Coaching For Success
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Three Tips on Search Engine Optimization especially for Small Business Owners
Jul 7th
Starting an Internet business is an exciting adventure. It requires a small initial investment, which gives Internet business owners with bright, creative ideas a good chance of success. If you are a small business owner, these three Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips will be of great help.
Develop Great Website Content
If your website content is bland and generic, people will consider your product bland and generic. Too many sites think they can get away with writing robotic articles filled with little more than keywords, but they are wrong and it will hurt their business. This strategy will get people to their website, and get them off the website in a matter of seconds.
If you are targeting specific keywords (and you should), centre your content around those keywords. Use grammatically correct English and make the tone of your writing conversational. Also, submit articles to other websites to build your expertise.
Use Social Media
When you provide great content, you also have to provide a way for visitors to share your articles. Visit some popular websites. How many of them have Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and other “tell your friends” links below every article? This simple feature allows your visitors to spread the word of your business just by clicking a link.
Analyze Your Success
If you have a successful Internet business, do you know if you are earning as much as you should be? A tool for analyzing visitor statistics, like Google Analytics, allows you to see how many people are coming to your site and, more importantly, from where. If you use pay-per-click campaigns, this will allow you to see how many people are coming to your site. Additionally, you will see how many of those visitors end up buying your products. This will allow you to change your ads and your landing page to see how different marketing messages, page layout, and page content affect your income.
6 Top SEO Myths Dispelled
Jul 6th
There is a lot of info out there online, some great some not so good. Online just like life there are folk tales, myths (no Dragons 
) that never seems to go away and in some instances have gained such momentum that some swear it is the truth. This post seeks to dispell some of the common SEO myths in the pursuit of clarity for the already information overloaded internet business owner. In reverse order:
Myth #6 – JavaScript links cannot be crawled
This is not really true Google and many other top search engines now go out of there way to spider JavaScript-based links and pass PR through them. If you are attempting to hide pages from being crawled, you will have to format links that you don’t want crawled for PageRank in a much more complicated way using iframe elements or generate them with JavaScript that is defined off the page. Remember to disallow the /iframe, iframe source file or .js file in your robots.txt file.
Myth #5 – 404 pages are significant to your SEO
Ok this one just keeps coming back like bad Freddie Kruger movies, Yes it is important but it will not help your SEO. Usability is important for all sites but this is not SEO, a search engine will stop when they get a 404 whether there is anything on the page or not so basically does PageRank and any link benefits attached to the page.
Myth #4 – XML sitemaps help improve site rankings
XML site maps like 404 pages are really for usability, for that purpose do create them. Many people would say they are important to SEO as it might help you get your site indexed which has merit, however for the effort you put in it will not improve your sites rankings or increase keyword relevance and does not pass PR.
Myth #3 – Being W3C compliant aids SEO
This one is always interesting as in the pursuit of a good site, we do believe your site should be compliant, however it seems at odds with search engine providers logic to only list pages based on compliance rather than relevance and hence give a PageRank according to that sites compliance. Providers such as Google are more likely to consider on-page factors, link importance and link relevance. This may not be the case for mobile web users as in that instance it would make more sense to make the results shown based on friendliness of the pages using valid XHTML documents.
Myth #2 – there is an ideal keyword density
This one is a biggy as lots of SEO tools claim the ability to determine what keyword density should be used on a landing page. This software will usually look for sites ranking well for a keyword/phrase and average the density of those pages to give you a score. Many of the tools do not take into consideration off-page factors which may well increase the pages popularity. It is best to keep your keyword density around 2 – 3% although there is no particular percentage that you should target.
Drum roll please
Myth #1 – Duplicate content will get you penalized
This is the biggest myth out there in SEO and is the most misunderstood issue. Many SEO articles and people will say that duplicate content can hinder your rank and get you penalised.
Don’t get me wrong here it is not really a good thing to have duplicate content and it could potentially hurt your rank, however it is not that simple. Anyone writing content knows how hard it can be to write a totally original piece as so much information on many topics is already out there. Unique (i.e not found in that format) content is best but really this is a grey area.
When Search Engines find pages with the same content they will attempt to find the original source using factors like PageRank, domain age and trust, the site determined to be the original source will then get the SEO benefits from the content. Basically leaving the duplicate content site owner with no ranking or being indexed in supplementary pages essentially making the content of no use to the that site owner.
Only in extreme cases like whole sites or parts of whole site duplication (cloning) will your site be penalised and or removed from search engines.
Really this problem is easy to avoid as there are many article twisters/spinners out there; most are free, that will allow you/ help you rewrite the duplicate content. Equally sites like copyscape.com can also help you ensure that your content is as unique as possible.
Hopefully this post will help business owners put aside some of the myths so they can continue to build a successful business without worrying too much about the SEO myths whilst concentrating on the real job of Search Engine Optimisation.
Internet Marketing Service Experts: Should You Hire Them?
Jul 2nd
An Internet Marketing Service Provider Can Help You Put The Internet Business Puzzle Together for Success.
Should you hire Internet marketing service experts or not? The correct answer is – it depends. Think about the following issues and you will come up with the right answer on your own.
How Internet savvy are you? If you can honestly say you are an expert user, doing Internet marketing on your own will be much easier. From a purely technical point of view, understanding tools and methods such as Facebook, Twitter, search engine optimization, pay-per-click and analytics tools is a challenge. Even if you are a proficient consumer of Internet services, you will find yourself confused when it comes to being a provider of online services.
How familiar are you with marketing? Even if you know how to use all the different tools, you will not be able to use them well for your Internet business if you do not understand marketing. Knowing the basics – price, products, place, and promotion is good. Then you need to have a well-designed marketing plan. Finally, you need to combine that knowledge with technical know-how to design ads and campaigns that will appeal to your target audience.
How interested are you in Internet marketing? If you are the kind of person who just wants to use Internet to do business, learning how to market your products can be a time-consuming endeavor that just frustrates you and drags you away from what you really enjoy doing. You will find yourself learning how to do things you would rather have somebody else do, while the thing that really gets you excited is pushed in the background.
To make the right choice for yourself, make a quick cost-benefit analysis. Assess your current knowledge of Internet technologies and marketing. Then find out how much time you would need to learn to do that job on your own. Include the cost of any books or seminars you would need to purchase. Then calculate how much money you would make doing the job you are actually good at. If, after all this, it makes more sense to focus on your core business and leave Internet marketing to an expert, hire one. Otherwise, do it on your own.
For a small business owner looking to start an Internet business, it can be hard to add the cost of hiring an Internet Marketing Service provider to all the other costs. But good services of a qualified professional will soon pay off and end up saving you a lot of money.
A Little SEO Goes A Long Way
Jun 11th
Websites are a great way to promote your business. They can reach millions of people within a click with little cost. As a website owner you desire the maximum possible visitors you can get to view your website. The quickest possible way to make your unknown webpage visible among the millions of other web sites online is to get to the top of search engine results lists somewhere on that first page preferable in the top five (not including the paid ads).
This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Some people think it is a matter of luck getting their site to this position, some Internet Marketing people will tell you that there is some special art to getting there, however this is not true all you need do is learn some of the techniques of ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ which can help you achieve it.
The SEO Building Blocks
SEO-Definition and Importance
SEO is the process of building content for your site in such a way that it improves the probability of getting it listed in the maximum amount of search engines for relevant searches for your content area. You can do this through ‘Keyword Enrichment’, which is using the words, which are used frequently by your target audience with relevance to your business area. The importance of SEO lies in the fact that the basic purpose of building a website is to get people visiting it, no matter how beautiful or creative it is or not as the case maybe.
‘Starting SEO’
You begin building a website by identifying its basic objective or the goal. The goal must state what you want people to do on your website. You may intend to put lots of information about your products, you may want people to join your business network or you may want to sell products online. Whatever your intention is, you have to be clear about it and on the basis of that you will offer some value to your visitors.
‘Offering value to your visitors’
If you don’t provide what your visitors are looking for then your basic purpose fails. So, you must know what people want from your website and what exactly you can offer to match their needs. Even if they don’t find much use for the information, give them an option to ‘like’ your information so as to indicate that you have gained their interest. You can always ask them to put some comments along with their email address, which can help you in expanding your customer database as well as improving the information you offer on your site. The content may contain articles, e-books, a report, discussion topics, a newsletter, an infomercial etc., but it must be in line with the customers’ needs.
‘Continuous improvement‘
Once you get visits on your site you should make the effort to continuously update the content of the site. The latest happenings relevant to your business must be published from time to time. Even the user interface of the site must be changed so that visitors feel refreshed each time the visit the site. If you have gained sufficient traffic on the website, then you can even showcase your product for selling purpose. Features like online payment, online order booking etc. must be there to facilitate the customers.
Always remember, once you create an exhaustive and possibly beautiful website (beauty is not always necessary as some very ugly sites do extremely well), you automatically get the advantage of viral marketing which is great SEO. As the number of visits on your webpages increase, your SEO efforts automatically help you get closer to the top of organic search engine results and gain more prominence.
Keeping such simple things in mind and designing a website for your business will fetch you unexpectedly good results. The power of Internet can be a boost to your business if you learn how to tap its potential in the proper way. SEO helps in guiding you to tap that potential.
