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Post from: BrightCite

Post from: BrightCite

Warning.  Slight rant below…

Is Your Business Web Friendly?

Is your small business prepared for the arrival of the virtual marketplace?  For years I’ve been telling all who would listen how strategic use of the web is a critical small business asset.  I’ve been met with many glazed eyes and blank stares from small business people who just don’t get it. 

Too bad – because the clock is ticking for the small business person who is web-illiterate and who still thinks about and uses a website as only an online brochure. 

It’s going to be a rough road ahead for small businesses not actively seeking to build online assets and who lack a basic understanding of how business works on the web.

On the flip side, proactive small business owners who see the Internet as an opportunity for a business building investment will be rewarded with an exceptional rate of return on time, money and resources. 

Are you actively educating, positioning and preparing yourself and business to profit from the power of the Internet?  Where do you stand?

Quick Audit
Answering yes to the questions below indicates you are positioning yourself to build online assets that will serve you and your business well in the years ahead:

1. You have a dedicated domain name for your website and e-mail (www.yourbusiness.comyourbusiness.com) skills.
2. You have a strategic plan for your website that ends with tangible results.  These results are based on visitors taking specific actions like calling, e-mailing, registering and downloading information from you.
3. You see  analytics information at least weekly, that tracks how many people visited your site, what they clicked on and how they found you.  You use this information to improve the strategic results of your website over time.
4. You understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization and have identified the keywords potential customers are likely to type into a search engine to find you.
5. You understand what a blog is and how it works for business (just as you understand the news media and PR).  You have left a comment on a blog.
6. You have a basic understanding of what RSS is and have used a feed reader before.  You know how it’s used to subscribe to and organize video, audio, blogs and other web content.
7. You have visited MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and SecondLife to familiarize yourself with social networking, Web 2.0 and network effects that govern an emerging virtual marketplace.
8. You know what a Podcast is and have listened to one.
9. You know what a widget is.
10. You have given thought to how the web is changing the rules of your business and assessed how it complements your business strengths and exploits your weaknesses.  You are actively exploring the online opportunities and threats to your business.

The more questions you answered "no" to, the less prepared you are for the rapidly approaching future.  On the other hand – there has never been a better time to start increasing your online business knowledge and skills. 

Post from: BrightCite

What Happens When You Type Keywords Into A Search Engine?
A search engine sends a "spider" (AKA "bot") to crawl the servers on the world wide web to find relevant documents to bring back to its index or database. In the index, it filters documents according to the search engine’s rules (such as, to weed out duplicates) and stores those which meet its relevance requirements.

Search engines use mathematical formulas to evaluate the relevance of the websites in its index to what you typed in the search box.  In a nanosecond, the search engine checks millions of websites for your keywords and ranks them based on how many times your keywords appear in a web page’s title and meta tags, content and links. It also checks how many times the keywords appear websites that are linked to yours.

Does Your Website Pass The Test?
This is a simplified explanation, but the bottom line is the websites that pop up on the first page of the search results have passed thousands of tests related to your entered keywords.  The results are ranked by what the search engine technology and formulas believe are the most relevant websites to your search.

High Rank Can Mean Higher Profit
As a small business, being ranked in the top 5 results positions (especially #1) for a customer related search is extremely profitable.  You are essentially moved to the front of the line for the customers attention.  And because there are so many companies competing, you have a clear advantage.  So needless to say, optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines is a smart move.

How Does SEO Help Improve Your Search Engine Rank?
The goal of Search Engine Optimization is simply to make it as easy as possible for search engines to measure/index your site. In other words, it’s about helping your website pass as many relevance tests as possible for strategic keywords.  Fundamentally, SEO is about managing 4 things:

1. Addressing the limitations of the search engine "bots" with crawler-friendly site architecture, as well as addressing indexing filter issues.  (Using clean HTML, etc…)
2. Making the site accessible to searchers by identifying keywords most used by your target audience and positioning the keywords — sensibly — into the text of your website. (Including the terms searchers are most likely to use for a search into your website tags and content)
   
3.  Attracting inbound links from authoritative sites that have strong traffic and relevance and targeting those links to searchers’ interests. (With valuable content that others want to pass along and including keywords in the links)
4. Analyzing visitor activity on your site — both human and "bot" – to look for ways to improve the search experience for both. (Using analytics to measure how visitors are behaving on your site)
   

When you do this right, you help the search engines do a better job serving their visitors the information they seek.  In turn the search engines display your site to the visitors you seek. It’s a win/win deal!

Why Search Engines Want You To Optimize Your Site
The success of search engines like Google are predicated on the relevance of the results they provide for you and other searchers.  If Google search results did not help you find what you are looking for you certainly wouldn’t use them as your search engine.  That would mean a lot of lost ad revenue for Google.  So it’s in their best interest to give you the best search results possible.  Google even posts SEO guidelines that help them help you…

Why Getting Good Search Engine Rank On Google Is Important To Your Company’s Profits
Check out some stats:

• Studies reveal that 70% of searchers click on natural or organic listings. But with Google, that jumps to 87%.
  
• Nearly 50% of all searches are done on Google — more than half, if you add in AOL, which displays Google search results.
  
• Of 1000 searchers, 555 (55.5%) will use Google or AOL, and 483 (87%) of these will click on links that are not "sponsored".
  
• Of the remaining 445 non-Google searchers, 311 (70%) will choose organic listings over paid.
  
• Altogether that’s 794 out of 1000 searchers! Who wants to pass up that many visitors?
  
• 2005 research showed that 60% of searchers click on one of the top three organic listings if it interests them. 

Bottom line: it pays to rank well in the search engines.  The time to get started with your optimization efforts is now.  One of the measures Google uses to determine relevance is how long a website has been in existence and its historic rankings (domain age).  So just like a good investment strategy, the optimization efforts you make today can end up compounding your results over time.

Post from: BrightCite

Your customer is looking for something online.  Your business wants to sell them something online.  Improve your odds of generating quality leads by giving prospects less choices, not more.  Here’s why:

Less Choice Means Better Search Engine Optimization – There are millions of websites competing for your customer’s attention.  If you focus with your 80/20 compass on providing prospects with only a few key solutions, the search engines will love you because:

1. Your content will have dense,  focused and concentrated keywords making it more relevant to search engines.  The more choices you give, the more watered down your relevance can become.
   
2. Other websites are more likely to link to specific content rather than general.  Offering less choice means you can get more specific and detailed with your content.  The more links from other websites you get – the more the search engines reward you with higher ranking.
   
3. Your long tail starts to wag.  The long tail refers to the millions of searches that are looking for obscure or non-general search phrases.  So instead of a general search for "truck" a longtail search would be "1984, blue truck with 20 inch tires"  So by focusing on building your content on fewer choices you are in a better position to benefit from the long tail.  The long tail also has high conversion rates because the searches are so specific and there is less competition for the terms.

Less Choice Makes A More Effective Website – The more options you add to your website the more confusing it becomes to the visitor.  Where should they click, what does this link mean, I can’t read this, it’s too small, am I in the right place?  These are all variables that play out every time a visitor lands on your webpage.

The solution.  Kill the confusion.  Reduce the choices.  Then reduce them again.  You’ll be surprised at how your web traffic and sales will increase.

Customers Want Less Choice  – In his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz makes a compelling case that giving a prospect too many choices is the surest way to send them packing.  Why?  This book review from Publishers Weekly captures the essence:

“Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options (’easy fit’ or ‘relaxed fit’?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”

Bottom line – too much choice creates stress.  So perhaps the question is – how much stress is your website causing your visitors, customers, employees?  Should you put your website on a stress reduction program?  Cutting down the number of choices you offer is a good place to start…

Post from: BrightCite