Small Biz Websites Tips and Tricks

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Business Blogs - Onsite or Offsite

A blog is a great way for a business owner to add fresh content to their website quickly and easily without having to engage their web designer.

As a business owner one of the things you need to decide is do you want your blog to be onsite or offsite.

Here are some of the pros and cons for both scenarios. Each has their advantages and disadvantages and you need to decide which one best suits your business situation.

Onsite Business Blog

Advantages of having your blog onsite include -

1. It is easy for your visitors to find your blog.
2. You can add new content to your website quickly and easily.
3. Search Engine ranking benefits of being able to add keyword related content to your website and being able to feed your website with new content on a regular basis.

Disadvantages

1. Your links will count as internal links rather than external links
2. If you are not a web designer there will be a cost to add a blog to your website.

Offsite Business Blog (eg. Blogger)

Advantages

1. You can link back to content on your website as external links
2. No setup cost

Disadvantages

1. You won't be able to add new content to your main website. You could use a product like RSS Content Builder to get around this. There is a cost associated with this.
2. No direct search engine benefit to your main website. However if you can build you offsite blog so that it gets noticed by the search engines you will get some benefit when you make links back to your main website.

Regardless of whether or not you have an onsite blog or offsite there are some key things you must do to ensure your blog is successful.

1. Have a plan to post content to your blog on a regular basis.
2. Make sure the theme of your blog is consistent with the theme of your website and your business.
3. Create an RSS feed using a service like feedburner.
4. Use Zimbio to share your content. Check out my post on sharing your content for more information about Zimbio.

Make your blog fun and interesting and share useful content with your visitors and customers.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Share your blog content with the world - Free traffic and more Backlinks

OK. So you have a piece of quality content that you have put on your blog and now you want to promote it to the world. Find people that don't know about your blog and bring them back to your site. How do you do it??

Check out www.zimbio.com

This website is a collection of online magazines, and a great way to post your content onto other websites. This will get you in front of people that don't know you and will bring links back to your website as well.

Here is a few stats about Zimbio that should excite you. PageRank is 6 so Google loves them. Alexa rank at time of posting is 528. Compete tells me they got over 4 million unique visits for March 2009. This will get you some serious exposure and for little or no time.

OK, so here is what you need to do.

1. Create an account at Zimbio.

2. Register your RSS feed and they will automatically pick up your blog posts.

3. Search Zimbio for relevant ezines that relate to your content or niche.

4. Weekly, I log in to my Zimbio account and you will find your blog posts listed and you can then nominate which ezines you want to post them to.

That is about how hard it is.

I have about 5 ezines on Zimbio that I post my content to that all relate to my niche. At the moment I am averaging about 3 blog posts per week. For each blog post I get a link back to my blog associated with the post, and I also get to include links within the content to other blog posts and to my other websites. Don't go over board with the links, but if you have 3-4 links within your content that is 4-5 links per post. That is an extra 10 to 15 links per week which is 500 to 750 links over a year.

The other great thing about these links is you have complete control over what you link to and what text you attach to the link, making the links more valuable to you.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Share your blog content with the Social Media World

It is no secret that social media must be one of the greatest ways to promote your business and content to the world.

You can even get your users to do it for you.

So I wanted to share with you quickly one of the best and quickest ways that I have found to automate this process, and make it really easy for you and your users to promote your content.

Given the large numbers of social media sites it can be quite time consuming to setup all these submission gadgets on your blog, they can take up a lot of space, and often it makes it too hard for your readers to be bothered doing it.

So, how about one gadget that does it all for you. Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Myspace - you name it.

One of the blogs that I watch on a regular basis is Sitefling by Justin Brooke. You should check it out for info about web design and internet marketing.

I noticed a while ago on Justin's blog that he had a gadget on the bottom of each blog for sharing his posts. The gadget is Tell-a-Friend by SocialTwist.

Go check it out if you want to ramp up your blog profile. Make it easy for your blog users to promote your content and bring more traffic back to your blog.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Every Small Business should have a Blog

Let me say it again!!

Every small business website should have a blog!!

Why do I say this?

I think there are 2 main very important reasons why a small business should have a blog.

1. You can quickly and easily put new content onto your website.

One of the main challenges facing small business owners on the internet is how do they get new content onto their website, quickly, easily and for free.

The best way that I know to do this is with a blog.

I have worked with a lot of business owners on their websites and one of their biggest challenges is that once their website is up and running and they have paid their website designer they cannot put any new content onto their site, without paying more money to their website designer. So, quickly their website becomes out of date and stale, and their business suffers as a result.

But, with a blog you don't need to have any knowledge about HTML or web design. Open up your blog, start writing, put in a photo or two if you want, and a few links back to your main website and there you have it.

You can even pay a few dollars to your website designer, and get the new posts from your blog fed directly back onto the home page of your website so that your new and current content is posted directly onto your main website. This will cost you to setup but there are no ongoing fees associated with this.

2. Create links back to your website

Small business websites suffer in the search engine rankings for a couple of reasons, but one of the main ones is that they have no links back to their website.

Include a link back to your website each time you make a blog post. Link to a relevant page on your website.

DO NOT always link back to your home page. Search engines don't like this.

Create a feed for your website at Feedburner and then use this feed to post your content at Zimbio. You will need to create accounts but this takes about 10 minutes. From your Zimbio account you can then post your blog posts to different ezines all over the internet bringing more links back to your website.

Want to find out more about including a blog on your website. Chack me out at Professional Website Design

Friday, April 17, 2009

18 Websites to Bring you more Free Traffic and More Links

In order to bring more traffic to your business website you need to generate links back to your website.

One of the best ways to do this is to promote your business by submitting content to other websites. When doing this you can create a link back to your website to bring you targeted traffic.

How can you do this for FREE?

Here is a list of 18 websites that I use to bring free traffic back to my websites and those of my clients.

Create a blog - post new content directly to your blog. Link it back to your main website.

EzineArticles.com - submit 300-500 word articles and include 1-2 links back to your website in the author bio box at the bottom of each article.

eHow.com - write 5-10 step How To articles.

GoArticles.com - similar to ezinearticles.com

AssociatedContent.com - article directory

Zimbio.com - automatically post content straight from your blog and then submit it to ezines all over the web that relate to your industry.

Craigslist.com - advertise your business services and products.

BackPage.com - business classified advertising

USFree Ads.com - the name says it all.

Kijiji.com - the name tells you nothing but this is another classified website.

MySpace Classifieds

Twitter

YouTube - got a promo video for your business. Upload it to YouTube. Maybe you are a movie star in the making!!

Squidoo - create lens for your products and services and link them back to your main business website.

ArticleDashboard.com - another article directory

FaceBook Classifieds

BestManagementArticles.com

StumbleUpon.com - promote your website to users within their nominated fields of interest.

Across the internet there a thousands of articles directories and large numbers of video submission websites. I have not even covered podcasts.

You can quite literally from one piece of content submit it to 20 or 30 different websites all giving you links to your website and bringing you targeted traffic.

Even if you only create 1 piece of content each week that is 20-30 links per week which is 100 links per month. That could make a big difference to your traffic volumes and search engine rankings.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Getting your keyword research wrong will cost your business lots of time and money

How big is the market that your business serves?

Are you a local business?

Do you serve the market within your state?

Do you service a national market?

Can you service the world?

Or do you regularly send orders to Mars?

This needs to be the first question that you ask yourself when you think about keyword research for your business website. If your business only services a local area then there is no point in attracting customers from outside of that area to your website.

If you cannot service them then you do not want them!!

And the second point is that it will be much harder to get your website to the top of the search engine rankings for a generic search term, than it will be for a search term that targets a specific geographic area.

Lets look at an example.

You are a dentist. You own a dental surgery in Tampa. You specialise in cosmetic dentistry. You have a website that you are looking to optimize so that you can get more traffic to generate more leads.

So, which search term do you want to optimise your website for.

If you do a search for 'dentist' you will find that the number one website for that search term out of 33,500 000 results has a PageRank of 6 and in excess of 11000 inbound links according to Yahoo.

So now you do a search for 'cosmetic dentist' and find you are only competing with 5,800 000 other websites. Number 1 site has a PageRank of 5 and about 10000 inbound links.

So now lets look at 'cosmetic dentist tampa' and all of a sudden you are only competing with 416,000 websites. Number 1 site has a PageRank of 1 and 5 inbound links. THIS IS YOUR MARKET AND YOU CAN COMPETE WITH THIS.

One of the major mistakes that I find with local businesses is that they want their website to compete on a national or international scale. You do not need this and you cannot service this market. You are wasting time, effort and money if you are trying to do this.

Would you like to know what you have to do to get on the first page of Google for your business website. I offer a FREE website review service. I will compare your website with the top 10 websites for your competing search term and show you what you need to do to get to the top of the search rankings.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Your Small Business Website is All About your Users

Search Engines don't spend Money!!

At least not at your website!!

Alot of the work that I do with small business owners is geared around making their website more friendly to the search engines to bring more traffic to their website.

But, a word of caution - you must remember that it is your customers that spend money with you, and not the Search Engines.

One of my clients has a marine website - he sells boats. He doesn't as such sell boats online, but he uses his website to promote the boats that he has for sale. The original design for his website was particularly unfriendly as far as the search engines were concerned. URL's, title tags, meta descriptions all unfriendly. Keyword research - non existent.

So, when I started to work with this client I did a major redesign of the website, but I also made alot of changes behind the scenes so that they would get more natural traffic from the search engines.

It took a month or so, but there were some exciting changes as far as the traffic to the website were concerned. When I took over this project there was very little data about the website. Where was the traffic coming from? How much traffic? What rankings for keywords in the search engines?

So, now the website is getting some traffic, how do we track user experience. I know there are a number of very good paid packages on the market, but the main one I use is Google Analytics.

How much traffic are you getting?
Where is it coming from?
How many people 'bounce'?
Do they do what you want them to do?
What pages are they visiting?
What links do they click on?

When you have some base information you can start testing different elements on your website to start to improve these parameters.

Is there a page on your website that has a very high bounce rate? That is, people leave your site quickly after landing on this page. If so, why? This would be a page that I would look at changing to reduce this.

Do people click on the link to sign up for your newsletter, or to buy now?? If not, what can you change to make them more likely to do this?

Optimising your user experience is all about testing and retesting. Make a change and test the result. Is it better or worse?

One of the services that I offer for small business owners is a free website review.

Unfortunately I find that alot of small business owners don't have any relevant information as to how there site is currently performing. The client that I mentioned had a hit counter on their site. They thought this represented unique visitors. What it really represented was page views, and it included their own page views.

Improving your user experience is about having meaningful data as to what is currently happening on your website. You then can set some priorities as to what you want to improve. Make changes and then track to see if the changes improve the result or not. Repeat this process, and repeat, repeat and repeat again.