vestadigital

Google SEO Strategy for 2011

: vestadigital; May 20th, 2011

Current Mood:: content

Speed of the Site

With the right web platform, businesses are able to have access to a rich and powerful web application framework with a supporting cast of tools, servers, and technologies to help them succeed on the web. By choosing a web developer for your website, you are choosing a framework (PHP, .NET) with their own advantages and disadvantages. A web developer will choose the framework for developing a website depending on the requirements and his or her technical proficiency. Make sure it matches your strategy and not just your budget.

Good Control of CMS

Content is the key to a successful website. Solid content requires superior organization and better-quality management. Each business or organization has its own strategies for collecting, organizing, storing and maintaining the information intended for consumption by an audience.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

CMS is a set of processes, applications, and databases that help businesses create, store, coordinate, and publish information with a consistent method in a useful format and in a timely fashion. Companies need to spent considerable amount of time evaluating CMS platforms and their use based on the requirements set forth by each company. One important thing to consider is the skill level of the people who will be directly involved with the chosen platform on the daily basis.

Keywords and Internal Linking

Keyword research, competitive analysis and solid content are a must. Don’t attempt to go after the one 1 word keywords like “cars” “shopping” “lawyer”(reach for the moon why don’t you). Most people start with the most popular term in the industry, throw in a couple of variations and call it done. You need to learn your audience. Target words from your users, evaluate your traffic reports from the web tools you are using and constantly update your web content to support your rankings. One more reason why you need a good CMS in place: to edit, add, delete and create more pages-see CMS above. Know what it will take to compete and then build for success.

Your website's content is filled with the opportunities to link to other pages throughout your site and help users find their end destination faster. For a successful internal linking strategy have your user in mind and go through your site sections and pages to see where you can insert some contextual links to other pages that you consider to be your most popular landing pages. The link connections should be valid, meaning that the target key phrases are seen on the destination page and are easy to spot.

Social Media Marketing and Distribution

The world of social media is vast and growing. Facebook with 500 million users leads the revolution that is disrupting advertising professionals, marketing experts, and small business owners alike. If you use social media the correct way, that is to build and strengthen relationships, you can build brand awareness, loyalty, and generate word-of-mouth marketing. Simple dissemination of your web content to 30 networks you just registered does not work. To succeed with social media marketing, you need to ensure that your branded messages to your audience provide meaningful content that adds value to the reader's experience.

Watch this Google video.

Tags: content management system, google, seo, social media marketing

What to do in a Cash Flow Crisis

: vestadigital; February 23rd, 2011

In the event your small business starts experiencing a lull in cash flow, you need to act fast. Even if you’re still profitable on paper, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have enough in the bank to pay the bills. Problems can arise especially if your company is successful, but your customers start slowing down their payments.

David Worrell of Allbusiness.com has a specialty in finance and managing small businesses. He wrote a great article on a few tips that can help you survive a cash flow crisis. Below are a few pieces of advice from David that may help to save your company from going under.

Know the numbers.

“In good times and bad, keep an eye on key cash flow numbers. I'm not talking just about a cash flow statement each month, but also about key ratios or metrics in your business. If you start this habit in good times, you'll have forewarning when cash turns against you,” David says.

His advice is extremely useful in this circumstance because new business owners have their focus spread out. It’s important to keep a finger on the pulse of your cash flow because you will be able to better sense an incoming crisis and have more opportunities to prevent it from happening.

Cut your own pay. Now.

“Besides taking pressure off of cash, this will motivate you to fix the problem. If you hide behind a salary – and keep building debt, or laying off staff to pay yourself – the problem will grow worse until it is out of control. Cutting your own pay also demonstrates leadership to your team,” David says.

This fact is extremely important to running and entrepreneurial business. As a leader, you need to demonstrate how important it is to work together with your team members. If that means your employees are paid and you’re not in times of crisis, so be it. They will be more motivated to stick with you and have a deeper connection with the business. Employees that feel as though they are a part of the company – rather than just employed by it, can help take a company to a much higher level.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, entrepreneur, income, small business

3 Important Lessons to Learn Before Writing Your Business Plan

: vestadigital; February 21st, 2011

You can’t start anything and expect it to succeed if you don’t have a plan. After developing, nurturing and convincing yourself and all of your confidantes that your new venture proposal is an absolutely fantastic idea, you need to write a business plan.

There are many different views on how long this process can take, some say a few weeks and some say six months. It truly all depends on the kinds of resources you have available like time, money to conduct an effective amount of research, and the people you need to work with in order to create the best business plan ever.

Here are a few tips based on some advice from Tim Berry, founder of Palo Alto Software, about a few factors that make an effective business plan.

It must match the business purpose

Your small business should have an ultimate end goal in mind, whether the plan is to exit to get investment, create a self-sustaining charity, or whatever your goal for your business may be. Your business plan should be framed by your business purpose – where your business is going and what you want to leave behind.

Lesson 1: Your business plan must outline your company objective.

It must be realistic

Your business plan really won’t get you anywhere if your projections are off the charts. You may have a fantastic business plan with pretty charts and flawless formatting, but if you are presenting an idea for a product that simply cannot be produced, it’s not going to catch on.

Lesson 2: Step back and assess the feasibility of your plan.

It must be specific

According to Tim Berry, “every business plan ought to include tasks, deadlines, dates, forecasts, budgets, and metrics. It’s measurable.” This idea is so true and it’s amazing how many business plans leave out the crucial information. You can make your company sound great but if you don’t have the numbers backing up your projections, you might as well start over.

Lesson 3: Outline your business’s every detail

You have to give yourself the ability to track your results and see if you are in line with your projections and goals. You will most likely encounter set backs and a few failures here and there but if you have a solid business plan and structure in place, it won’t be difficult to reassess your business situation and get back in line.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, entrepreneur, small business, succeed

How to Execute a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign

: vestadigital; February 18th, 2011

Having a small business can be very rewarding but it can also be stressful. If you are having trouble getting the amount of traffic your small business needs, it is time to invest in a small business website. Having a website is becoming a mandatory facet of success for any business. Once your business website is set up, you should begin a social media marketing campaign.

We've all heard the buzz about how important it is to invest time into social media. With these tips, you can learn exactly how to execute a campaign that will create enough word-of-mouth marketing that people will notice your business website and make the commitment to buy from you, not your competitors.

Learn to listen

Social media really is all about the social experience. If you want to gain more customers, you need to establish relationships online. It's no different than establishing a relationship in person. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and say "here's my business card, buy my product." You would take the time to get to know that person's interests before offering to help with a particular problem. This is why it is important to listen to your target audience rather than bombard your audience with links and offers.

Provide value

If you spend all of your time on Facebook posting links and advertisements, people will ignore you. There is enough advertising clutter throughout every day of our lives, we don't need it when we log into a social network as well. People will only be interested in what you have to offer if it is valuable to them. As a small business owner it's a given that you know a lot about your product and your industry. Share some of that information. If you give people a reason to listen to what you have to say, you've made it half way. After you get an audience's attention, the selling is easy.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, business website, online business, small business, social media, social media marketing

What Social Media is Really For

: vestadigital; February 16th, 2011

If you own a small business and have a business website, you’re probably doing pretty well for yourself. After all the economy should be mending soon and you should have already done your homework and found a product that solves a specific problem within the market.

Now, the only difficult part after setting up your small business website is marketing it so that you gain some traffic flow and hopefully increase your revenue stream. This is where social media kicks in. Social media can help you cut marketing costs, build relationships, and network with other people both in your industry and in completely unrelated fields.

Social Media Marketing

Entrepreneur.com wrote a recent article about how to treat social media marketing like a cocktail party. I love this idea because it promotes the concept of social media as a fun, relaxing environment where people come to converse, network, get to know each other, etc. It’s no tradeshow where people are bombarded with free trinkets and obnoxious displays.

Entrepreneur.com goes on to say that in order for your social media presence to have any value, you need to focus on other people’s interests and needs. This should be a given because as an entrepreneur you should always be paying attention to people’s complaints searching for an opportunity to fix them and expand.

Your role in social media is not to advertise your existence; it’s supposed to be a tool to measure the preferences and behaviors of your target market. What better survey than the one your consumers completed on their own time and on their own volition?

According to Entrepreneur.com:

“Online marketing specialists say small businesses like yours are well-positioned to make their customers and fans feel they are the center of the conversation, via social media.”

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: advertising, business, business website, facebook, online business, small business, social media, social media marketing

Tips To Appear Higher Up On Google

: vestadigital; February 15th, 2011

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with a small business website is just waiting for traffic to come to you. Why not, if you have a great product? Wrong. If you have a small business website you need to get your market’s attention. That’s not going to happen by simply offering a good product.

Your small business website has two different types of Google rankings. You have your search engine ranking and your page ranking. While they essentially work together to determine your website's worth, they have a different set of criteria that defines the rank.

Search Engine Ranking

Your search engine ranking is where you end up on a results page after a person conducts a keyword search through Google. Naturally, people are going to click higher up on Google to get what they want. So, it’s important for you to put some effort into your website so you show up higher on Google.

Page Ranking

Every web page out there has a score between 0 and 10 (10 being the better score). This score represents how influential your web page is. According to Entrepreneur.com, Google updates page rankings four times every year. There are several things you can do to improve your individual page ranking as well.

If you don’t know your ranking, simply search for your product on Google and see where you end up. You also have the option of finding a web page that shows page ranks – for you and your competitors. If you install Google’s Toolbar, you will have the ability to see each site’s page rank as you visit them.

Here are a few ways to improve your page ranking and your overall search engine rankings:

Build links

The more pages out there that link back to your site, the higher you will appear on a search engine, it’s as simple as that. This means you should participate in conversation with others (or even your competitors), and provide a link back to your website. Social Media is another great place to leave links.

Keywords

Use keywords throughout every webpage, but don’t practice keyword stuffing. If you stuff your content with keywords, Google can actually punish your ranking. Try to use keywords as naturally as possible throughout your web content.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, business website, keywords, online business, page rank, search engine optimization, search engines

Why You Should Own Your Own Business Today

: vestadigital; February 14th, 2011

Besides the fact that many people are reporting an improvement in the economy, there are so many reasons why you should set up your own business. There are plenty of problems in the market, if you could set up a business focusing on solving that problem, you’re good to go.

Allbusiness.com wrote a great article on the top 10 things small businesses can be thankful for, so I’m going to give you 5 of these blessings as reasons you should go into business right away.

You are your own boss.

The best part of running a small company has always been that you're in business for yourself, not someone else. So go ahead, take Friday off -- the boss won't mind. You are a part of a team that shares a vision. You focus on innovation, motivation, achieving the same goal as your peers – rather than an administrative environment where everyone is focused on meeting deadlines and climbing their way up the ladder.

Small is the new large.

Revolutionary changes in technology -- including the increasing consumerization of business tech, the rise of cloud computing, and Software as a Service (SaaS) are dramatically cutting the cost of equipping a business and building a computing infrastructure. Best of all, these trends seem tailor-made for the needs of small businesses -- especially startups -- not saddled with the legacy systems that can hinder many older, larger companies.

The economy really is getting better.

No doubt about it, things are still tough for many people, but there are more and more positive signs out there, boding well for companies large and small. The major stock market indexes have shown surprising strength, credit card issuers report that delinquencies have slowed, and U.S. retail sales currently stand at their highest level in more than two years. That's all good news for small businesses, especially consumer-facing firms. Even as most prices small businesses pay remain low, some small businesses are reporting that they've been able to increase profits by raising prices.

The Internet and social media.

From Facebook to Twitter to eBay to email marketing, the Internet's impact on small business is impossible to overstate. The Internet has made it possible for even the smallest companies to sell their products and services around the world, to work with suppliers and employees in remote locations, and to inexpensively market to millions (or billions) of people at once. On the Web nobody knows you're a small business -- in many ways you're competing on a level playing field with the Fortune 500. And that's not all. The Web also makes it easy to get the information you need to make your business successful -- not to mention network with your peers for advice and support.

Great employees.

Small business owners have the privilege of leading some of the most dedicated, resourceful, productive workers in the world. And unlike large multinational corporations, small businesses often get the opportunity to work directly in cooperative teams with their employees, free of much of the bureaucracy and red tape that hobble bigger organizations.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, entrepreneur, management, small business, social media

How To Balance Your Business and Your Marriage

: vestadigital; February 11th, 2011

In lieu of Valentine's Day next week i decided to cover a topic a little closer to our hearts. How do we business-oriented people balance our relationships and our professions? This sort of advice can apply to any career-oriented person, not just the newly budding entrepreneur or over-achieving small business owner.

Entrepreneur.com recently posted an article that discusses the ultimate business question: how do you balance your business and your personal life? Any mentor will tell you that owning your own business can often strain even the best marriages. The article shows how three couples manage to balance romance and business.

Couple #1

Travel often comes with the territory when you own your own business. Entrepreneurs Peter and Susan Fuller (married for 18 years) have firsthand experience. They each own a separate business in Indianapolis and Peter is forced to travel frequently – one of the number one strains of any relationship, especially if there are children involved.

Peter felt he was doing his best to stay connected but once he slowed his business travel to once every six weeks, and supplemented the time apart with Skype video calls, the couple was able to regain their passion.

Their advice:

in any relationship it’s important to have similar goals, like having the freedom to create their own paths in life.

Couple #2

Another struggle couples often go through when business is involved is the failure of a venture. Dediako Rogers watched helplessly as his real-estate business plummeted in 2008 after the housing-market collapse. He and his wife, Rachel were newlyweds and were constantly cutting expenses in every way they could, including downsizing their home and sharing one vehicle.

The couple was able to get back on their feet after Rachel received her law degree and started a law firm serving Gen-Y entrepreneurs and business owners.

Their advice:

Being married to another entrepreneur is helpful because you understand each other’s drive to run their own business. Be supportive of each others’ pursuits and encourage each other to start new businesses and try new things.

Couple #3

One of the most unlikely strains comes from being married to your business partner. It can make it difficult to keep business from becoming involved in every part of your life. Jessica Rovello and Kenny Rosenblatt met while working at a tech company and launched an online gaming business in 2001 together. They married in 2004.

The two experienced difficulties when they caught themselves bringing their work home.

Their advice:

Respect each other’s passion for your professions. It’s important to balance work topics with fun topics as well.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, entrepreneur, small business

Top 3 Small Business Ideas for 2011

: vestadigital; February 10th, 2011

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, 2011 is the best time to start a business. If you’re tired of working in a managerial environment and you’re ready to take on a market, you should start exploring some ideas. Before taking off into a new venture, you need to be aware of what kind of opportunities are excelling in the market this year.

The Noobpreneur Business Blog posted 10 great ideas for budding entrepreneurs everywhere to consider. Read on to see the ones I thought were the most opportunistic for 2011.

1. Online business and make money online

Online businesses will always thrive so long as our society continues to depend on technology the way it does today. People search for products, brands, prices, reviews, and just about everything they need online. Your online business can be very lucrative because it is more cost-effective (if executed properly) than a brick-and-mortar location. If you set up your small business website, make sure you maintain control over the content so you can adapt to the changing environment and evolving consumer preferences.

2. Personalized products and/or services

There is a growing need for expressing individuality in today’s market. Customization is always a great way to please your consumer base. Offering a product your consumers can design themselves is almost a guarantee of customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth marketing. The opportunities are limitless here. You can offer t-shirts, greeting cards, school supplies, really anything that someone can personalize – you can take advantage of.

3. Small business with a cause

I recently learned of a non-profit organization that offers a free online game similar to Facebook’s Farmville. This game allows the user to build villages and actually purchase provisions for the village. By making donations and purchasing provisions through the game, the game hosts purchase real life provisions and provide them to a needy village in Uganda. Once the village is self-sustaining, they can move on to another village. They then take pictures of the provisions being provided to the village in Uganda, and post them so the gamers can see them and be involved in the whole process.

Offering an abstract incentive to buying your product can go a very long way towards your business success. If you embed a social cause into your products and services, you will have happy customers.

There are so many opportunities for you to take advantage of. Setting up your business is the easy part – it’s finding an idea that’s difficult. All you have to do is pay attention to a problem in the market and figure out a way to solve it.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, business website, entrepreneur, online business, small business

How To Turn Browsers into Buyers

: vestadigital; February 9th, 2011

Once you have set up your business website with e-commerce capability, you need to be able measure some returns. Why is it that browsers mill about your website and then bail as soon as they need to make a decision? What can you do to get them to subscribe to you, purchase from you, and give you their information?

There are several things you can do to convert more customers. WSI Marketing has some great tips on their website on how to increase your credibility and provide a positive online experience for your customers, which will undoubtedly increase your conversion rate and your online business’s ROI.

Improve your business credibility

Is your website professional? According to WSI Marketing, “consumers can be skittish, especially online. The slightest sign of impropriety can send them back to their search engine results to find another site, which may have a more professional and trustworthy appearance, even if it means paying a little more for the same product or service.”

You can make very simple improvements to your website to increase your credibility in the minds of your consumers. Some of these improvements include:

Consistently display contact information like telephone numbers for your business.
Post genuine testimonials and case studies of customers that are happy with your product.
Have an organized and easy to navigate website design, nothing too flashy or distracting from your main objective.
Have complete product information.
Double check all of your links and make sure they are working.

Have control of your website

If your web hosting service requires a fee every time you want to make a change, it can detract from the effectiveness of your website. It’s extremely important to have a content management system that allows you to have total control over your website content. You need to be continuously updating your content as you discover issues that your customers are having.

If you notice that you are getting a solid amount of website traffic but people simply aren’t buying, you need to have access to your content in order to make improvements to solve that problem. Also, if customers are asking the same questions (such as what is your warranty policy?), you should have the answer readily available on your website.

The key is to be adaptive. Be aware of what your customers want to know and need to know before making a purchase. Continuously updating the content on your site is the best way to convert browsers into buyers.

Distributed by IntelBuilder Social Media Platform

Tags: business, business website, content management system, customer loyalty, online business

Previous 10

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31