Category Archives: Understand The Internet

Random Bits of Tech News Important to Small Business Owners

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Why Are Random Bits of Tech News Important to Small Business Owners?

1. One might think that people use the internet for something besides email and social media, but sometimes one is wrong. What we can learn from this is that you have to be a little entertaining to capture people’s online attention.

That doesn’t mean you have to behave like a clown on Facebook or post jokes on your website. What it means is that your business simply can’t be all business, all the time. That’s the thought behind the latest internet craze, Pinterest. Is Pinterest for your business?

2. A local videographer has taken the time to create some blog posts about local eateries he has worked with. One was a great pub in Schenectady, another was a a restaurant in Utica and yet another in Ballston Spa. You get to see videos about the businesses and a little behind the scenes on his interaction with the business owners.

What we learn here is that your online promotions don’t need to be dull and always focused on your business. If your website is interesting and valuable, you will gain more customers.

3. What about esoteric news stories about how to be promoted by search engines, botnets or how people now get their news online (as opposed to tv or newspapers?)

What we can learn from these disparate items is that the online world is very complex. If you have a local news publication and matching website, it would be encouraging for you to discover the trend that more people get their news online.

Little Guy Creations exists, in part, to help small businesses make the most of the internet. Give us a call at 518-365-8082 and we can help your business.

Do You Speak The Web?

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Have you heard about HTML5? You probably don’t follow the news about web languages. That’s okay – you have someone doing web work for you so you don’t have to.

If you will indulge us, there’s this newish-not-yet-completed thing called CSS3 which let’s you use commands to create simple images and movements.

One clever designer has done something truly amazing. Using no pictures, the designer made a walking At-At, complete with shooting laser turrets and walking legs.

Why do we mention this? Sending pictures requires bandwidth, which can be expensive. Sending this same picture using only text is faster and cheaper.

Look for more improvements along these lines as the CSS3 commands are further improved and implemented.

Self promotion. Big production companies.

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These two things seem mutually exclusive. Musicians have to choose between them.

Do you? Does your band need to be discovered?

What if you could use the web to discover fans? Put your original music online for a minimal price. It can work.

What if you don’t have a band but you still want to self promote?

Offer something for free and let people know about it. This will help bring people to your site.

Don’t Get Left Behind

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You may recall a time when Ma Bell was the only game in town. Alternately, you might remember when KMart was bigger than WalMart. And even now, Sears is closing stores and the USPS is closing Post Offices.

But you may be shocked to learn that Microsoft isn’t as healthy as it could be. It could also crumble. And not just for purely business reasons.

Now is a good time to think about having some backup plans for any necessary computer systems you have. You don’t have to switch just yet – just be aware of what some of your options are.

There are free word processors and spreadsheet programs that can replace Microsoft Office.

If you are adventurous, you’ll research Linux and find out that there are free and robust operating systems available. Or maybe you’ll see how Google plans to replace your computer with a stick.

At least go into the Apple store and tinker with the computers there – you’ll see they aren’t so different from Windows computers.

Even if Microsoft doesn’t collapse, at the very least, you will know you have other options besides paying $150 for the next Windows upgrade or the $499 Office Professional.

Content Optimization, Keyword Tweaking and SEO

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In the past, we have talked about key words and how to gather them. If you research online, you will find some web designers recommending having hundreds of keywords including plurals and regions and misspellings and colors and …

And that’s probably fine if you plan to spend a lot of money in Adsense or some other PPC (pay per click) advertising service. What if you haven’t reached that point yet? What if your budget is pocket change?

The good news is that if you do good keyword research, you will be able to narrow down a large list to your 50 biggest hitters. This is a reasonable number to aim for since it is likely that your site only has 10 pages or so anyway. You can’t stuff 500 keywords into 10 pages and not have it look spammy. (If you have more pages in your project then feel free to add more.)

So you take your top 50 manageable keywords and split them into your 10 pages. They will very likely fall into ten or so related topics and these will make good subjects for your 10 pages. Use them in your titles, your image alt tags and your text – preferably near the top of the text, a mention in the middle and then again near the bottom. And if you code your own webpages, you can make sure you are using header tags and meta tags with those keywords. Try to limit your title tags to 60 characters and your meta description tag to 25 words while using as many of your keywords (on the specific page) as possible.

Then have someone read each page and make sure it is easily understandable. They will point out spelling and grammar errors that inevitably creep in. Leaving those things in will distract from the message of that web page and break the reader’s attention span. Even if your readers are not English Majors, bad writing still feels bad. You might not recall what a dangling participle is but you will get annoyed or impatient if you read a webpage with incorrect punctuation. It just doesn’t read well even if you don’t consciously know the rules of grammar.

So if you have made it easy to read each page and not cluttered the page with too many keywords then you are ready to post your site live. You’ll feel good that you have taken your best shot at giving these 10 pages the best structure and keyword optimized content you can. But your content optimization job isn’t over. Nope.

You have to go back and measure the results. How do you do that? You either get access to the website analytics or install them and watch what happens. Say your site is about fruit recipes and over a month you see that your banana smoothie page is not doing well but your apple crumb cake page is gaining more readers every day.

You go back and do a bit more keyword research and find that people are not searching for banana smoothies anymore. They are now looking for banana italian ice recipes. So you rewrite the article with keywords related to banana flavored italian ice and repost it. Likewise, you can look at the apple crumb cake page and write another page (your 11th) about optional toppings for you to have with your apple crumb cake recipe or you write another recipe variation and post that with links between the two pages.

But your job isn’t over. If you stick with it, you will see success with work and regular effort. It is best if you take this article as just one of many data points and research the topic further. You will see that some common keyword techniques and recommendations have been left out or merged together for this article.