Thursday, November 20th, 2008
Wordpress is the most versatile and easy to use.
I use Wordpresss for all of the sites I build, except the very specialized ones. Here’s an article that backs me up. I’ve used all of the editors and other CMSs and I think Wordpress is the most versatile and easy to use. If you want to keep your site updated regularly, and who doesn’t?, then you should be using Wordpress. I’m not sure you should ever pay for a theme, since they can all be customized, but it might work best for you.
WordPress - It’s Not Just for Bloggers Anymore - Premium WordPress Themes | How to Start, Build and Promote Your Online Business
WordPress - It’s Not Just for Bloggers Anymore
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Premium WordPress Themes
I’ve been a webmaster for over 12 years. And in that time I’ve used just about every HTML editor, CMS and page generator that was ever released.
Today, I use WordPress to develop 99.5 percent of the website projects I work on. The SEO, Web 2.0 and content management features make it so easy to deploy and market websites there’s really no need to use anything else. Almost anything you could want from a website can be easily plugged into WordPress.
With WordPress you can edit your website from any computer with an Internet connection. Change and add content, navigation, interactive features or even modify the design of the entire site in a matter of minutes. You can do it on a Mac, a PC or even a Linux box. It doesn’t matter because it’s all done over the web.
No more hassling with expensive software and updates. Everything you need is built in.
You’ll notice I’m using the word “websites” and not “blogs”.
“But I thought WordPress was blogging software?” you ask.
It is blogging software. Arguably the best blogging platform in the known universe. But, it can also be used as a robust content management system with or without blogging features enabled.
Imagine being able to give your secretary or assistant the login to your WordPress site and him being able to update content, add pages and upload photos in less time than it takes you to go to Starbucks and back.
Do you know how many hours I’ve spent training administrative assistants and church secretaries on how to use Dream Weaver or Front Page to update their websites? More than I care to remember. The sad fact is that most of those sites were never really kept up-to-date and therefore never really lived up to their full potential.
Read the entire article at WordPress - It’s Not Just for Bloggers Anymore - Premium WordPress Themes | How to Start, Build and Promote Your Online Business
Posted in SEO, development, free, small business website | No Comments »
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
Posting good content regularly is magic in terms of traffic.
Here are the first three reasons that your small business really should have a blog of some sort. I know you want a normal “brochureware” site, but posting good content regularly is magic in terms of traffic and people finding out about your small business. Static pages are so 1998.
Six Reasons Why Blogs Are So Good for SEO - flyte blog: web marketing strategies for small business
I’ve been trumpeting the benefits of blogging for search engine visibility for a while now, and here’s why:
1. Blogs are all about content. Search engines love content. They don’t love Flash, and they’re still struggling with photos and video, but they absolutely get content.
2. Blogs have text-based navigation. Search engines have an easier time with text based (vs. image based) navigation because it’s more transparent. Search engines for a while now have told us that they want sites to serve up the same information/experience to a search engine bot as to a person.
3. Blogs offer lots of links. If search engines feast on words, they travel on links. Blogs are often a good place to find new content on the Web.
Read the entire article at Six Reasons Why Blogs Are So Good for SEO - flyte blog: web marketing strategies for small business
Posted in SEO, small business website | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
What is the goal here?
We need to know what we want to accomplish. What is the goal here? You have a business. You want more customers. How do customers find you? Search engines. “Google” has become a verb. How do they use a search engine? They type in a words and hit enter. Those words, those “keywords”, are critical to your success.
You first need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. What does your company do? How would you describe your company?
You also need to know that you have competition. You are probably other companies out there that do the same, or similar things. They also have web sites for those very same keywords that you want to be found for.
As you search for more keywords at one time, you will narrow the results. Let’s pretend that you have a car repair shop in Torrance, CA that specializes on transmissions. If you search for “auto” you’ll get 1 trillion, 280 million results. If you search for “auto repair”, that narrows it down to 22 million results. Dude. That’s still too many. You don’t want to compete against everyone in the country.
Let’s try “auto repair torrance”. That’s better. There are only 226,000 results for those terms. Not all of those are repair shops. Some of those are on Torrance Blvd. in another city. Some of those are blog posts by some guy, sitting in his underware, complaining about the work some shop did to his Corolla. We can do this.
Let’s decide that these are the keywords that we’re going to try to optimize for, “auto repair torrance”. Another acronym to make you feel smart; “SEO” means search engine optimization. It also means “spend a lot of money” if you pay someone to do it for you. You’re going to do this yourself.
Posted in free, small business website | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Bam. There it is.
Now, back to the Wordpress page. See where it says “Username”? Type in your three keywords, in order of importance. Now put in a password. No, not the name of your cat. Use numbers and letters and make sure you can remember it. There. That’s good. Put it in again, to make sure you didn’t make a typo, not that you would ever do that.
Put in your email address so they can send you a confirmation email to activate your account. They want to make sure you are a real person. Check the legal flotsam, tell them you want your blog and click “Next”. Bam. There it is.
Posted in free, small business website | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
There are some things that we’ll set up and never touch again, to begin with. These are all located over to the right in the “Settings” tab. When you click on that, it takes you to the “General” tab. Here, you want to change the Blog Title and the tagline to something that works with your keywords. You probably want those keywords in there some place, if there’s room and it doesn’t look stupid. Also, change the timezone to one that’s appropriate.
Now, let’s talk about the “Discussion” tab. Most of the time, having a nice discussion is a great thing, but this tab is where allow people to leave comments on your site. At this point, I’m going to say that you probably don’t want people doing that, so I’d say that you should turn them off. Go down the list of checkboxes here and set things the way you want them to be. You and I can have a discussion about the benefits and liabilities of allowing commnets, but not now.
Posted in free, small business website | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
What else do people want to know when they come to your site? Prices? I don’t want to hear your sales pitch. I want to know what it costs. Then maybe I’ll check your features and benefits. I know you want to tell everyone how great you are, but no one cares what you want. We only care what we want, so give it to us and we’ll be happy. Prices, products, descriptions, features, locations, sizes, colors, styles, services, recommendations, photos, support, downloads, a way to yell at you. Just give us what we want.
Now, do you have the list of buckets written out? (This is different than that movie, the Bucket List. This is a list of buckets.) On to getting that information into the CMS. (Did you remember what that stands for? Good. I’m proud of you.)
Wordpress started out as a blogging platform, so it was built around “posts”. Things that you wrote every day, that were displayed in chronological order and disappeared off the front page as you wrote newer posts. You don’t want that (for now anyway. I’ll talk to you into a blog later.) What you want are static pages that stay where they are and are always in the same place. No chrono-nothing to do with these. Well, Wordpress calls these, (wait for it), “pages”. A “page” is different than a “post” in Wordpress in how and where they are displayed. Similar, but different.
Posted in free, small business website | No Comments »
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Here is some great ideas about how to get your web site noticed. Using keywords is critical and know where and how to use them will make your site successful.
Putting Your Keywords & Content to the Best Use | Caroline Middlebrook
When starting a niche site, the first step is usually keyword research and then a large majority of the time is spent on content creation and the process seems simple enough - pick profitable keywords to target then write content that targets those keywords but hold on just a moment… there’s more to think about.
Where Are Keywords Used?
Most people don’t really stop to think about where they will use their keywords. They simply identify keywords that they want to rank for and then pimp out their site SEO-wise to try and target that keyword as effectively as possible. But stopping to think about where you use your keywords will reveal the kinds of content you need to create, and where you don’t need content at all.
Your Website Content
This is the most obvious place where you will use your keywords - on your site itself.
Actually, that last statement is not quite true. Go to Google and type in “twitter tactics”. Depending on where in the world you are, the site http://www.twittertactics.com/ ranks very highly for this keyword and yet it is a completely empty WordPress default blog that was created and then abandoned. The only place where the keyword has been used is in the URL and the title of the site. There isn’t even a post that targets it. However, this keyword is probably not a competitive one so this doesn’t often happen!
Article (Marketing) Content
The next new posts in this project will discuss the backlink strategies that I am using for my niche sites and article marketing is one of them. Now there are two ways in which you can benefit from an article:
The backlink you place in the article or resource box
Traffic that comes from the article itself
To utilise the first strategy, you just need to write pretty much any old article that is related to your site and then insert a link back to your site in the resource box. There is nothing to say that you have to target any particular keywords in the article itself because the important part is the backlink for which you will use appropriate anchor text.
However this is only one way to benefit from articles and is really a bit of a wasted potential if that is all you do. Josh Spaulding in his Article Marketing Domination book advocates writing an article that is going to draw in traffic to the article itself and a portion of those people will click through to your link so this way not only do you benefit from the backlink, but from the traffic itself.
There are two ways in which you can approach the process of writing a highly-trafficked article. One way is to once again abandon all keywords and simply write the most compelling article headline you can think of and hope that its listing in the directory will be enough. However if you are in a competitive niche it can be tricky to really stand out from the crowd amongst hundreds of other articles. The other strategy is to utilise the ranking power of the directory and target low competition phrases in the article itself.
When doing your competition research I am sure that you will have seen on many occasions an article from EZine Articles ranking in the top 10 in the serps. Google loves EA, probably a lot more than your site and if you wrote that same article for your website, your EA article would probably out-rank your site article. By utilising the power of popular directories you can target keywords that the directory can rank for and then drive traffic that way.
Read the entire article at Putting Your Keywords & Content to the Best Use | Caroline Middlebrook
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | The Changing Consumer Experience
Act more like publishers, entertainment companies, or even party planners, than advertisers.
According to Razorfish, “…today’s consumer is more technically adept, open for experimentation and—most importantly—active than ever before.” Its recommendations include:
“Act more like publishers, entertainment companies, or even party planners, than advertisers.”
“Create content that engages and ‘reaches’ consumers across channels, provide valuable services over mere advertising, and master an increasingly complicated and expansive content distribution model.”
“Rethink the way they create relationships (or conversations) with consumers before it’s too late.”
The report also examines the impact of widgets, RSS feeds, “advertising as a service,” Twitter, online video, iPhones, and new design standards. In short, this is something you should read to stay on top of Web technology and digital content. You can get it before your competitor by clicking here.
Read the entire article at OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | The Changing Consumer Experience
Posted in marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Why The World Isn’t Listening - Small Business Branding Written by Ed Roach
How many of your clients believe they are an apple ripe for the picking? They believe in the old adage, “build it and they will come” - literally.
I'm Not Listening To You!
The actual post told of businesses who want that magic bullet to success. You know - the - what is the tricks and techniques to instant results? What is it, that would lead any of us to believe that this solution exists? In the many years I’ve been in business, nothing comes easily. It takes work and perseverance.
How in the world is anyone supposed to find you if you do nothing to tell anyone that you are there? Googling is not enough, don’t bet the farm on SEO (but don’t ignore it either). You have to get out there. Do your research. You can’t generate an income without some sales effort. There are some great books on promoting yourself on and offline. Read them and FOLLOW THEM. Having your base marketing in place is a great start, but you have to realize that you must consistently and repeatedly push your brand out into the world. Take every opportunity to develop your brand so that it returns a respectable income for you and your company.
Posted in small business website | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
How to explain “URLs” so anybody can understand them - easyDNS Blog
One of our tech support guys just had a conversation with somebody who wanted “to register the URL http://example.com/something.html”, where example.com was already registered, the person couldn’t understand why he couldn’t have that URL with “something.html” after it.
We’ve heard variations of this one a lot. Like somebody who knows “xyz.zz” is taken “but can I register “www.xyz.zz?”, no, you can’t.
The easiest way to explain a URL such as this one: http://www.example.com/something.html
Is to think of it as HOW, then WHERE and finally WHAT:
| http:// |
« how? |
The method we are going to use to retrieve or “get to” the document described by the URL. Common ones are “http” (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol), you may also see “ftp://” or “mailto:” |
| www.example.com |
« where? |
This is the hostname of the server, somewhere on the internet, which is holding the document we actually want |
| /something.html |
« what? |
Finally, after we know what server we are looking for and how we’re going to retrieve the document from it, we now specify exactly which document we want off of the remote server. |
Understand those three components and you basically have URLs down cold.
Your web browser (firefox, safari, IE, Opera) is all about “how”, what protocols to use to pull all these documents over the web to your desktop.
The web host is the “what” machine. It sits on a server and serves document after document to remote web browsers who send it requests.
Something has to bridge the browser to the web host/server and that’s the “where”, that’s where DNS and domains come in, and that’s primarily what we do here at easyDNS. We tell web browsers (and other client applications) the “where” aspect of retrieving and transmitting documents (the “whats”) across the internet. We do this via “DNS lookups” …about a quarter billion times a day.
Read the entire article at How to explain “URLs” so anybody can understand them - easyDNS Blog
Posted in domain name | No Comments »
