Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Remodeling an existing house poses very different challenges than building a new one from scratch. Remodeling a business without closing down is even more challenging, and that’s a lot like upgrading and updating your servers without down time.

Let’s push the analogy a little further by pointing out that the challenge is a little bigger because unlike a traditional business, you can’t just hang a sign out that says “We’re Open During Remodeling!” You need to upgrade your servers without anyone noticing that things have changed, often dramatically, on the back end.

This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, or that it has to be painful. Some businesses close down for the weekend, and those two days of unavailability may work out fine, but some companies work 365 days a year.

During 2007, we were asked to make a number of significant improvements to the servers at Northshore Christian Church and Academy. It’s a fast-paced environment with hundreds of workstations, any one of which may be needed on any day of the week. In addition to upgrading software and replacing hardware, we had to remain at the ready for equipment failure, which grows more common as devices age.

Qualified IT managers are always going to be able to update and improve network environments without down time. It will require addition caution, time and skill, but it can be done, and for many businesses, it’s really the only option.

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

HTML Source EditorWord wrapSince your site is an extension of your business, you know you have to treat it like such. You first have to get in front of people and tell them you exist before they can tell your friends about you. The web linking component of Search Engine Optimization is not too different. The more friends you have, the more Google will think of you as the popular people, and from there it can start to grow.

In the early, easily corrupted days of the internet, all you needed was a bunch of sites linking to you, and you were golden. It didn’t matter what they were or the reputation of the sites, it just mattered that they had a link pointing to you. This was quickly exploited, destroyed, and factored out of the search engine algorithms.

Now they look at who links to you and how they link to you. The details are all very hush-hush, but those of us in the SEO game for a decade have it figured out pretty well.

Benefits to having good links pointing to your site:

1 – Search engines will see that you are popular and increase your rank accordingly.

2 – Since there are more sites pointing to you, your site will be crawled by search engine spiders more frequently.

3 – Real readers representing organic traffic will increase. This is listed last because it is the least of the benefits, but still very real.

There are many different types of links and each one has a different value and purpose. Figuring them out is easier than actually getting them to happen, but knowing what they are each worth is more important still.

Relevant Link Swap – If you can find someone with a similar web site, ask him or her to link to you. If you sell real estate in Seattle, ask a real estate web site in New York to link to you. You aren’t competitors, so trading links in this way can be an effective way to direct traffic without hurting either site’s business. You should never pay for this type of link; that falls under the heading of “sponsored links.”

A word of caution, however, if you’re going to ask to trade links: don’t say “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Instead, post a link to them and say, “I have already linked to you; will you also link to me.” If they say no or ignore you, no big deal, just remove the link.

Make certain too that you’re trading equitable link positions. If they link you on every page, you need to do the same. If they bury you on a links page, you should do the same.

Directory / DMOZ.org Links – Define your business and find the best category within DMOZ.org, and follow the link at the bottom of that page to submit your site for inclusion. DMOZ is a highly regarded directory site and having your link there will automatically include you in Google Directory and many other sites that look for easy content to flesh out their offerings without any work. We have already said that these automatically generated sites perform poorly, but these low-level links will not hurt you and will get your name out in the market.

Don’t worry about hitting every single one, since most of them run on the same database, but if you can find a fair handful, a few hours investment can payoff in the long run.

Sponsored Links – Many sites offer to sell sponsored links. They often appear at the bottom of pages, sometimes at the bottom right. These are the least valuable ad spaces, which is why they are so affordable. Don’t count on seeing big traffic (or any at all), but know that buying them helps search engines find you and realize your relevance.

Since you’re likely going to pay as much as $10 per month for these (assuming your link goes to every page of their site, not some obscure single page, which you should never purchase), you need to make certain this is a high-traffic, high-relevance site.

Contextual Links – If you can find a long-standing web publication to sell you keyword driven links pointing to your site, these are the very best to buy. I worked for a company that would broker deals between leading publications and advertisers where article keywords in news publications like “concert” or “football game” would point to an event ticket reseller.

These help the most because the links pointing to your site are now equated in the minds of the search engines with those terms.

A word of caution, however, if you’re going to ask to trade links: don’t say “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Instead, post a link to them and say, “I have already linked to you; will you also link to me.” If they say no or ignore you, no big deal, just remove the link.

Make certain too that you’re trading equitable link positions. If they link you on every page, you need to do the same. If they bury you on a links page, you should do the same.

Directory / DMOZ.org Links – Define your business and find the best category within DMOZ.org, and follow the link at the bottom of that page to submit your site for inclusion. DMOZ is a highly regarded directory site and having your link there will automatically include you in Google Directory and many other sites that look for easy content to flesh out their offerings without any work. We have already said that these automatically generated sites perform poorly, but these low-level links will not hurt you and will get your name out in the market.

Don’t worry about hitting every single one, since most of them run on the same database, but if you can find a fair handful, a few hours investment can payoff in the long run.

Sponsored Links – Many sites offer to sell sponsored links. They often appear at the bottom of pages, sometimes at the bottom right. These are the least valuable ad spaces, which is why they are so affordable. Don’t count on seeing big traffic (or any at all), but know that buying them helps search engines find you and realize your relevance.

Since you’re likely going to pay as much as $10 per month for these (assuming your link goes to every page of their site, not some obscure single page, which you should never purchase), you need to make certain this is a high-traffic, high-relevance site.

Contextual Links – If you can find a long-standing web publication to sell you keyword driven links pointing to your site, these are the very best to buy. I worked for a company that would broker deals between leading publications and advertisers where article keywords in news publications like “concert” or “football game” would point to an event ticket reseller.

These help the most because the links pointing to your site are now equated in the minds of the search engines with those terms.

How to implement these links

Ideally, you should do these on your own. Nobody knows relevance to your industry and your company as well as you do. When it comes to purchasing links, however, you may wish to hire an outside agent. You should be able to find a single agent who can broker better deals by volume than you may be able to get. First ask your web designer what they know and if they can help you.

And if you’re reading this and wondering what to do, post your questions below with thoughts and ideas about costs and I’ll do my best to respond with specific answers.

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Traditional advertising has some huge benefits the internet has found difficult to replicate. There isn’t a goodwill equivalent of sponsoring a little league team, or a targeted audience quite as captive as putting a notice in the Sunday bulletin, but there are still advantages that can’t be overlooked.

Let’s take a handful of blog entries compared with a 5,000 copy newsletter mailed out to your customers.

1 – Your web content will reach customers you didn’t even know existed, as well as the ones you knew about.

2 – Your best customers can share your web content with friends, family and coworkers with ease.

3 – You can fix your mistakes. If you’ve ever sent out a newsletter with a typo, you know how embarrassing that can be. With web content you can always go back and fix it easily.

4 – The cost of printing and mailing 5,000 newsletters, no matter how many corners you cut, is going to cost around $2,000. Web content, even with excellent design, top notch hosting and paid editorial content, will still cost a fraction as much.

5 – Instead of 5,000, you may have 5,000,000 readers, and the cost to you will remain the same.

6 – The long term effect of web content is tremendous. Unlike traditional marketing media that fades the minute it’s mailed, web content remains online for as long as you’d like it to. That means years from now you’ll still find that people are reading your content from today and even taking action based on it.

The cost, convenience, customer experience and long term benefits make it clear why almost 5% of small businesses have started publishing a business blog and why the number is growing every day.

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Once you’ve run a blog for a while you may find the ideas harder and harder to come up with. You know you need to update regularly and make the stories as relevant and interesting as possible, but that may seem like too much work. An easy way out of the problem is to buy articles from a content farm, but it’s not a very good solution.

A content farm is a site with articles you can purchase, or in some cases use for free, to quickly get tons of content to put on your site.

Free content is almost universally designed to promote someone else’s business. You may search for articles about cars but end up with stories promoting a specific dealership or the interests of a particular manufacturer. Worse still is that, in trade for the use of these articles, you will be required to insert links pointing back to the place you got them from.

Unless you’re in the business of promoting other web sites for free, this is not something you should be doing.

Paid articles from content farms is even worse. Not only will you usually be required to place the links pointing to other sites, but the articles you buy may appear on dozens, if not hundreds, of other sites already. Search engines can spot identical content, so unless what you purchase is completely original and has only been sold to you for your exclusive use, the benefit to search engines will be effectively eliminated.

If you can’t create your own content, or just don’t feel like it, the best solution is to hire a professional writer with pro-blogging experience. In all my years of working in this industry I’ve never heard anyone brag about the benefits of content farms except for the people who own them, and their goal is not your success, but their own success.

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

In the early days of the internet the mantra was “content is king.” Once the spammers and scammers got smart enough, that fell away, but the good guys at Google have better programmers and smarter systems, so lucky for readers, those days are back. Content is once again king, even if it’s a throne he’s forced to share with some other important elements.

It’s unfortunate for webmasters who want a cheap and easy way to bring eyeballs to their sites, though, since content is far more work than installing a system to trick the search engines. That’s okay for you, though, because those eyeballs would resent you anyhow for stuffing the ballot box in your favor, as it were.

If content is the king, relevance is his crown and scepter

When the shift to content came back the first thing the tricksters did was create endless pages full of random words. That’s content all right, but it sure as heck isn’t very useful. Tricks like that didn’t work for very long, and they almost never work now. When they do sneak through the system, you get angry readers and risk being blacklisted by the search engines.

How can you be relevant? It all depends on what you do. If you make widgets, talk about how you make them and what purpose they serve. If you offer landscaping, talk about shrubs and bulbs. Whatever your area of expertise is, that’s what you need to talk about.

Stepping up the content

If you want more content but don’t have the time, ability or inclination to do it yourself, consider hiring a professional to take over the responsibilities for you, or at least supplement your own writing.

Many web design firms have writers on staff for just this purpose. People like this are most commonly used to complete content pages for site’s “About Us” and “Products & Services” pages, but many are capable and experienced writers who can write news articles, blog entries or detailed product descriptions for your site.

There’s a fair chance your existing web site is already equipped to handle such regular additions of fresh content, or that your site can easily be reconfigured for it. When in doubt, just ask.

The only thing better than lots of relevant content

A large volume of relevant content is great, so the only thing better is regularly updated text content. If you commit to adding even one or two new articles or pages per week, search engines will be more likely to come back often, and so will your organic readers.

Once a search engine recognizes that you regularly update your content, they’ll realize that the site is an actual living entity on the web, for lack of a better way to describe it, and your rankings within your key search terms will improve.

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Thursday, March 20th, 2008

A Favorites Icon is the little logo for your site that appears in the address bar up top just before the URL. It used to be a sign of elite status on the web since it proved you had good designers who had great skill and rare software on hand. Today it doesn’t mean much of that, and almost everyone has one, and that means your site should too.

Now it means that sites absent of a Favorites Icon (the file named ‘favicon.ico’) may stand out as less professional.

If you already have one and need to upload it, simply place it in the root directory of your site. Some hosts may require you to login to your control panel to upload it through there, but that’s less common.

If you’ve already uploaded it but can’t see it when you go to your site, you may need to clear your cache (under the dropdown tab ‘options’) or restart your browser.

There are a number of sites out there that allow you to upload an image to their site to automatically generate a pretty good Favicon, but make sure you give it a sharp, crisp, high-contrast, high-saturation image of at least 160×160, and it being perfectly square will help too. If you or your graphic designer are familiar with PhotoShop, this is all very simple. If not, don’t sweat it too much; you’ll still do okay.

If the option is present, select to merge the icon with larger sizes like 48×48.

When you get a site built, ask your designer to create a Favicon, and make sure it will be created, uploaded and tested for you. Ideally, you won’t pay extra for this. It should be a fairly standard item in any site construction or redesign.

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Thursday, March 20th, 2008

It’s human nature and smart business to look for the lowest bidder, but be careful about the questions you ask your bidders, the people you’re going to put in control of your most valuable business tool. Too often, the lowest bidder will rack up extra charges for a number of reasons, even if they are trustworthy. Here are a few questions and thoughts to bear in mind when looking for a network provider.

Hourly vs. Contract

A lot of low cost providers like to quote prices based on hourly service. The inherent problem with this approach is that it gets rid of the incentive to work quickly and entirely eliminates their benefit of doing the job right the first time.

Especially if your IT staff can troubleshoot remotely, which all of the good ones do with services like GoToAssist, you can’t really know how many hours they work compared to how many they bill, and low cost providers have to get the income up one way or another.

Companies willing to charge contract prices do so knowing they can get the job done more quickly and efficiently, so the need to charge by the hour may be reserved for training or meetings, when time will be fixed.

What’s Included, What Isn’t?

Many times a network manager will offer an affordable maintenance contract, but not mention which critical elements cost extra. Some companies will not include things like scheduled data backups, technical support, on-site service or even a local staff. Talk with them and ask what is included, but also be very sure to ask what is not included.

Got Certification?

There is no licensing requirement for network managers, so technically, your nephew can do the job if he knows enough to be dangerous. If you have a small network, you will require MCSE or MCSA certifications (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator, respectively.)

If you have a bigger network, or hold your IT staff to higher standards, you should look for more comprehensive certifications like Cisco. The Microsoft certifications are perfectly valid, but children as young as 9 years old have earned them, so take them with a grain of salt. The same can not be said of Cisco certifications, which require intense training and testing.

Check References

Since you’re going to be putting the entire company in the hands of these people, you need to know what their reputation is. It’s not enough that they seem like nice enough people; you need to look at other clients they have to make sure you’re not going to be their first customer, or their next victim. Have they managed a network as big as yours? Have they been thrown off of jobs before? Your business is too important to leave to chance, even if you do save $10 per hour.

Best Advice

Before hiring a network provider, make a list of every question you can think of and make sure you get the answers you need to make the best decision. If something is important, get it in writing. If you have any doubts, do more research. Look at their other clients, check out their certifications, and don’t be afraid to hurt anyone’s feelings. This could be the beginning of a long and successful relationship, or the most dangerous mistake you’ll ever make.

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Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Business owners have already recognized the value of a strong web presence, but taking that from a simple brochure to a powerful marketing device can change everything you thought you knew about marketing in a period of just a few months, but you can’t do it alone. You need help from some of the biggest companies in the world, and those are the search engine likes of Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL, not to mention all their lesser cousins.

Getting a site to the top of the search engines can be tricky, but the benefits of building your site with those companies in mind will pay off in ways far better than any traditional advertisements, and you can do it while helping people get the information they want, even if they aren’t ready to become your customer just yet.

Convincing a search engine that your site is important and relevant is hard, but if your pages are not built in compliance with their published standards, it can be impossible. A big key to making the search engines work with you is making your site easy for them to “index,” or read and catalog.

SEO Friendly Pages

Whenever you use Flash or images instead of text, specify alternative text so the search engines can still understand what it is.

Start off with a descriptive, relevant headline. This needs to say what the page is going to be about and it should appear separate and in a larger font.

Make sure your ROBOTS file is set to permit access to search engine crawlers. If they aren’t permitted to look at your site, they won’t have any idea what content is there.

Avoid the use of Frames and iFrames, as these are still very confusing to search engines. You may have relevant content that the search engines like, but when readers click through, they’ll find themselves in a small portion of your page, rather than on a real, full-content page.

Making the Most of Meta Headers & Keywords

You may not have noticed this before, but up in the top of every web document is an area of “meta” text. This may include the page’s title, description, language used, keywords, program used to create the page, how soon it will be updated or deleted, and more.

If you didn’t know that exists, odds are it isn’t being utilized fully. The title and description are rarely overlooked, but the keywords often are. Having relevant keywords in here that actually pertain to the page can boost search engine rankings tremendously.

The Keys to the Keywords

Don’t use the same keywords for every single page of your site. Not all pages are about the same things, and recycling the same ones over and over doesn’t help one page over another.

List as many as 20-30 keywords if you can, but make sure they actually apply to the page. Littering it with irrelevant words (commonly used in the past have been celebrity names) can hurt your site more than help it.

Make them specific and descriptive.

If possible, you should tell your webmaster or web designer to make a box in the admin section of your site, so that when you create new pages you can enter the keywords right there. If you have to manually crack in to the code every time you make a new page, it’s going to be far more work than it’s worth.

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