Small Business Tips

If you are new to Search Engine Optimization and you need to learn the basics, where do you turn?  If you search for SEO on google these days you get over 880 million results.  Add to that fact that SEO changes on a regular basis, so how do learn the basics and feel like you have a qualifed source.

Over the last two years, I have immersed myself in SEO and built my knowledge base to then realize that everything I learned two years ago is no longer an acceptable strategy.  When asked recently from a new website owner where they should start to learn SEO, I realized that building your SEO foundation is a tricky endeavour.

So after learning mountains of information then discarding and learning newer information, what do I know for sure about SEO?  Google is the king of the hill and the search engine that you want to impress with your site, so start with the obvious and read

Yes Google has written a Starter Guide to SEO in a deceptively simple 32 page pdf.  If you trust and follow this guide you are well on your way to an optimized website.

The best piece of advice from the Google SEO guide is

That is the hardest lesson to learn and the most difficult to implement because it is never ending.  Creating content is like exercise – something you have to do regularly to get the benefit – it would be much easier if just changing a title tag did the trick, but the reality is you have to continually create content and not just any content, but “compelling” content.

So if you want to learn SEO, here are the two resources that I recommend and after you have read these two then get to work on your site and don’t read about SEO again until you have done everything in these two guides.

Google SEO Starter Guide

SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO

A recent Wall Street Journal article, A Web Presence Without a Website, offers many suggestions for small businesses establishing a cheap or even free web presence to market their business.

…if you’re starting a business with limited funds, a flashy company website isn’t a must. For little or no cost, you could put your fledgling enterprise on a third-party site such as a blog-hosting service, social-media outlet, business directory or marketplace

The article provides good examples of businesses using internet sites to market their business, like, facebook or etsy. While the article touts that these businesses do not have a “website” they certainly have a web presence, but if you want to own your business then you must have your own website.

Using other sites as a way to market your business is imperative, like being on facebook or twitter, however, that should never be your only use of the internet since you have no control of it. If you build your entire business by using facebook and then facebook decides you have violated a term of their agreement and takes your page down – what will you do? Can this happen? sure, see Redmond Pies or Complexion Spas

The one thing you need on the internet is a “place” to call your own that you have full ownership of and control of the message.   Your own website is the place to bring it all together – you can show all your social media and you can create your own business identity.  Creating unique content on your site will help educate and inform your customers which builds trust in a way that social media cannot.  Your site’s content will also establish you as an expert or authority in your field which in the long run is very important from a search engine perspective.

You are creating a business and your business must have its own identity.  Not an identity shaped by someone else’s website.  While you may think that facebook is here to stay, I am sure the people who put their business on MySpace many years ago thought it was too, but the image of MySpace has certainly changed.

The huge game changer today is how easy and cheap it is to get your own website.  I am not only an advocate, but probably an evangelist for using WordPress to manage a business website.  WordPress may be known as a blogging platform or content management system, but it can easily be classified as a business website management tool.  The cost to set up a WordPress site for your business is about $10 per year to register your domain name and about $7 per month to host the site.  While you could get away a little cheaper by letting WordPress host the site for free, I do not recommend that for the same reasons stated for not using other third party sites for your critical business image.  Instead pay a hosting company to host your website and they provide the WordPress software for free, but the content you develop is always yours and you can back it up and download it to your own computer so you always have a full copy.

WordPress is incredibly easy to use to not only write blog posts, but also to write entire pages for your website with images, videos, etc.  The current version of WordPress with the TwentyTen theme makes putting a navigation menu and setting a home page for your site very easy, so your site will function like a business website and also have a blogging component.

Where WordPress really excels is the free plugins that are available to add to your site.  Plugins are tools that make your site have the features and functions you want.  For example, you can add a facebook plugin that shows your fans or a twitter plugin so your tweets are always on the sidebar of your website.  As of today there are 14,380 WordPress Plugins available and new ones are created everyday.

Throw away the notion that a business website is expensive or difficult and grab your own place on the internet.  Get started today crafting your business’ unique identity and give it a place to call home.

Everywhere you turn these days you see statistics about mobile web users and how many people are accessing the internet from a mobile device. Phones and tablets are becoming primary web browsers for some people and making fast advances in numbers of users. Consider these facts presented in the Mobile Access 2010 Report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

40% of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32% of Americans who did this in 2009)

African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos continue to be among the most active users of the mobile web

38% of cell phone owners are now more likely to use their mobile phones to access the internet versus 25% just a year ago

I wanted to see if our site or our blog over at Home Health Testing was experiencing visitors from mobile browsers. I went into Google Analytics and looked under Visitors-Mobile-Mobile Devices to find out that 12% of the visitors to our ecommerce site and 26% of the visitors to our blog were entering on a mobile device. So we can’t ignore these numbers and need to address the issue of presenting our website or blog on a mobile device which is quite different from the large widescreen monitor on my desk.

Here is the beauty and power of WordPress, we can make our blog mobile ready with a variety of plugins. After some research, I chose WPtouch based on the reviews and that 1.6 million wordpress users have downloaded the plugin. The plugin will:

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

Installing the plugin was simple and straight forward and just accepting the default setup produced excellent results. However, you can also go into the setup and customize the application by answering some questions. Immediately after installing the plugin, I used my mobile phone to view our blog and it showed up similar to the image at the right – easy to use from any mobile device. WPtouch will automatically detect if your visitor is using a mobile device and then display the blog for that device, however, if your visitor comes in a regular computer browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox then the theme you have on your blog will be displayed and WPtouch will not display your blog.

Our blog articles are now clear and crisp on a small screen and very easy to read. An investment of about a half hour of time to install WPtouch produced astounding results by making our blog mobile friendly for those 26% of our readers. You want to keep the browser clean and easy to load for mobile users and this plugin does that extremely well.

WordPress and the community of developers who make plugins help us keep our websites and blogs technologically up to date. I am still amazed that most plugins are free and how easy they are to install. The tools we have at our fingertips now to run a business are astounding.

If you want to read more about mobilizing your website, the folks over at oDesk wrote a helpful blog post Tips & Tools to Get Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Putting a table on your website will help you explain data in an easy to digest way for your customers. Here is an example of one we created over at Home Health Testing:

Create the table in Microsoft Word which allows you easily add the text, colors and formatting. Once your table is ready in Word, use Select All and Copy. Then open the graphics program you use or just open Paint and Paste it in there. We used Paint and then used Save As to save the jpeg which could then be imported to our website.

While the table makes the information easier to read for a web visitor, the data is not available to search engines since it is now embedded in an image. Below the table you should still put the information in text format so that search engines will know what your page is about. Making your table in Word makes it visually pleasing to engage your readers, but the rest of the text on the page gets it found by searchers on the web. Remember, your website has to be found to be relevant.

Google recently asked on their Small Business Blog, “if you had one wish for your small business in 2011, what would it be?” and then posted We asked You Told Us summary of the results.  The number one overwhelming theme for small business owners was to move it online.  From moving their business online with a website to finding more online resources to help a business grow.

Business owners are looking for more resources to connect with customers and understand how to use social media.  The survey respondents acknowledged they are receiving more referrals online and want to understand how to maximize that.

Ten percent of the respondents said they want to “Get Found Online” by users searching for their product or service.

I am glad to see small business owners asking for more resources and looking for ways to use their website to connect with customers.  We begin 2011 with a wealth of resources available for free to make these things happen, but sometimes free is not easy.  Here at 44ideas, I will continue to blog about WordPress and search engine optimization techniques to help simplify the basic need to “move it online”.