For the last 5 or more years, I couldn’t pick up a newsletter or ezine without finding an article about search engine optimization.  That is, until now.

Ten years ago, we focused on adding meta tags to our websites to get them ranked.   Five years ago, it was about linking strategies.  Then content became king.  And with each change, SEO specialists like myself adapted.  So how to you drive traffic to your site today?

The evolution of search today has taken on a real time emphasis.  Looking for the news? Today the news finds you.   Of course, you want the latest information on whatever you are searching for.  Nothing is more frustrating than going to a website and finding information from 2006.  Even if it’s still pertinent, chances are you will go on to a more current site.

Real search or live search focuses on delivering the most recent information.  And that information is frequently not from a website.  The most recent information is more likely a blog post or even a Twitter tweet.  Yes, I said a Twitter tweet.  Here’s a good example:

A Google search for “Iceland Volcano” resulted in a section for Latest News – that contains a live feed changing every few seconds.  The listing below shows results from just minutes before.

Twitter Results in Google

Directly below the Latest News is a section for Video results that displays YouTube videos of the Iceland Volcano.  What every happened to the Google we all knew that took 90 days to get your site found?

Video Results - YouTube

So should you abandon your website for a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel?  Not yet.  I look at the social media like a big funnel.  Twitter, Facebook and YouTube should be funneling people to your blog and your blog should be funneling people to your website, where browsers can find out details about you and your business and hopefully take action (but that’s another topic).

Another reason you can’t abandon search engine optimization (SEO) and your website is the permanency of social media.  You might be ranking well with your current article, post, tweet or video, but as more recent media are found, yours will either drop in ranking or disappear all together.  So you website is the anchor. A well designed, search engine optimized website should remain fairly stable (even in competitive keywords.)  For example, search for “Tucson Interior Design” in Google.  Of the top 4 results, 3 of the sites are ones that were optimized by 800biz.com several years ago.  With little or no changes, these sites have maintained their top ranking consistently.

So for now, SEO is still alive and kicking.  But today, you there are more pieces of the online marketing puzzle to put together.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Now wait a minute – Wordpress is free, isn’t it.  Yes, Wordpress is an open source program that’s free (for the most part.)   But there are different versions of Wordpress, with very different limitations.

Let’s look at Wordpress.com first.  Wordpress.com allows you to create your blog and have it hosted on the Wordpress site.  You can create an account and have your first blog in the blogosphere in a matter of minutes.  No programming knowledge is needed and you blog can be visible to the search engines, Technorati and the Wordpress blog directory.  You have a choice of templates to change the appearance of your blog, it’s layout and even include different widgets.

What’s a Widget?  A widget is an add on feature that will enhance the usability or appearance of your page.  Some common widgets are calendars, images in the side bar, videos and even social media badges.  Available widgets are based on the theme you choose.  Not all themes have the same widgets available.

There are several limitations to a Wordpress.com site.  One limitation, your blog address is www.yourname.wordpress.com.  You can have your own domain name attached for an additional charge

The limited number of themes available is another limitation of a Wordpress hosted site.  You have less than 100 themes to choose from and editing the theme requires knowledge of CSS Stylesheets and purchasing the custom upgrade.

Another limitation is access to plugins.  Plugins are like widgets since they add to the functionality of your blog.  How a plugin differs is a plugin can be added to any theme.  Wordpress.com sites do not allow plugins

Finally, your content is not in your control.  Your account is controlled by Wordpress.  You are subject to the terms and conditions of Wordpress and if, for any reason, they choose to remove your account, all your content will be lost.

Now let’s look at Wordpress.org.  Wordpress.org is also free but it requires a website  hosting account.  A large percentage of hosting accounts include a Wordpress add on.  If not, a free version of Wordpress can be downloaded from Wordpress.org.  To install, you will need FTP (file transfer protocol) to your hosting server.  FTP is a program used to upload web pages, images and other files to your server so they will be web accessible.

A Wordpress.org site is attached to your own domain name so you have full control of your content and site.  Many domain registrars, like Godaddy, also offer web hosting.  For someone that doesn’t understand the whole web hosting and domain process, many companies, like 800biz.com, offer a inexpensive package that includes domain purchase and configuration, web hosting and Wordpress setup.

Regardless of where you decide to host your site, you can expect to pay a monthly hosting fee, ranging from $9 up.  But remember, you get what you pay for – the lower price sites offer less support, no automatic backups, limited access to your site and more.  So choose your host wisely.

With a hosting Wordpress site, you have hundreds of templates you can choose from, many of which can be modified with your own graphics.  You can also modify the colors and appearance by changing the CSS stylesheet.

With your own site, you also have access to the entire Plugins Library.  There are plugins for just about everything – social media, search engine optimization, videos, polls, site review, keywords and much more.  A word of caution – read the review of any plugin before you install them.  Some plugins have not been thoroughly tested and may cause problems with your site.

My favorite plugins are:

• All In One SEO – This adds search engine optimization to your blog post
• Askimet – This helps cut down on the spam comments
• Share to Any (Add To Any) – This is one of my favorite plugins.  This plugin lets you or your readers share your blog post to hundreds of social media site and social bookmarking site.
• Socialable – This adds the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc to your blog, making it easier for people to share your content to their friends and followers.

As you can gather from this information, my recommendation is to host your blog on your own domain.  Yes it will cost you a little money.  But unless your blog is for personal use only and not business, the small investment a blog and a hosted account requires should be a no brainer.  Because you do get what you pay for.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

You Don't Need A Website UNLESS...

Wait, did I just read that right, you’re asking?  A website designer saying you don’t need a website – something must be wrong.

Well, there are cases where a website is a waste of money.  First of all, if the goal of having a website is just to check off the appropriate box on your business plan, you don’t need one.

You don’t need a website just because your brother in law, the unemployed college drop out says so.

You don’t need a website if you think a website is the new yellow pages and everybody looks there.

The bottom line is, you don’t need a website if you not committed to making it the important marketing vehicle it should be.  So where do you start?

During the last 10 years, I have seen the evolution of websites, from simple 3 page sites with a waving cactus graphic, to multi-media sites with intricate flash graphics, to the mobile web we see on our phones.  Search engine optimization has been the buzz word for the last several years.  And it remains a critical element of your website.

But in today’s internet landscape, SEO is only a piece of the puzzle.  Does your website content call browsers to take action?  How are you building your brand?  Are you the expert in your industry?

In the coming blog posts, I will discuss online marketing and how to create a comprehensive program to get maximum exposure.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

One of the biggest road blocks facing small businesses when addressing social media is the question of return on investment. With so little time devote to what’s crying out to be done, adding something else or something new like social media can feel like a real burden. Sometimes the only way to rationalize and prioritize something new is to understand the benefits in relation to everything else your doing and take a new view based on that understanding.

So much of what’s written on social media amounts to lists of things you should do, get on twitter, blog, create a Facebook fan page, and not enough on why you might consider doing it. While all those tactics may indeed be wise, I would like suggest a number of ways to use those actions to do a better or more efficient job doing things you’re already (or should be) doing.

Start to think in terms of doing more with less effort, not simply doing more. If I can let small business owners get a glimpse of social media through this lens, they might just decide to go a little deeper. Here are five ways to look at it.

1) Follow up with prospects

I love using social media tools as a way to follow-up with prospects you might meet out there in the real world. So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Then you offered to show them how to create a custom RSS feed to get tons of information about their industry and their competitors. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do.

2) Stay top of mind with customers

Once someone becomes a customer it’s easy to ignore them, assuming they will call next time they need something or, worse yet, assuming they understand the full depth and breadth of your offerings and will chime in when they have other needs. Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well.

This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Recording video stories from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online.

3) Keep up on your industry

Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. With unparalleled access to information many clients can learn as much or more about the products and solutions offered by a company as those charged with suggesting those products and solutions. You better keep up or you risk becoming irrelevant. Of course I could extend this to keeping up with what your customers, competitors, and key industry journalists are doing as well.

Here again, new monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches (see more about how to do this) or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know. (Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.)

4) Provide a better customer experience

It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying.

Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match.

While some might not lump this tool into social media, I certainly think any tool that allows you to collaborate with and serve your customers qualifies. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking.

5) Network with potential partners

Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. One of the surest ways to attract potential partners is to build relationships through networking. Of course you know that, but you might not be viewing this kind of networking as a social media function.

If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool (and you should) you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly.

If you know how to set up a blog already, offer to create a blog of network partners so each of you can write about your area of expertise and create some great local SEO for the group.

So, you see, you don’t have to bite into the entire social media pie all at once. Find a tool, a technique, a tactic that makes your life easier today and provides more value for partners, prospects and customers and you’ll be on the path to getting some real ROI on your social media investment.

What social media tactics have you discovered that allow you to do more of something you’re already doing?

Article by John Jantsch on 03/16/2010 – Reprinted from Duct Tape Marketing

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Aren’t you impressed by those work flow charts with all the bubbles so nice and orderly?  Well, prepare to be the “impressor”.  A new tool I just found called Bubbl.us does just that.

My clients often get bogged down in the layout of their website.  Visually being able to see how their site will layout is a huge time saver.  By creating a flow chart of the pages in the site and how they interconnect, Bubbl.us makes the transition from concept to reality much smoother.

Maybe you want to create a work flow chart for a new project your planning.  Start with the main theme and build sub categorie until you have everything in place.  Create an account and you can save your work, then go back and add to it as needed.

Put your ideas on paper

If you are just brainstorming an idea, use Bubbl.us to organize the ideas into a visual presentation.  No more chicken scratching on a napkin or the back of your old electric bill.

Once your done, export your masterplan as a jpg image that you can either embed in an html document or insert in your Word or Powerpoint document.

Feel like a Fortune 500 CEO with your very own organization chart.  In fact, give yourself a raise.  You’ve earned it.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in online marketing, website design, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing for small and medium size businesses.

Our goal in school was to avoid getting an F, right?  We failed when we got an F.  But when creating the content for your website, you want to make an F.  Not because you want to fail, but because you want your site to succeed.

When creating your content, it’s important to know how people view your page.  Do you know anyone that leisurely reads a web page?  With the shear volume of competition on the web, browsers will scan a page to see if that site has what they are looking for.   If you want your site to be in the running for their consideration, you need to make sure they see the major points of your site.

Here’s where the “F” comes in.  Researcher and writer Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. conducted a study of how people read on the web.  In his groundbreaking eyetracking study, he found that the reading behavior was pretty consistent.  The dominant reading pattern looks like a large letter “F”.

• Users first read horizontally across the top of the page, which forms the top bar of the F.
• Next users move down the page a bit and read across a shorter area, making the lower bar of the F.
• Finally readers scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement, completing the F.

Move outside of your website owner’s chair and look at your site with an objective eye.   What jumps out on your page?  Is your content capturing your browsers attention or are they hopping off your site to your competitor?

Gary Wagnon and 800biz has been providing website design, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small to medium sized businesses since 1999.

If you have searched Google for a local product or service and seen the map with pin points for the businesses that fit your search, you’ve seen the Google Local Business Center.  If you have a local business, your business should be listed here.  There is no cost to list your business and the process is pretty simple.

Maybe you knew that already.  But I bet you didn’t know this.  Google just made a change that unless you verify your business listing ANYONE can edit it.   What would keep your competition from going in and changing your phone number to theirs?  Wouldn’t you rather describe your own business as opposed to letting Google or your competitors describe it?

Go to Google immediately and search for your business.  When you find it in the map search, it will either say Verified or it will have “Edit Listing” and “Business Owner”.  Clicking on the Business Owner link will begin the process of claiming your listing and protecting your business’ online presence.

If you need assistance in the process, contact 800biz for all your website design, SEO, search engine optimization, online marketing and social media marketing needs.

We all remember the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the little tailor whose mistaken feat of killing seven flies with one blow eventually earned him the hand of the princess and king of the land.  A rather efficient use of one’s circumstances, wouldn’t you say.

When it comes to marketing and branding your business, you can choose the one-swing-at-a-time method or take the little tailor’s efficient approach and hit several at one time.

In previous articles, I talked about the need to a diverse approach to your online advertising and marketing plan.  With the wide assortment of social media sites, directories, social book marking sites and other sites, you can spend hours spreading your message or you can let technology do the work for you.

We can’t pick up any publication about marketing without seeing the importance of blogs in your marketing plan.  I don’t want to burst your bubble, but the power of a blog is not just in the eloquent word skills you exhibit.  The real power is the viral nature of your blog, getting it in front of as many eyes as possible.  If you only post your blog to your website, you’re limited only to the amount of traffic you site gets.  So how do you increase the readership of your blog?

That’s where a diverse approach comes into play.  Start by posting your blog to your social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or LinkedIn).  But equally as important are the social bookmark sites. There are hundreds of these sites that are made up of user contributed articles.  Many are divided into communities of like interests, while others are general purpose site, open to any type of post.  Sites such as Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Mixx are examples of the later.  All that is required is to create a free account and within 5 minutes you’re ready to share your blog with thousands of others.

Now for the double secret stuff— How would you like to have one site handle it all for you?  If you are using a WordPress blog (other than a free version), you can add a plug-in called Share To Any.  Once you publish a blog post, there will be a button at the bottom that will allow you (or anyone that reads the blog) to share it to dozens of sites, including all the major social media and social bookmark sites by simply clicking the site you want to connect to.

Ping.fm is another site that will publish your blog to all the social media at one time.  The downside of Ping is that it does not reach the social bookmark sites.  Regardless, the time saving factor is well worth it.

So be smart, be efficient.  Like the little tailor, take care of as many areas as you can with one blow.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing.  For more information, visit our websites – www.800biz.com.

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If You Build It Will They Come?

You have probably heard me use the analogy that the web is not the “Field of Dreams,” where if you build it they will come. For the last few years, we have focused on creating web sites using the latest search engine optimization techniques to help our sites reach prominent search engine ranking.

With 63% of all consumers going to the web before they make a decision on any product or service, being found is critical. But the bigger question is, with an abundance of competition in almost every category, why would a consumer choose your site over any other site?

Once it was important that you just have a web presence. If it looked good, was easy to navigate and loaded quickly, it stood a good chance for success. Today, things are quite different. Claiming you have the best prices/best quality/best customer service doesn’t cut it. Every other site says the same thing. Hoo Hum! Consumers aren’t buying that any longer.

What does your site offer? Is there a compelling offer or call to action? Do you clearly explain what you do? Do you offer delivery? Do you service your entire area or only selected parts?

Want your site to stand out? Add a video. If your site has a video that welcomes people to your site, or explains what you do, would that separate you from your competition? Do you have an email newsletter consumers can subscribe to? How about a Podcast to personally tell new visitors what you do?

Does the content of your site stand out? So many of us have trouble writing about our own business. Try having a friend or even good customer write your info. Better still, hire a professional to write the copy for your website. (I do have a couple of good sources if you need help.)

It’s time to revisit your website with an eye to making a statement that lifts your site above the rest.

If you build it, and they come, will they find any reason to take action?  That’s the question.

800biz.com specializes in website design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing.

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