Small Office, Home Office Information

Our business continues to boom and we’ve had some excellent results with outstanding search engine placement for a couple of clients in the last week. While none of them have been mission impossible it’s still good to be able to say that “I love it when a plan comes together”

On the other hand it gives me little pleasure to tell you that over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of enquiries from local businesses who have been dissatisfied with the work done on their websites by other local designers.

These people have spent anywhere from $1500 to $5000 dollars on sites that have turned out to be absolute failures. They neither rank well in the search engines or make sales or generate leads and the sites owners come to us in the hope that we can work some miracle without costing them any more money.

Sadly we can’t because our time is just as valuable as any other small business and all too often the site designs are so bad that they need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Even if the design can be recycled the cost of re-writing the text on the site is often more than the site owner can afford.

So if you’re about to pay a web designer to build a website for your business you’ll find 85 Reasons Why Website Designers/Developers Keep SEOs in Business in invaluable read for it will give you some guidelines that will help you to avoid wasting money on a clueless web designer.

Some of the reasons given in the article:

3. They develop navigational menus that are invisible to search engines

5. They ask the client to provide them with website copy (it’s the designer who should develop the text based on the concepts that you give them).

6. They have the client provide them with what pages they want on their website.

10. They think that SEO is submitting (the site) to search engines.

12. They put the same title on every page of the website.

18. They find it easier to use paid search.

I could go on with more but then I’d be breaching the fair-use rules of copyright so just let me encourage you to follow the link and read those 85 points. Unfortunately we’ve come across every one of them in the last few weeks.

More and more small businesses are going online with their own websites. Once their site is online it’s not long before they begin to wonder what their site is actually doing for their business. At that point the site owners start looking for an analytics programme that will give them the information they need.

Many small business website owners turn to Google Analytics and that’s certainly the one that we recommend to our clients. Google Analytics is a very powerful program and it’s also free so it’s hard to beat when it comes to value for money.

However, it’s one major flaw does rest in all that power and the information it can provide. For many small business owners all that information becomes overwhelming but help is at hand. Google’s own expert on their analytics programme was interviewed recently on just what was the important information that Google Analytics could tell small business owners.

You’ll find that interview here and it certainly does shed some light on the data that is important for small businesses.

In tough financial times like these there will always be plenty of people looking for a way of earning an income by working from home.

In tough financial times like these there will always be plenty of sharks out there looking to fleece gullible people and pyramid selling schemes are a great way to do just that so be very careful of any get rich quick scheme that you may see advertised.

Just because someone says that what they’re offering isn’t a pyramid selling scheme doesn’t mean it isn’t … and just because you see it advertised in your local paper doesn’t mean that it isn’t a pyramid selling scheme either.

Even if they happen to be a feature article in your local paper doesn’t mean that they aren’t pyramid selling schemes.