Small Business Design Resources

Promote Your Website With Article Marketing

Small business owners have been using article marketing for decades, but the Internet and new Web 2.0 sites have really increased its potential and popularity. The principle behind article marketing is pretty simple: the idea is to promote your business and website by writing articles to be published as free content on other Internet sites. These articles promote your business by including a link back to your website and a brief bio about you and your business. Writing quality articles and submitting them for publication on other sites is an investment of your time, but one that can have real benefits for your small business website.

Benefits of Article Marketing

• Publishing articles on other websites will help you reach a broader audience—the more information you have on the Internet, the more likely it is that your target audience will find you.
• Writing high-quality articles related to your business is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. People searching for information on the topic will read your articles and see that you know what you’re talking about, which will encourage them to check out your website for more information.
• Readers will come away from your articles with a positive impression of you and your business, since you’re providing them with useful and free information.
• Every article you write and publish will have a link back to your site, providing you with valuable backlinks that may improve your search engine ranking. Keep in mind that search engines like Google take into account the quality of the sites linking to yours; for this reason, try not to sacrifice quality for quantity. It’s probably to your advantage to focus on writing well-written and informative articles that high-quality sites will be happy to publish, even if this means you’ll end up with fewer articles overall.

Be Careful of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is large blocks of text from different webpages that are identical or extremely similar. Google can penalize you for providing duplicate content by lowering your search ranking or completely removing your site from the Google index. These duplicate content penalties are part of Google’s effort to provide useful search results—they don’t want every search result to have basically the same content.

Duplicate content only results in penalties if Google believes your intent was to manipulate search rankings or deceive users. Submitting the same article for publication on multiple sites in order to promote your own website can be seen by Google as deception and result in penalties. Article marketing can be very effective in boosting your search rankings and increasing traffic to your small business website, but make sure to avoid duplicate content to ensure that your efforts don’t backfire.

Understanding and Improving Google PageRank

There’s no question that having your small business website on the first page of Google results is good for traffic. Google has been used for more than 70% of U.S. Internet searches so far in 2010, making it by far the Internet’s most used search engine. One reason Google is so popular is that Internet searchers trust the results it returns. Google’s method for putting together a list of great search results relies heavily on PageRank (PR), a number from 0-10 that reflects a web page’s importance. Average PageRank is 3-5; a PageRank of 6-7 is considered extremely good. Only a few elite websites have PageRanks of 8 or above, and only Google and a handful of others have PageRanks of 10. PageRank is a logarithmic calculation, meaning that each level is harder to reach than the last. For example, moving from PR 2 to PR 3 is easier than moving from PR 3 to PR 4. It also means that a PageRank of 4 is more than twice as good as a PageRank of 2.

The formula for calculating PageRank is patented and a closely guarded secret; according to Google, PageRank is determined by looking at more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. But even though you can’t know all the details of Google’s formula, there are some things you can do to increase your PageRank.

1. Inbound Links
   The most important factor in determining PageRank is the number of high-quality websites that link to your webpage. Think of it as a voting system: when one page links to another page, Google considers that a vote for the other page. The more votes a page gets, the more important that page must be and the higher its PageRank. Votes from more important pages are considered more important, meaning that a link to your site from a page with a high PageRank will increase your PageRank more than a link from a page with low PageRank. Links from sites that have content related to your website’s content are also more valuable than links from unrelated websites.
2. Internal Linking and Structure
   How you structure your website is important to maximizing PageRank. Here are a few tips:
   • Make sure your website has a clear hierarchy and important links are made up of text rather than images.
   • Don’t let the structure of your website get too “deep”; having to follow several links in order to get to a page from your site’s homepage generally decreases that page’s PageRank.
   • Make sure every page is linked to by at least one text link, and avoid dangling links (links to pages that don’t contain any links themselves).
   • Include a site map that links to your website’s important pages.
   • Don’t put too many links on any one page.
3. Quality Content
   Having a lot of interlinked pages is good for PageRank, but only if the content on each page is original and useful. Good website content will encourage other websites to link to your pages (see Tip #1), and Google penalizes websites for containing content that is duplicated elsewhere on the Internet.
4. Use SEO Techniques
   Don’t forget to optimize for your target keywords, so Google knows what your website is about. Good Search Engine Optimization is key to improving your search engine ranking and is a factor that Google takes into consideration when calculating PageRank.

Following these tips should improve your Google PageRank, but be prepared to wait a few weeks before you see results–with the millions of websites on the Internet, it will take time for Google to reevaluate your website.

Create a ‘Sticky’ Website: Make Visitors Stay Longer & Return Often

After putting time, energy, and money into your small business website, you’re eager to welcome visitors and show them around the place. You know some tips for attracting traffic, but how do you convince visitors to stick around and return often?

Content

• Catch the web browser’s eye with content that is interesting and unique. If visitors see something that piques their interest, they’ll stick around and check out what else your small business has to offer.
• Make regular updates so people have a reason to return. Provide links to new information from your homepage, or offer email updates–returning visitors will appreciate the ease of seeing what’s new.
• Ensure that the people who find your site are interested in your content by optimizing for the right keywords.

Design

• A professional-looking website inspires confidence in your product or services, encouraging people to trust your website’s content and consider browsing your site worth their time.
• Organize your content in a way that makes it easy to browse. Provide your visitors with a natural path through your website, so they continue moving and checking out new pages.
• Avoid Flash intros and other design choices that will make your website load slowly. People often have limited patience and will move on without waiting for your page to load.

Interactivity

• The Internet is growing increasingly social, and people appreciate websites that provide ways to interact. Comments, ratings, and polls all encourage users to become more invested in your site, and can also help you learn valuable information about their experience.
• Include internal links whenever they’re relevant, so visitors keep discovering new parts of your website. Avoid outbound links on your homepage–you don’t want to direct visitors away before they even have a chance to see your site–and have them open in new tabs or windows so your website stays open.

Keep these principles in mind, and you’ll find that your website visitors will stick around longer (a lower bounce rate) and return often, resulting in higher conversion rates and improved visitor response.

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How to check that your main website content is above the fold

OK, so you understand the concept of showing your main website content above the fold on your website. Now you wonder “how do I display my main content  to all the visitors the same if all of them have different browser size resolutions?” There’s a simple solution to what you probably thought was impossible to do.

To make sure that your main website content fits above the fold for your users, follow these steps:

1. Check your analytics program to see what top 3 screen resolutions your users are using. Since you can’t please everyone, you can at least please the majority of your website visitors.
   
2. Go to the Google Browser Size tool http://browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter your website next to the Google logo and hit Go.
   
3. Evaluate the colorful chart to see if your website’s main content fits within your top 3 screen resolutions from step 1.
4. Adjust your website content if necessary.

What is Blogging

A lot of websites these days use blogging as a way to draw customers. Blogging means posting a fresh article to your site every day, every week, or at some other interval that makes sense to you. Blogs can be useful to customers who may check out your website regularly to find out new information related to your product, your service or your company. New customers may be led to your site using keyword searches or by following links from other sites that reference your site, or from links you embed in other articles on your website.

The primary purpose of a blog is to provide fresh content for your website to keep your customers coming back. They want to see what new products you are offering, hear what’s new in your company, and see what additional services are available. A blog is also a great way to add fresh content to your site to keep it at the top of the search engines.

But what should you write in the blog? And how can you keep coming up with new ideas for blogging?

There are some definite advantages to blogging and once you get the hang of it you might just get hooked:

1. Writing helps you think. And thinking about your business is something you should be doing every day. You can use blogging as a way to explore new ideas for your website, your product or your business.

2. Blogging invites customer feedback. Create a blog with a comment block where blog readers can post their feedback. This is a great way to find out what your customers think. You can ask them questions directly, and use the responses to begin an email contact list. The best part about this is your feedback is coming directly from current users of your website. You can even take it a step further and start sending email articles directly to your blog fans. Can’t decide whether to branch out in this direction or that direction? Ask for customer feedback directly in your blog. Everyone loves to give their opinion.

3. Blogging is a catalyst for doing research. If you sit down once a week and come up with 7 topics for daily blogs, or sit down once a month and come up with 4 topics for weekly blogs, you will remain on your toes as well have new content to keep your website fresh. You can research the competition and find out what they are blogging about, or research a particular aspect of your business, describe the special features of an existing product or introduce features for a new product and motivate readers to give it a try.

4. Blogging is a great tool for stimulating your own learning. Because you will be on the internet, checking your competition, doing your research and finding interesting things to write about, you will be acquiring new knowledge constantly about your business field. Becoming an expert in your field is an absolute must for out-maneuvering the competition and your website is the perfect place to display your expertise.

To get started blogging, map out a few ideas, determine how many words you want to write in your blog (300 to 500 is plenty to begin, but don’t restrict yourself if you get on a roll). Don’t forget to create a few links in your blog to other similar articles on your website.