Business and Finance

So let’s take a look at some of the most common mistakes done when a small business takes their business online.

Order of links

So many times you visit a small business website and they proudly flag the “about us” link as their first link. This is called the pride link because they often think that telling people about the company is the most important thing. The links should be in order of importance. Not in the order of the business owners EGO! If you use a website designer and he does consult you on the order of links, chances are you should be using someone else or at least make sure you educate yourself about online marketing because your website designer sure hasn’t!

No focus

Most small business websites lack focus. When you enter you are not sure where to go next which makes it hard for the user to understand exactly what he is supposed to do. The website should flow and the user should be able to make sense of the site within a few seconds of opening it up.

No sale / No lead setup

Many small businesses do not use their website to increase sales directly or capture leads. It is nothing more than an online brochure or business card. Sometimes the information is more confusing than it is helpful. If you competitors site is easier to navigate and captures either the sale or lead, you just lost a client. A small business websites needs to be even more on top of catching leads than a corporate website because every client lost counts more!

Did you know that most small business websites generate very little traffic? Whether you have outsourced your web design or have it done in-house, it is important that your webmaster understands the basic structure and on-page criteria that will make the search engines happy. And when the search engines are happy, the result is increased targeted traffic.

Website Mistake #1: Not Building Trust

Probably the biggest mistake I see is the lack of trust-building content. If your website is filled with sales pressure tactics or doesn’t offer any helpful and informative content, people will simply move on to something else. Remember, when people come to your site, they are in complete control. Give them just one reason to leave and they will.

You must earn your visitor’s confidence through original, useful and compelling content. Remember, in many cases, people are coming to your site from the search engines to find information, not to make a purchase. Give them what they want.

If you’re not sure what kind of content to write about on your site, then it’s time to invest in a paid keyword research tool like Wordtracker or KeyWord Discovery. These tools will help you uncover search phrases that you can then use to write page content.

Website Mistake #2: Improper On-Page Criteria

The search engines look for certain elements contained within your page. There are proactive ways you can help ensure your pages get ranked favorably. These include making sure all your META Tags are correct, your primary keyword phrase is sprinkled throughout your text, and that you include a link with your main keyword in the anchor text.  Read more...

If you have a website of your own for your small business first of all congratulations. Many of you competitors do not have one yet. You have a leg up on them. For those that do have their own website they may not have it optimized for the maximum results from the search engines.

Here are a few ways you can get a leg up on them with proper search engine optimization for your small business website.

1. Duplicate Content: As a general rule keep all of the content on your website fresh and original. Don’t use someone else’s content unless you have paid for it and it is 100% yours to copyright.

2. Links: Outgoing links are bad. Incoming links are good. Internal linking to other pages within your site are good. Use hyperlinked keyword phrases to tell the search engines and your visitors what the page is about.

3. Keyword Density: Keep you keyword density at 2%-5% per page. This means that if you have an article of 400 words on the page don’t use your primary or secondary keyword phrases more than 20 times. Personally I think that is to much and would shoot for 8-10 times. More than that and it sounds like spamming and it probably is.

4. Title Tag: Keep you words to a minimum and include your primary kewyord and secondary keyword one time.  Read more...

Last time we looked at Title tags and how their potential is under used , , in this article  we looked at whether you trading or company name should be in the Title tag and if there are occasion it shouldn’t go in.  Also we touch on some bad and good phrases that can be in the Title.

3 Should You Put Your Company Or Trading Name In A Title Tag

Well if you want your products to be associated with your company and positive target keywords to be associated with you company then the answer has to be yes.  If  your company is well known are SEO optimized tags will then give you a boost , if not then it’s a chance to get your name out there.Target traffic to your website is the main goal .

Of course your company name on it’s own in an SEO phrase may not be enough to get the potential customers clicking .So you need to include it in part of a keyword phrase  for example “Camera Kings Ltd Great Offers on Canon DSLRS” so people that know your business will find it by name , other that don’t now it will find it in the keyword phrase and associate the phrase with your company .

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Professional website designers pride themselves on creating a visually attractive piece of work. It is actually a very unique skill set brought on by the internet where a website designer needs to not only know about what looks good and works smooth, but also the variety of programming languages behind designing a website. A website these days can be powered by not only HTML, but XHTML, CSS, Perl, ASP, VBScript, Java, Javascript, SQL and of course FLASH.

Flash programming, now more than 10 years old was first developed by an ingenious company called Macromedia which is now owned by once rival, Adobe. The value of FLASH is its ability to deliver multimedia motion graphics for animation and interaction on the web but using the least amount of memory possible, thus making its programmers highly sought-after for upper-end website construction.

So as a small business owner you may have run into a “FLASHY” website in your surfing travels and been in awe (ok, jealous) of how great they look. Well the thing is really, I have seen thousands of small business websites with expensive Flash programming and immediately thought to myself, “What a complete waste of money!”

Creating and designing your small business website using all the latest software, enhanced graphics and in depth programming will almost certainly lead you to eventually lose interest in your own website, commit you to future invoice headaches for every little update you need to make, and cluster your website with a slew of others in your market that are equally as glamorous as they are ineffective.  Read more...