Quality Web Design

• First impressions speak for themselves, and your website must speak to your customers. Keep it simple and uncluttered with use of white space
• Why not put your contact details in your web template so your customers see it on every page?
• Always grab their email through an offer or incentive that requests their contact information on the home page

Search Engine Optimization

• Always include keywords for your business in your text
• Put keywords in Title and Heading tags, which carry more ‘weight’
• Have a site map that catalogs every page of your website

Search Engine Marketing

• Post blog entries on the web with reference to your business
• Build as many links to your website from other locations as possible
• Make use of online communities and social networking sites

Targeted Email Campaign

• Highlight the benefits! You’re not writing an American Novel
• Be more conversational, not too formal
• Include an ‘offer’ or promotional opportunity in your email

Install Website Analytical Software

• Which pages of your website are most popular (or unpopular)? You must know these things to focus your energies in the right places!
• Track promotions and sales
• Where are your users coming from? Finding out can help you improve your online marketing strategy

We hope these tips will help you along the road to success in integrating your website with your business, driving your conversion rates and of course, sales! If you would like a professional web solutions company to integrate these strategies for your business, please feel free to give me a call simply to chat, get some advice, and see how we can help you take your website to new heights.

Best Regards,

Larry Wood
(830) 460 0889
www.buildweb20.com

Several years ago, the mantra was “Every business needs a website.” Today it’s “Every business needs a website with a blog.” No matter your industry, your prospects have come to expect a blog from your business.

What is a Blog? A blog lives on the web as either a part of your current website or it can stand alone as its own entity. A blog is whatever you want to make of it.  It can be descriptions of events, happenings, observations, how to’s, whatever’s on your mind really.  A blog can also contain other media such as photos and videos. Blogs are a simple, cost-effective way to create a professional online presence, build an audience and communicate with your clients and friends.

Blogging is easy-A blog allows you to quickly and easily create a place on the web where people can find you, learn about you, and interact with you. You don’t need an IT staff or a degree in computer science to blog; if you can send an email, you can create a blog.

Blogging benefits- There are other practical reasons for having a business blog: Posting content frequently makes you a better communicator and allows you to gain expert status in your industry–and it will make you a better salesperson. One of the most practical reasons to start and promote a blog is that search engines seem to love them. Just having a blog and posting content often allows your entire website and business to gain much better exposure from search engines like Google and Yahoo.  If that wasn’t enough reasons to blog, here’s one more; blogging allows readers to respond and comment on your blog articles.  This will help your future patrons get acquainted with you and your ranch and what’s going on, so that they will want to join in on the fun.

Create your Blog- If you want to create a blog, my recommendation is that you start by reading other blogs. You can go to a site such as Bloglines.com and create a free account. This service allows you to find, read and subscribe to blogs of your choosing so that you can view all the new content in one place and get ideas for your own posts.
Creating an effective blog can feel like a lot of work at first, but the benefits will add up over time and give your business a significant competitive advantage.  BuildWeb20.com can help you set-up your blog and get you on your way to blogging.  Popular blog publishing software includes TypePad.com and WordPress.org

From San Antonio

I’ve been spending a good amount of time the last several weeks getting ready for the workshop session I’ll be giving at Web 2.0 Expo next week in San Francisco on building next-generation Web 2.0 applications. What does “next generation” mean compared to what we were doing a couple of years ago with Web 2.0? A good number of things as it turns out.

We’re currently seeing that newer
Web applications are much more federated than in the past, meaning they’re made of distributed parts instead of being just one app on a Web server at one domain and are increasingly leveraging external Web services and APIs.

next generation

Reference : http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/tips_for_building_next_generation_web_20_applications.htm

From Houston
1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you’re trying to solve. Google’s first and primary job was very simple: Help people find stuff. They didn’t start layering on everything else until much later. Brad calls this the “narrow point of the wedge.” Its the easiest, simplest version of what you’re trying to do… the smallest bite your users will ever have to chew–small enough to get hooked on very easily.

2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product. The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas.
They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don’t like stuff. You couldn’t have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers. Don’t rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he’s not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.

3. Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Every day. Don’t wait until its perfect to put it out in the open. No more closed invite-only betas. Your idea of perfect may not jive with your users’ ideas of perfect. Put whatever you can out there and get people using it as soon as possible. Feed them daily with new features to keep them interested and coming back. No one likes waiting six years for new releases.

4. Distribute. Distribute. Distribute. Don’t force your users to play on your site in a walled garden. Let them take the service and use it wherever they want. (See Flickr badges, Google Ads, Amazon affiliates, Indeed jobrolls, del.icio.us linkrolls, moblogging, RSS, e-mail alerts, etc., etc….) Instead of building it so they will come, go out and get them by placing little bits of your service everywhere on the web. Be where they are.

5. Don’t hold users against their will. If they want to leave, let them pick up with all of the content they created while they were on your site and leave… for free. Charging $0.29 to get back each of the hi rez photos you uploaded to the site (See my upcoming Snapfish post) is thievery. You have to let the barn door open and focus on keeping your customers fed, so they want to come back, instead of coming back because they’re stuck.

6. Be mindnumbingly simple. Extra clicks are deadly. People just won’t do it. Indeed: One search, all jobs. Two boxes: What job and where. You can’t get any easier than that and all it takes is for someone to put one search in for people to go, “Wait…what’s this… links to Monster AND Careerbuilder??”

7. Get people hooked on free. Craigslist wouldn’t have become Craigslist if it wasn’t free for so much for so long. Even now, they’re very profitable and they’re only charging for just a few small pieces of their service in just a handful of their 120 markets. The world is changing. Service is cheaper to provide now than ever and users are expecting to get more for free than ever before. Its hard for a lot of big companies to accept that. I just had lunch recently with a couple of friends from a music publisher. They were signing some bands to “incubator” deals for just a couple of songs to test the market with them. I said, “And you’re giving those songs away for free, right?” They nearly choked on their food. Well, why the heck wouldn’t they? Give a few songs away for free, generate buzz, get lots more people to buy future albums. Seth Godin did that with his books, releasing e-books that generated buzz around hardcover sales. Free sells. Do you think the Facebook would be the Facebook if you had to pay for your smooches like you do on Match?

8. Don’t waste any money on marketing. Word of mouth has never ever been easier or less expensive in the history of human communication. Things go viral in a hurry… when they’re good. Ever see a Skype superbowl commercial? No, but they’ve had 146 million people download it. If you don’t have the service and the quality to back it up, no amount of fancy marketing is going to help… and people are so quick to share cool stuff, because they want to be the person “in the know”. When they’re satisfied, they’ll blog about it and e-mail everyone they know. And they’ll tag it furiously on del.icio.us, too.

9. Don’t overfund. Do you know how many times a day I see companies get funded on Private Equity Week and I’m like, “What the heck are they going to do with all that money??” Underfunding a company can be a problem, too, but thinking that more money makes you better is a fallacy. It probably makes you a bit sloppy and fuzzies your focus. When you raise $2 million, you’re much more likely to have a clear sense of exactly where that money is going to go than if you raised $20 million.

10. No one sucks. I hate it when someone says that a whole service sucks. Now, I say it myself, I’ll admit, but what that does is it teaches you to discount and generalize, and probably miss a lot of small opportunities that add up. Now, I think Ofoto sucks versus Flickr, but people still use it. Why? There’s got to be something there. AOL sucks… or does it? They still have 20 million users, so it can’t entirely suck. You should look at every competitor and take the best of what they do right and do it yourself, even if that’s only one thing and the rest of their service sucks.

Reference: http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2005/08/10_steps_to_a_h.html

From Boerne
Everywhere one looks when he/she owns a website that is designed to engage in e-commerce, people are talking about SEO or search engine optimization. The stated purpose of SEO is to help a web site achieve a higher ranking in the search engine results when someone types in a keyword search for an item that site carries. Unfortunately, many savvy business people have no idea how to achieve the best search engine optimization.
Probably the easiest and most cost effective way to achieve the best search engine optimization is to hire an outside firm that specializes in providing SEO services to overhaul the Meta tags and keyword content of the website. These two items will go a long way toward improving a site’s ranking in the search results. Another step that these services take is to have a writer who is knowledgeable about the niche this site tries to fill compose and publish some articles in e-zines and directories all over the internet with links back to this website. One of the things that search engine robots look for when determining how relevant a particular website is on a particular keyword search is the number of external links that can be traced back to that site.
One thing that one must watch out for is keyword stuffing. Most search engines and directories have started lowering the ranks of websites that try to use keywords too often to give a false impression of their value to the person making a search. Another is that the service providing SEO services must work to improve the “natural” search results and not provide a paid ad slot on the first page of results because most people skip over the paid ads anyway.
If a site owner has someone in house who is capable of performing the steps of SEO as listed above, he should consider himself lucky. Otherwise, to achieve the best search engine optimization, it is probably best to hire an outside firm that specializes in this type of service and has a good reputation for delivering on their promises of improving one’s search ranking.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Achieve-the-Best-Search-Engine-Optimization&id=1971336

From San Antonio

What’s the best way for your small or midsize comapny to spend its marketing dollars: advertising or building out your company Web site? According to a new report, SMBs are voting with their balance sheets, as “non-advertising” efforts by SMBs is expected to triple in the next few years, while remaining a fraction of overall ad spending.

The report from Borrell Associates, called Main Street Goes Interactive: How small businesses are spending their online dollars, says SMBs spent a total of $6.8 billion online marketintg last year, and that figure is expected to grow to $7.4 billion by 2013.

The makeup of that spend is changing, however. Display ads on the Web now account for 54% of SMB online budgets, but the percentage of online marketing spend that goes to display ads is expected to fall significantly as companies triple their “non-advertising” Web investments to $1.63 billion by 2013.

Online Media Daily quotes the report stating: “The blurring borders between what is advertising in the interactive world and what is not added to the shift of ‘non-ad’ marketing dollars… Businesses large and smaller–but especially smaller ones–don’t even try to make the distinction. To them, whatever they spend or do on the Web is advertising, whether it goes through an intermediary or not.”

So spending on Web sites, online promotions, and interactive PR is expected to increase from 7.9% to 18.1% of total interactive marketing costs by 2013.

And the report suggests the continuing importance of search ads, while traditional online ads migrate to video. Traditional online banners, now 47% of online marketing buys, will shirnk to 19% by 2013. Meanwhile, so-called “non-advertising” spending is expected to grow from $600 million in 2008 to $1.6 billion in 2013.

Surprisingly, I didn’t see any discussion of social networking in this mix. That could be a real opportunity to differentiate your small or midsize company from your competitors.

Source – bMighty.com

Some following tips are derived from the book High Performance Web Sites (O’Reilly) by Steve Souders:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests to reduce object overhead.
2. Use a content delivery network.
3. Add an Expires header.
4. Gzip/compress text components.
5. Put stylesheets at the top in the head.
6. Put scripts at the bottom of the body.
7. Avoid CSS expressions which are CPU-intensive and can be evaluated frequently.
8. Make JavaScript and CSS files external.
9. Reduce Domain Name System (DNS) lookups to reduce the overhead of DNS delay by splitting lookups between two to four unique hostnames.
10. Minify JavaScript.
11. Avoid redirects which slow performance. It’s better to CNAME or alias.
12. Remove duplicate scripts to eliminate extra HTTP requests in Internet Explorer.
13. Configure ETags for sites hosted on multiple servers. FileETag none in Apache removes Etags to avoid improper cache validation.
14. Make Ajax cacheable and small to avoid unnecessary HTTP requests.

From Houston
The Web2.0 is a superb invention on the World Wide Web. The whole concept of Web2.0 is really simple. Once you find a website really interesting and it appears you, you can let others know about it. This can be easily done via adding the website as a favorite.

The best known services under this category are

Digg and Stumble. Here, people can easily come to know about interesting content and share it anywhere on the World Wide Web. However, there are also a lot of websites in the pipeline that are going to be introduced soon upon.

Web2.0 can be easily used to generate good amount of traffic on your website. Here are some tips to make Web2.0 work for generating more traffic to your website:

* Make your title really interesting. However, you don’t need to reveal all that will be available in your content via your title. Let there be a curiosity generated among the public about what’s in.

* It is important to make your description short but really sweet.

* Make a research on various services and get to know what people actually like to read. Know what type of articles get most of the votes.

* Share other people’s stories on the services. These will do a lot good to you. A software known as web2.0 submitter will be of great help to you in this regard.

Remember that Web2.0 is not just about submitting articles to Digg and various other services. Following the above mentioned tips will drive good traffic to your website.

Reference : http://www.stevearun.com/241/how-to-generate-potential-traffic-with-web20/

From San Antonio

What’s the best way for your small or midsize comapny to spend its marketing dollars: advertising or building out your company Web site? According to a new report, SMBs are voting with their balance sheets, as “non-advertising” efforts by SMBs is expected to triple in the next few years, while remaining a fraction of overall ad spending.

The report from Borrell Associates, called Main Street Goes Interactive: How small businesses are spending their online dollars, says SMBs spent a total of $6.8 billion online marketintg last year, and that figure is expected to grow to $7.4 billion by 2013.

The makeup of that spend is changing, however. Display ads on the Web now account for 54% of SMB online budgets, but the percentage of online marketing spend that goes to display ads is expected to fall significantly as companies triple their “non-advertising” Web investments to $1.63 billion by 2013.

Online Media Daily quotes the report stating: “The blurring borders between what is advertising in the interactive world and what is not added to the shift of ‘non-ad’ marketing dollars… Businesses large and smaller–but especially smaller ones–don’t even try to make the distinction. To them, whatever they spend or do on the Web is advertising, whether it goes through an intermediary or not.”

So spending on Web sites, online promotions, and interactive PR is expected to increase from 7.9% to 18.1% of total interactive marketing costs by 2013.

And the report suggests the continuing importance of search ads, while traditional online ads migrate to video. Traditional online banners, now 47% of online marketing buys, will shirnk to 19% by 2013. Meanwhile, so-called “non-advertising” spending is expected to grow from $600 million in 2008 to $1.6 billion in 2013.

Surprisingly, I didn’t see any discussion of social networking in this mix. That could be a real opportunity to differentiate your small or midsize company from your competitors.

Source - bMighty.com