Ideas for Business

Search engine optimization (or SEO) is often made out to be some strange and scary beast that only professionals dare go near. In reality, SEO is a tame beast. In fact, it’s a beast that you have a lot of control over. Sure, once you get past the basics, SEO can be time consuming, and perhaps even frustrating at times, but in reality, it’s still a simple concept.

For a web site to rank well, it’s necessary to understand what goes into the ranking process. SEO is the process of optimizing your pages (and web site) to gain the best position possible in search rankings. And that process is, as I have mentioned, fairly simple – there are only three steps:

1. Discovery – search engines need to find your content, however, I wouldn’t leave it to their efforts alone. Search engines need help and that help comes initially in the form of sitemaps that are submitted. You can expedite this process by creating a Google Webmaster Tools account – there you can submit your sitemaps encouraging the search engine to visit and crawl through your website.
2. Indexing – the second step in the SEO process is to have your pages indexed. You could submit a sitemap with 100 pages, and still find that a search engine has only indexed half the pages. External links to your pages can help as can social media mentions. It also helps if your web pages are easy to find, and easy to crawl. Pages that are deep within a website often fail to get indexed. Search engines will often only travel three or four links deep into a website. Your web pages should be easy for a search engine to read – that means ensuring your content is as close to the top as possible (of the root index file), and that Java and Flash are limited and SEO friendly as well.
3. Ranking - the hardest step in the process is ranking. This is where a page is compared to other pages and ranked for search terms. You can increase a page’s ranking by building inbound links and by gaining social media mentions. This is one area where website owners make life harder for themselves. The real key to ranking well is to create content that others find useful, that others will reference on their sites (inbound) links, and that people will discuss on social media sites (social media mentions).

SEO is the sum of those three activities and you will never succeed if you skimp on one area. You can have the best content in the world, however, if a search engine can’t find it, or finds it impossible to read when it does find it, then it won’t rank. Likewise, poor content will not receive the external support that is so vital to rank a page highly.

In a nutshell, build your site, tell the search engines where your content is, and make sure it easy to find and easy to read and that the content is worthy of ranking. Get that right and you have created a great SEO platform to build on.

What’s the one problem that every small business owners faces when it come to social media marketing? Time. There are just not enough hours in the day to manage a business, often work in the business, manage traditional marketing problems, and then manage a wide range of social media interactions. Having a Facebook page is becoming a must and for many businesses, a Twitter account as well. Google’s +1 will become a go-to place and for professionals; a profile on LinkedIn is also a big help. What’s really required is a comprehensive way to bring all four of those social media sites together, and that’s where Nimble comes to your rescue.

We’re currently putting Nimble through its paces, however, first impressions are positive. Nimble will solve some of your social media time problems since you can bring in your contacts from those four sites and review all of your interactions with those contacts. Having it all on the one page can reduce the time spent on social media by at least 50%, if not more.

Nimble is possibly one of the easiest yet comprehensive online CRM programs available. They seem to have thought of everything, even email and calendars. Personal users get one free account that comes with all the basics. Businesses can opt to pay $15 month to have multiple users and access to advanced features. There is plenty of help available including videos, which make it a lot easier to visually gain an insight into all the features.

The last word should be left to Nimble – they describe themselves as the all-in-one place where you can :

Unify all your contacts, calendars, conversations from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. Monitor the most popular social networks from one screen, engage prospects, and build deeper relationships.

If time is your problem when attempting social media marketing, give Nimble a try; you may just find that you have plenty of time left for the other important areas of your business.

QR (quick response) codes are everywhere now. You’ll see them on billboards, the sides of buses and trains, and even on television. They are not placed in these areas for practical purposes; they are being used as part of a consumer education/branding campaign by marketers, particularly the big national brands. QR codes are really best suited to areas – as a download to a smart phone in the form of deal or coupon, and in print media. Large corporations have the jump on small businesses in this area, however, you can fight back. Large corporations can place these codes on national publications such as newspapers and magazines. The cost to advertise in these publications is often prohibitive for small businesses – you can get around it.

To begin with, let’s look at QR codes. They are used in a similar way to a bar code. A smart phone can scan the code and either store it for later use – for example, to claim a discount or deal – or they can be used as a link to a particular web page on the Internet. For small businesses, your opportunity lies not in national advertising, but in your own printed matter. This includes letters, business cards, invoices, brochures or flyers, and in local media such as local newspapers. You can even have QR codes in your offline storefronts.

The key to successfully using a QR is to have the right destination in place. Smart marketers are linking to their Facebook or Twitter pages suggesting users ‘follow’ them in order to receive news and special offers. A well written intro on these pages can result in a lot of new friends on these social media sites.

Big businesses have taken on QR codes very quickly. They can see the benefits that they can bring to their business, and since the costs involved are fairly minimal, easily justified. For small businesses, you may need to update your technology, however, the long term costs and benefits are proving to be very sound and producing good conversion rates.

There is one trend in society that smart marketers are starting to use to their advantage. That trend? The prominent use of cell phone cameras.

The camera in a cell phone today is far superior to some of the best digital cameras of five years ago. The use of these cameras is so dominant that, on most days, there’s a news story on one of the TV networks that includes a story with pictures provided by a local using their cell phone. In fact, you can often see video footage of an event that was taken via cell phone. So how are marketers using this to advantage?

High end fashion brand Marc Jacobs recently asked followers to share their favorite family moments by using pictures taken through a cell phone. They then featured those photos through a collage on their website for all to see. General Electric went a step further with a contest that involved photos uploaded to Instagram, then shared to Facebook for voting.  That was a novel way to connect two social media platforms for marketing purposes.

Instagram has proven to be a popular photo sharing website, and the use of cell phones whereby users can take a snapshot then instantly upload that shot from their phone to Instagram is proving to be a hit. One popular coffee outlet regularly publishes photos of customers (with their permission of course) sitting down and enjoying a cup of their favourite brew.

Photos and the instant sharing of photos may well be one of the major activities by users over the next twelve months. Smart marketers may be able to take advantage of this increased activity by incorporating the photos taken by customers into their various online activities. People love to show off, so if you advertise a campaign that encourages those traits, you may be able to build and further develop your brand.

Bookmarking sites come and go fairly quickly. There are some that hang around for years, often going through popularity phases – StumbleUpon is a good example, people join up,then drift away, then return spasmodically to see if things have changed. Pinterest is the latest and while it is an ‘invite only’ site at present, is well worth checking out. You can request an invite, although the home page is rather off-putting, it looks more like a parked domain than a real website. However, once you open those doors, everything changes.

Pinterest is a virtual pin board complete with a browser ‘Pin it’ button for Firefox, ‘Pin it’ (and ‘follow me’) buttons  for websites, and an iPhone application. Find pictures, videos or web pages of interest and you can ‘pin’ them to your pin board – and you can have more than one pin board.  The pin board concept has a wide range of uses, to quote their help page:

People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and share their favorite recipes.

Can businesses use Pinterest? This is one site that has definitely not been set up for commercial use. Self-promotion is frowned upon and users found guilty of promoting their businesses won’t last long. However, that doesn’t mean the service is totally out for businesses. Adding the ‘pin it’ buttons to your web site will invite visitors to add your pages to their pin boards. You can also have your own pin board where you can pin related content to your business. If you have the occasional page from your website pinned, for example an advice or recipe or how to page, then you shouldn’t have too many problems.

The feature that most businesses will find helpful is that pins can be shared between users and through Facebook and Twitter. Pins are also searchable through the search bar on Pinterest. It appears to bring the best of Stumbleupon and Facebook and is certainly well worth looking at, particularly those in service industries. It may not be for everyone, however, for a social media site that is invite only, it already has 4 million registered users – nowhere near Facebook or Twitter, but it could explode once the doors are opened. You can request an invite through Mashable’s pin page.