a mobile phone.
- Often emails that are forwarded over and over containing funny or inspirational messages (especially ones that urge you to forward to friends immediately for a blessing or to see what will happen) are actually collecting email addresses. Avoid forwarding those types of emails and ask your friends not to forward them to you.
Privacy is becoming a rare commodity in today’s world. Do what you can to stay safe!
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Question 1: How would you describe the quality of a McDonald’s hamburger?
Question 2: Who sells the most hamburgers in the world?
The answers to those questions makes an important point. McDonald’s is not letting perfection get in the way of selling a lot of hamburgers.
Are you making this mistake? In your pursuit of making the perfect hamburger (or product or website or idea) maybe, nothing ever actually gets launched.
Is perfection getting in your way? Don’t let perfection get in the way of the possible! Yes, strive for excellence and do a good job, just realize that creating something great and launching it is better than striving to create something perfect that never sees the light of day.
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Foursquare counted its 40 millionth check-in recently, and it now has over 1 million users. Is it time to get on board? Could be, however, Facebook has announced that it will be adding location based features this month. That could really put a chink in the metal of Foursquare. What we do see, though, is that location based social media is up and coming and could be very useful to small businesses.
Because Facebook has not yet added its location based feature, let’s take a look at Foursquare and how it can help your business. First of all, what is Foursquare?
foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.
So how can your business use Foursquare?
Reward Loyalty
Foursquare allows visitors to your business to “check-in.” The person who has checked in the most times is the “mayor.” Offer the mayor of your business something extra. For example, a free cup of coffee or a free appetizer if you are a restaurant or some other incentive or discount. Offering an incentive gives your customers a reason to “knock-off” the current mayor to become the mayor themselves.
You could also offer an incentive for customers who have checked in a certain number of times. Even if they aren’t the mayor, you can still reward your other customers.
Get New Business
Offer something to 1st time check-ins. People who are visiting or are new to your area will appreciate an incentive to visit your business.
Offer Tips
Offer Foursquare users tips about your business, including specials and other offerings. When people visit your business, they can also offer their own tips.
We’ll have to wait and see what Facebook does with location based offerings. We also have to keep in mind the problems that Facebook has had with privacy and how that will affect adoption of their location based offering. Whatever shakes out, you and your business need to start thinking of ways to leverage location based social media to find new business and keep your current customers happy!
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