When it comes to web hosting, many SMEs simply leave the choice of hosting company and package to their design company, if they think about it at all. It ends up being one of those aspects of having a web site that easily gets ignored or forgotten about.

This approach works adequately for brochure sites but tends to cause problems if you want your web site to work hard for your business.

Make your site work hard

I bang on about this quite a bit but here are some of the elements that are essential to make your site a vital part of your business:

• You need to know who visits the site
• You need to know where they’re coming from
• You need to know what they do when they visit
• You need to convert visits to leads
• You need to keep the site up to date
• You need to add content regularly
• You need to know your site is secure against malicious attack
• You need to know what changes to the site will reap business benefits
• You need to know who to turn to if your site encounters technical problems

As your site becomes an increasingly important part of your business strategy – and it undoubtedly will in the next year or so, if it has not already become so – you will find yourself frustrated by the lack of information and control at your fingertips.

If you want to add new email addresses, the chances are that you’ll be charged for it.

If you want to load some new content, you’ll probably be charged for it.

Ask for traffic stats and you may recieve a simple total number that gives you no useful data about visitor types and actions.

So, what’s the answer?

If you make the decision that your new web site is to form a core part of your business strategy, the site needs to be treated in the same way any other core part of your business is treated.

You wouldn’t let a vital piece of equipment lie around with little maintenance or care.

You wouldn’t move into a plush new office and leave the windows dirty and use packing crates for desks.

Finding a cheap hosting company is easy: finding a company that will give your site the care and attention it needs to succeed takes a little more effort. But it’s worth it. You suddenly have an outsourced web department for much less than the cost of hiring a dedicated IT person.

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Search engines think page titles are important. You should, too.

Page titles are the text that appears in the very top bar of your browser when you visit a web page. It is not the same as the header you use at the top of the page’s contents.

On many poorly built sites, the page title will end up being a mirror of the name of the page in the navigation bar. So you see a lot of “ACME WIDGETS – About”, “TOP SERVICES – Home” and “BUYONLINE – Contact Us”.

Smart titles = quick SEO

Not only is this lazy but it’s also a missed opportunity from the point of view of optimisation.

For a start, if search engines are looking at your page titles so closely, you need to make sure each title describes the content of the page clearly. And what better way to do that than to use some of the keywords relevant to your product or service and used in the body of the page.

Remember, too, that the title often displays at the top of the browser long before the page loads. You should be reassuring visitors that they’ve come to the right site and convincing them to wait long enough to see what the page reveals when it’s loaded. Telling visitors they’ve reached the ‘home’ page is hardly going to set pulses racing.

Don’t be mean with the description

You may also feel you need to make your title short and punchy. Wrong. Make it as long as makes sense, while keeping it readable and meaningful. Not an essay, of course. Ten words is fine.

Want to see how it should be done? Unsurprisingly, 37Signals is a company that gets this right. Take a look at the home page title – “Simple small business software, collaboration, CRM: 37signals”. The company name is at the end because it’s a given that people searching for 37signals on the web are probably going to find it near the top without much trouble. It’s the first words that the search engines find most important. Here we have three keywords or keyword phrases: ’small business software’; ‘collaboration’; and ‘CRM’.

Click through from the 37Signals home page to one of the products and take a look at the page title now. Highrise, for instance, displays this:
“Highrise: Small Business CRM, Web-Based Contact Manager”.

Every one a winner

Which brings me to my final point in this brief look at page titles. Make sure every page has a different title. Different and descriptive. Each page on your site serves a distinct purpose (it does, doesn’t it?) so it will wear its own set of keywords. This is what you need to base your title on.

Simply being creative (but honest!) with your titles could start to work wonders for your search engine rankings.

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Be seen everywhere

I was commissioned in December last year by global loyalty marketing agency ICLP to write an article for their January 2010 newsletter on how brands can perceive social networking as a threat or an opportunity. The newsletter is now on-line and you can read my piece here. Do read the other articles in the newsletter, too.

If you feel like exploring even more of my thoughts on the web and social media, my posts on the bpodr blog are still available. This was last updated in August of last year, just before I moved my blogging principally to this site.

This is just my way of reassuring you that I’m not new to all this. OK?

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If you’re thinking of putting your business in the running for public sector contracts, the “Winning The Contract” course from Learning Direct is now free and on-line. The aim of the course appears to be to make the procurement process less intimidating and mysterious. This can only be a good thing.

Response to the course being made available at no cost has been predictably favourable, although the FSB’s John Wright puzzled me by suggesting that having the course on-line might penalise businesses with no access to broadband.

You know my opinion on this: a business trying to operate today with no access to broadband and no web presence is unlikely to be in the running for a public sector contract, if only because the business is not going to be around for very long. Tell me I’m wrong.

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Google Increases Profits

When Google announced recently that its last financial quarter profits had surged upwards by 18%, many commentators – and even Google CEO Eric Schmidt – used this as an indication that the end of the recession was in sight. And so it now appears to be.

However, equating Google’s profits – and an increase in its revenue – with a fresh willingness to spend seems to be to regard Google and its customer base in the light of traditional companies and industries. Google is neither a manufacturer nor a service provider in the normal sense. It is really a facilitator. Its increased revenue stems from its core business, which is to bring prospects and sales functions together. As more people use search engines – and Google in particular – as their first step to research on the road to purchase, it is only to be expected that savvy companies and business owners make sure their products and services are easily discovered. That means more businesses invest in AdWords campaigns and SEO. That, in turn, means more revenue for Google.

Whether in recession or not, this is increasingly the pattern of behaviour that drives business. Off-line or on-line. Using the web is cost-effective compared to more traditional forms of marketing, so it is inevitable that a recession drives smart businesses to look at their marketing budgets and ensure they’re getting bang for their buck. Once companies see the success of on-line marketing affecting their bottom line, they’ll continue to spend with Google.

How are you planning to use the web for marketing?

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In the early part of the last decade I was involved on a part-time basis for almost two years with a small start-up that was building software to help manage a sales pipeline. A vital part of that involvement had me spending a lot of time with successful sales people from a number of leading technology companies. In that time, I went from having what may be considered a traditional, rather sniffy attitude to sales in general to a feeling of healthy respect for the men and women who were so good at a task that most of us find either daunting or downright impossible.

For many, knowing where their meat comes from and how it gets to their plate is information they’re happy to live without. Sales occupies much the same position: we know it has to happen but we often don’t want to know the details.

Running a small business on a tight budget often means that selling is something that the business owner has to do, regardless of previous sales experience or how they feel about the function. There is another option, of course: Go bust.

I’ve read Mike Southon’s Sales on a Beermat (and his previous best seller, The Beermat Entrepreneur: Turn Your Good Idea into a Great Business) and I’m a keen reader of his weekly column in the FT. So, I grabbed the chance last week to attend his “Sales on a Beermat Workshop” in London as they don’t come around too often.

If you’ve read the books (co-authored with Chris West), you’ll know that the tone is fun, informative, and inspiring. In person, he’s much the same. Not only is he an engaging speaker but he is able quickly to convince an audience that it’s possible to sell successfully in an extremely ethical way – and still have fun doing it.

I firmly believe that everyone who attended the workshop left desperate to return to their work and begin the task of selling.

Yes, but…

…what has this to do with the web?

Think of the web – starting with your web site but also including your ‘presence’ across social networks and in every on-line client conversation – as a vital part of your sales process. Mike Southon, for instance, makes full use of email newsletters, Twitter, and his site to reinforce his credibility, sell more books, and sell speaking engagements and training. His column in the Entrepreneur section of the Weekend FT is also available on the FT web site and forms part of his weekly newsletter to subscribers. He knows the value of giving stuff away, too. There is a wealth of great information available on his site that you can download. This is all part of establishing thought leadership in your market niche, of course.

Mike knows how essential it is to stay in the minds of prospects and customers, so that when it comes to close a deal, the prospects and customers already have your name at the top of their list of likely suppliers.

How are you making sure your customers think of you first when it comes time to buy?

UPDATE: Just received the latest edition of Mike’s newsletter. He’s doing an extra sales workshop on Tuesday, March 11th 2010. Get the full details here.

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A very interesting piece in this week’s Saturday FT ‘Entrepreneur’ section. Catch it on-line here. The headline and first few paragraphs in what is, if truth be told, a fairly short article for a huge subject, concentrate on the idea of small businesses using the web to ‘reduce costs’. By the end of the article, however, the focus changes to how vital being on-line is for simply growing or maintaining your business.

The two stand-out statistics quoted in the piece are these:

• 76% of small business owners plan to increase on-line marketing in 2010
• 42% say they will use LinkedIn and Twitter to grow their business in 2010

This is a healthy enough number but the real challenge is taking the large step from intention to action. It’s easy to throw money at completely the wrong areas when you’re bombarded by new terms and buzz words and everyone tells you social media is the big thing you need to harness.

In the end, whatever tools and technologies you choose must fit both your company’s business objectives and its ethos. Otherwise, you’re left with what Seth Godin calls a ‘Meatball Sundae’ – a book well worth reading, by the way.

Please go and read the article on the FT site. The final quotation from Julie Hall of Women Unlimited is particularly pertinent if you’re undecided just how important the internet should be in your company’s strategy for 2010 and beyond.

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In my wife’s company, they use a version of Microsoft Office that is a few years old. There’s nothing unusual about that. This is a situation found in small businesses across the country.

It's enough to drive you crazy

She received a document from a new client yesterday, who uses a newer version of Word. The document was in the .docx format, which cannot be opened or read natively by previous versions of Word.

So far, so Microsoft. The options for my wife appeared to be to either install the ‘compatibility pack‘ released by Microsoft or to rush out and buy a copy of the latest version of Microsoft Office – priced around £216 at Amazon for the upgrade version.

In the end, she went with option 3, which wasn’t on the original menu. She sent the file to me and I opened it in my Open Office word processor, saved it as a Word document, and sent it back to her.

So, here’s the thing. The beauty of open source software is that when changes need to be made to the code, they get made quickly, get tested quickly, and released quickly. You also get the updated version of the code without paying for an upgrade. Microsoft’s genius has to be to convince a huge number of businesses that they need to pay for quality software and then keep paying to stay up to date.

As more businesses migrate more and more of their application to the web and become more savvy about open source, this business model will begin to ring more and more hollow.

How much are you paying for software functionality you don’t need?

(In the interests of transparency, I must state that the picture above is not of my wife!)

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Last night I watched the Jim Carrey film ‘Yes Man’. The premise is straightforward: a man haunted by a failed marriage and trapped in a job he hates is increasingly turning inward, avoiding all social events, and becoming ever distant from former friends. A chance encounter with an acquaintance from school leads him to a seminar by a ‘guru’ who espouses the value of accepting all opportunities that arise. The upshot is that Carrey agrees to say ‘Yes’ to anything asked of him from that moment.

This way to Yes

The film has elements of a good old-fashioned romantic comedy and Carrey makes it easy watching. The outcome is never quite predictable and, although the guru (played by Terence Stamp) is a figure of fun, his philosophy is shown to be slightly more subtle in a scene at the end. In effect, saying ‘Yes’ most of the time is really the message. Saying ‘Yes’ when it’s often easier to say ‘No’.

I thought of that again this morning as I headed off to a meeting of my local Business for Breakfast networking group. After visiting the group twice as a guest, I decided to say ‘Yes’ to becoming a member. I’m not a natural networker and saying ‘No’ would have been the easier option and left me more squarely in my comfort zone.

Needless to say, saying ‘Yes’ was the correct option.

Believe it or not, however, I don’t want to talk about me! I want to talk about small businesses and the internet and what saying ‘Yes’ means in this context.

The Bad News

Think what your business would look like if you had decided the phone was not for you. It might work for other companies, you thought, but it wasn’t something you could see making a big difference to your customers.

In a few years, the wry smile that sort of imagining raises will apply to the internet. And I don’t just mean having a web site that lists your products and contact details. I mean using the internet to engage with your customers.

The Good News

The tools are available and they’re relatively easy to put into action. The hardest part – you guessed it – is saying ‘Yes’.

There’s an easy test to see what lies behind a decision to say ‘No’. Listen for the excuses and the justifications. An example? A business refuses to start a blog because:

1. they believe they’ve nothing to say;
2. they don’t want competitors finding out what they’re doing;
3. they might say something they shouldn’t;
4. they don’t have time;
5. they don’t feel comfortable writing.

All of these might very well be true but they also indicate fear. Fear of taking things in a new direction. The internet has this effect on some businesses. These are companies who, at one time, made decisions on which their future depended. They probably started in business with little more than an idea and a passion.

Of course, discussing that passion would be one of the things that made their blog worth reading. Blogging regularly would also help make them feel more comfortable writing. And when they realised that their blog was read by both customers and prospects, they would probably find it even easier to find things to say.

In other words. all the reasons for ‘No’ can be overcome. Saying ‘Yes’ to the challenge of the web – whether blogging, email newsletters, Twitter, or something as simple as sharing files via an on-line service such as Dropbox – cuts out the justification process, gives you head start over your competitors, and helps bring your customers into a closer and, ultimately, more profitable relationship.

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I come across business owners who still believe that internet tools such as blogging and Twitter may be fine in the B2C world but have no legitimate place in the world of B2B. This is a limiting belief, to say the least.

What internet tools in general – and social networking tools in particular – have done, is to increasingly narrow the gap between the ‘B’ and the ‘C’ of the two business propositions in question. For starters, how many people open one browser for business use and one for personal use? Do you really think that people at work (’business’ people, even) are not also engaging in some ‘consumer’ practices like buying books on-line from Amazon, selling on Ebay that paperweight the mother-in-law brought back from the coach tour of Normandy, or even catching up on the football results on the BBC web site?

The other side of the coin is that a business blog that never gets personal is a very dull read. Also, business Twitter streams which do nothing but tweet company news are hardly going to set the word of mouth genie shaking to get out of the bottle.

It’s time to remember that people buy from people. Forget B2B and B2C when it comes to the internet. It’s all B2P now. P for person. The new tools let you and your business become personal, which allows your customer to see you as a person. You don’t need to wait to meet a buyer at a trade fair or the CEO on the golf course: you and your business have already made your personal mark on the web.

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